So about right now, Yahoo’s new CEO, Marissa Mayer is unveiling the new corporate strategy to all Yahoo employees at an all hands on meeting. She shared this strategic plan with the board last week. That means that through internal or external consultants she has had many meetings and looked at industry data, SWOT analysis, Kemper’s 5 forces, a lot of Excel worksheets, and many PowerPoint presentations before deciding where Yahoo will play and how they will win vs. their competition. She has sold this to her executive team and the board of directors and today is disseminating this information to everyone at Yahoo with a pledge of transparency. 
Rumors are that Yahoo’s new strategy is to focus on search, the look and feel of the home page, sports page, finance page, Flickr, into now, etc. Add technology may also be a major initiative. In this blog I am not as concerned with the actual strategy itself that came about through a several weeks of strategic planning but the execution of the strategy. Not to say that strategy formulation is not important. It certainly is. The fact is that 90% of well formulated strategies fail and that is our focus on improving those odds for our customers.
So what do we know about Ms. Mayer’s execution plan? We know that she has scheduled this mandatory meeting to present the corporate strategy. She has stated that she going to act in “radical transparency” with employees. We know that she rolling out a new system for tracking and grading each employee and grading them on their performance of each strategic initiative. She has also mentioned that she is going to change the compensation structure to align with this. This is a great start as pending on the source of the statistic between 85% and 95% of employees do not know or understand their organization’s strategy.
So will Yahoo’s strategic turnaround plan work? That remains to be seen but I do give Ms. Mayer credit for the way she is rolling out her strategic plan. Making it transparent to every employee as to what the strategy is and their role in it and incentivizing them to focus on plan will increase her odds of getting it done and not falling into that 90% statistic mentioned earlier. The only thing she could be doing better is to use our product to track the actual alignment and execution of her plan with real time data.
