As Susan Burnett, senior vice president of talent and organization development at Yahoo!, smiles outward from the cover of our current issue and on the front page of this website, news comes that Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has been ousted. According to various news sources, on the way out she sent an email to Yahoo!’s 13,000 employees stating:
“To all, I am very sad to tell you that I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board. It has been my pleasure to work with all of you and I wish you only the best going forward.”
That doesn’t seem particularly incendiary, but consider the context. The departures of CEOs from large companies are generally very carefully announced to employees and the public. CEOs don’t just say they’ve been fired, that it wasn’t done face-to-face and even specify who did it. Today sees the release of a Yahoo! memo naming an interim CEO and stating that the company intends to find a permanent replacement (which some find doubtful).
Regardless, the development sent me back to our recently published profile on Burnett. Bartz was central to the story we found here. The article begins “In January 2009, Yahoo!’s board brought in CEO Carol Bartz to get the Internet company off a rocky path.” It continues through Bartz hiring Burnett six months later. During the last two years, the two worked together and with their teams to transform the company – setting a strategy for growth that made it more interdependent and focused on internal development. The article states:
“Prior to Burnett and Bartz stepping into their roles, there was no transparency. There were no written company goals, metrics, quarterly business reviews or analyst meetings. All of those things have been implemented under Bartz’s leadership.”
But was it just too late for this type of transparency to turn the company around? Yahoo! has had its share of problems such as stiff competition from tech innovators like Google and Facebook, particularly in courting advertising; Microsoft’s failed hostile takeover of the company; multiple executive departures and rounds of layoffs; and stock performance that has not significantly improved (though the company has seen a boost as a result of Bartz’s departure). Forbes published a piece late yesterday offering possible scenarios for Yahoo! going forward, including finally merging with Microsoft, combining with AOL, or selling its Asian assets and seeking new ownership for the rest of the company.
I have no doubt that Burnett and Bartz were successful in making Yahoo! more interdependent and transparent, and our coverage quantifies the successes seen by their internal development program. This just shows that sometimes transparency can only go so far, particularly if a company is troubled. Written company goals, metrics, quarterly business reviews and analyst meetings don’t help if a company is on the verge of firing its CEO over the phone and then radically restructuring itself via mergers and sell-offs. Once that happens, the CLO’s job immediately becomes one of guiding the company’s learning department through transition, and we’ll be watching that happen in the coming months.
What do you think? Are you surprised by these developments at Yahoo!? How would you as CLO approach guiding learning in such a high-stakes situation?
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