Carol Bartz has shown she can run a company. That was Autodesk. But can the iron lady of Silicon Valley change a company like Yahoo’s culture?
I think over time yes, but it will mean bringing in new blood. The team still left at Yahoo is pretty much a hodgepodge of political survivors, corporate gamesmanship players and a group of very smart technologists who have been caught up in the crossfires of ever shifting direction and unclear vision being communicated to them.
Having attended meetings in Yahoo’s corporate offices, met with execs and dealt with their PR folks who seemingly post Brad Garlinghouse (where has he gone) and later Jeff Bonforte now at XOBNI, have all headed for the hills as their VoIP play has pretty much fizzled, and what they have is being farmed out to Jajah (though no one has ever confirmed the migration has happened yet and that they are moving traffic over Jajah.)
But back to Bartz. She’s working on instilling an change in how the company operates when their culture has been either laid back Silicon Valley or Hollywood cool. That’s nothing like what Autodesk was ever like I hear, and what’s more, the people at Yahoo will now be held to a higher measure. Given how high her compensation package is, and what it’s tied to, it would likely be helpful to be incentivizing the team there first, before doing things like bounties for ratting out their friends. I mean, at Yahoo everything is supposed to be searchable right?