Unlike most who’ve written about Brad Garlinghouse’s ‘Peanut Butter Manifesto‘, I see it in fairly pedestrian terms. It seems to me that Brad is frustrated with the state of affairs at Yahoo! - who wouldn’t be? - and, well, doesn’t want to be (just) SVP any longer - I suspect this ‘manifesto’ is at least partly an announcement that he’s on he way up or he’ll be on the way out, and this memo, released into the wild in what I, like my friend Mathew and also Paul Kedrosky, suspect was a pretty deliberate move, strikes me as simply the first overt step on succession moves at Yahoo!

Written in the iambic pentameter of internal memo corporatespeak, the memo contains the principal motifs of the ‘large company trying to turn around’ motivational speech:

• We’re great and things are good
• But they’re not as good as they should be and we face many challenges
• It’s no one’s fault - it’s just the way things are now
• We lack vision
• Our organizational structure needs to change
• Many of you need to leave

None of this is remarkable or surprising. Most large companies that falter say exactly the same thing, and there is an established cottage industry in motivational euphemisms for “getting back to basics”. The real surprise for me is that it has taken so long for it to come to this. Better late than never, of course, but I read the memo with increasing surprise that all this while Yahoo! has perhaps been the only person at this particular cocktail party who didn’t know it had toilet paper stuck to its shoe.

In any event, there’s a bumper year ahead for Yahoo!’s M&A lawyers. Lately, of course, Yahoo! has been the Noah’s Ark of the web - running and/or buying two of everything - just in case, it seemed. The tea leaf readers, trying to divine intention from Yahoo!’s many disparate moves, were undoubtedly banging their heads against the wall with each indecipherable acquisition. Judging from the memo, no longer. Many of the teams and technologies so carefully acquired in recent times will be unhired, unbought or Borg-ed, and hopefully Yahoo! will do more with what it has and will pick its targets more selectively. And soon - very soon, hopefully (this is the age of instant change, after all) - Yahoo! will figure out what it wants to be when it grows up. Note to Yahoo!: ‘Not Evil But Definitely Mad Scientist Bent on World Domination’ is already taken.

Update: I almost forgot to mention - it is a bit of fun to see Mike Arrington channeling Zefrank.