Leading from the front

YAHOO!’S CEO, Marissa Mayer, recently kicked up a huge controversy when she declared that she wanted all Yahoo! employees to turn up at office. In short, no more working from home. The memo went on to say “To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.” The memo has gone viral, read around the world, with every blogger worth his name and every magazine, from Fortune to Forbes, commenting on it. Is she right or not right? Step forward, or step backward?

As I absorbed the import of Marissa’s move, what struck me was that here is a leader who seems to have got her priorities right, and is willing to act. Marissa Mayer has been brought in with a specific mandate – to ‘turn-around’ Yahoo!, a company with 14,000+ employees and $5 billion in revenues that has been virtually written off as a sinking ship. She is not where, say, a Meg Whitman was in 1998 –Meg was hired at eBay to steer a small company in a hyper growth mode. Marissa has the unenviable difficult task of redefining Yahoo’s mission and strategy; redesigning its market and product-mix, and rallying the 14,000-strong troops to make change happen. Her job is to establish the right culture, and provide the right environment for her employees to succeed, and thereby lift the company’s fortune. And that is exactly what she is trying to do with this memo.

Yahoo! is a quintessential Silicon Valley technology company at its core. It is the pioneer that indexed the web way back in 1994, and  provided a ton of talent in search, advertising, email, social networking, etc., to the next generation of web companies like Google, Facebook and the rest. There was a time when it tried to fashion itself as a media company, under the leadership of its second CEO Terry Semel, and failed miserably. So, it is now very clear that Yahoo!’s fate hinges on putting out cool products and services, at the same if not at a faster pace than the nimble start-ups it is surrounded by in the Silicon Valley.

Much has been said and written about the innovation culture of Silicon Valley. There is no other place in the world, which has even come close to producing the same results that this small area, with its extreme concentration of highly talented engineers, marketers, investors and leaders has produced. This is not by accident. Neither is it by a well-documented ISO-9000ish process, for then it would have been easy to duplicate. What makes Silicon Valley possible is the culture of risk-taking and meritocracy, fuelled by like-minded folks working together, learning from each other, and spurring each other on to greater heights.

It is a place where failure doesn’t deter people from taking bigger bets, and trying again. It is a place where creative destruction is part of the deal. It is a place where people and companies reinvent themselves many times over….very unlike so many other places, where there is a premium on doing the same thing with higher outcome predictability.

No wonder then that a Samsung invests in setting up a massive R&D and Innovation centre in the bay area. And it is not an isolated case, every technology company has a major presence in the bay area, because it cannot afford not to be here – the costs be damned. Why technology companies? Even the Fords and the Wal-Mart’s of the non-tech world have pitched their tents here in Silicon Valley!

So, while everyone complains about the cost of living, the traffic jams, and the 24x7 life, the place ultimately delivers an upside that is unbeatable for its residents. The upside is the unknown, and unpredictable, new innovation that disrupts how we all live, work, play, communicate and entertain! Whoever imagined that Google would design a driverless car or a Google Glass?! Did Apple know that its fortunes were going to come from not the desktop computer or even the laptop, but a telephone?

In the same vein, today, Marissa and Yahoo! have no clue as to where their next big break is going to come from! She knows it’s very possible, but how does she make sure that she has the right ingredients in place to make it happen? What does she need to do remove all the stops, and increase the probability that a path-breaking innovation comes out of Yahoo!, and soon?

The time-tested Silicon Valley recipe has been to hire the best and the brightest, get them to rub shoulders with each other, ignite their passion, show them that proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and boom, the results will come. Steve Jobs did it when he came back to Apple, by putting the best product designers and engineers together and presenting them his vision of how they could, together, bring back the old glory of Apple, and change the world using technology and sheer genius! His first big announcement was Apple’s partnership with Microsoft, clearly telling its employees that Microsoft was not the competitor to go after, and setting their sights way higher in the realms of the unknown.

The rest is history, and we see a once-written-off company now looking unbeatable and unreachable. Silicon Valley’s history is replete with such improbable success stories, and Yahoo! could well be the next one, why not, if Marissa is able to get the original mojo back into the iconic company.

Can it happen without people getting together everyday, at one place? Can it happen with people putting work-life balance and other priorities above that of the company? Unfortunately, the resounding answer is a ‘No’! Yahoo is, today, in a start-up phase, and it needs a start-up culture. It cannot afford the ‘big-company’ corporate culture, even though its numbers and public status might trick its leadership into believing so.

Thankfully, Marissa is staying out of the trap that her predecessors fell into. She understands that she is starting afresh. She knows that her competition is the garage start-up next door, coming out of a Y Combinator, not a Google. She has to recreate the same work ethics of the start-up – the gruelling 24x7 schedule, fueled by a hunger and passion to create the impossible. Vacations and family/social life will have to be on the back-burner for a few years. And to make this easier, she will provide free lunch, laundry, a nursery, what-have-you, and also more money and more stocks - in short, everything but “more time at home”!

She is going to fire up every Yahoo employee’s pride, and dreams, and remind everyone of the ‘pot of gold’ that awaits each one of them if they pull off the turnaround. Most people will not remember that when Steve Jobs came back in 1997, Apple’s stock price was a lowly $5.85 – it went on to touch $700+ in September 2012! That is what the start-up and Silicon Valley culture is all about, and that is what Yahoo! needs today. Surely, not everybody will want ‘in’ on this soul-sapping work culture.

The ones, who choose to stay on and pick up the gauntlet, will be the folks who are confident, and obsessed with making a dent - the ones who truly believe that they are game changers. And these are the folks that Marissa is trying to discover, in the haystack of 14,500 employees that Yahoo! has today! No better way for her to start, than by asking them all to show up at work first!

The free-spirited, hierarchy-less, creative, and meritocratic work-culture of Silicon Valley is unique in the degree of innovation it has produced consistently over many decades. It is not for the faint of heart, or the mediocre.If Marissa Mayer does not tap into it, sitting in its midst, she would surely fail. Her actions convey a loud and clear message that she wants innovation at Yahoo! She will sweep off cobwebs, vacuum the place, and create the right settings that will attract the mavericks and outliers to come and work, and make magic happen.