Why I love The Economist (One of many)

The quality of writing & discourse in most corporations leaves a lot to be desired. Watch The Economist skewer a memo from a Yahoo executive and in the process expose much of what is wrong in corporate writing.

Yahoo!'s peanut-butter problem ( A disturbing trend in the literary genre of leaked corporate memos)

WRITING a manifesto good enough to cause trouble has been difficult ever since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set the bar rather high in 1848. So today's corporate bosses tend to call their manifestos “memos” instead. The genre has thrived in recent years. A decade ago, Microsoft's Bill Gates penned a classic, “the internet tidal wave”. Last year, Ray Ozzie, Mr Gates's successor as Microsoft's software boss, did quite well with “the internet services disruption”, a thoughtful treatise as such things go.

The latest example from Yahoo!, the world's largest internet company by some measures, reverses the trend. Brad Garlinghouse, a manager just senior enough to be noteworthy, has put forth a “Peanut Butter Manifesto”, which was helpfully “leaked” to the Wall Street Journal. It was meant as part St Crispin's Day speech to rally the troops, part corporate analysis of Yahoo!'s many troubles, part turnaround plan—and, it seems, part publicity stunt. But it turned out to be a redundant series of platitudes, split infinitives, clichés and mixed metaphors .

Yahoo!'s problems—it is lagging badly behind Google in advertising growth and market valuation—stem from a lack of focus, which inspires Mr Garlinghouse to evoke the metaphor of thinly spread peanut butter. But not, however, to the exclusion of other staples of the memo tradition, such as “silos”, “analysis paralysis”, “dropped balls”, and so forth. Mr Garlinghouse briefly gets specific, suggesting that 15-20% of Yahoo!'s staff should be laid off, but then returns to his theme, namely that “the smoothly spread peanut butter needs to turn into a deliberately sculpted strategy” (sic).

He repeatedly proclaims his loyalty: “I love Yahoo! I'm proud to admit that I bleed purple and yellow. I'm proud to admit that I shaved a Y in the back of my head.” He then signs off with a final exhortation: “Catch the balls. And stop eating peanut butter.” Is it any wonder that Yahoo! is struggling?

Ah yes, what would a conversation or memo in the corporate world be without mention of "dropping balls," "touching bases," and "hitting stuff out of the park."