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Simple is smart

Carol Bartz, Yahoo’s new CEO, has simplified the management structure. Good start. In her blog posting, Getting the house in order, her words strike back at getting focused around users and your core customers. Making users go ‘wow’ is a core company passion. I felt it when design consulting with Yahoo a few years back.

So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, “Wow.”

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Yahoo goes punk

The company also has its own Web 2.0 guru whose mission is to hack Yahoo “for its own good.” Bradley Horowitz, vice president of Yahoo’s product strategy group, told CNET News.com. Well, I run a group here called “Hack Yahoo”–and by Hack Yahoo, I don’t necessarily mean “hack it down at the root with an axe.” I basically mean help Yahoo break its own rules for its own good…uniting these like-minded people around the spirit of change and this start-up culture. What’s interesting: When I came to Yahoo, I didn’t find an innovation deficit. It’s not as if this company had grown complacent or sleepy or anything like that. But I think it was undercelebrated, both outside the company and inside the company. CNET article