Blow up the Matrix.Catch the balls.Kill the redundancies.

And stop eating peanut butter

(Source: Yahoo!’s Peanut Butter Manifesto — No kiddin!)

Huh! I’m quoting verbatim from a Yahoo! wide internal memo leaked yesterday to WSJ yesterday that has the whole blogosphere abuzz. That it comes from Senior VP, Brad Garlinghouse, is all the more interesting. Thanks to Jeremiah for the heads-up.

Brad has just sent out a clarion call to all of Yahoo! with regards to important measures to turnaround the company and its lethargy. What Brad highlights is a certain level of chaos in the company and ends on a positive remedial note that sounds very much like the Jack Welch mantra.

Here are some of his assertions:

* We have an identity crisis (“Flickr vs. Yahoo! Photos, Deli.cio.us vs. Yahoo! myweb, Social media vs. 360 and Groups“)

* We’re spread too thin (thus the peanut butter analogy, I guess!)

* We’ re too fat (“We must reduce our headcount by 15-20%“)

* We don’t have good leaders (nah, just kidding! but I wonder what this means

–“leaders make decisions, the rest of the company supports those decisions, and the leaders ultimately live/die by the results of those decisions“. Hmm? Interesting?)

As much as I don’t see a difference between Google acquiring YouTube after having an internal product Google Videos, I think this memo was necessitated by the fact that there seems to be a certain uncertainty — a lack of an internal sense of direction, purpose and clarity within Yahoo!

From a marketing/PR perspective this is pure PR chaos. How did the memo leak and if so, how would you as a PR team respond? What about the confusion over whether they have indeed purchased MyBlogLog or not (another PR fiasco).

Shouldn’t these be blog posts on Yahoo! Anecdotal! 🙂 What do you think about covering such controversial topics on the corporate blog? Is that a good way to negate such negative buzz?