A Nation of Stock Analysts
William Grosso @ May 27, 2008
While I’m out recovering from jaw surgery I’ve been catching up on all the reading I meant to do.
Today, it was the Harvard Business Review, The July-August 2007, entitled “Going the Distance.” All in all, a very good issue; I highly recommend going to your local library and reading it1.
The opening essay begins as follows:
Some years ago I was waiting for an appointment with a Fortune 500 CEO when he emerged from his office with three other people. He said good-bye to them, then greeted me. He said “I have to rearrange my mind. Those were stock-analysts, and their idea of a long-term view is 6 months. I imagine our conversation is going to be a little bit different.
Every executive subscribes to the value and virtue of managing for the long term, but that brief exchange encapsulates one of the biggest problems to actually doing it.
I couldn’t help reading that and feeling a little frisson of guilt about Yahoo. Here in Silicon Valley, the barbarian hordes, many members of which would be unemployed if it weren’t for low-cost blogging software, have been busy opining about why Yahoo must die and which other companies should engorge themselves on what remains. And, of course, there’s been a ton of bad taste around Jerry Yang specifically.
By my take, Yahoo is:
- Highly profitable
- The world’s most popular website
- The world’s most popular email client
- Damn near recession proof
Not only that, but from an engineering perspective it’s managed to launch quite a few really important pieces of technology over the past two years. And it’s managed to keep a lot of the key contributors (I’ve tried to recruit people from Yahoo. Depending on the business unit, it can be damn hard).
You want to talk laughable failures, look at Pets.com. You want to look at a reasonably successful company that, while it’s made some glaring mistakes, is actually doing pretty well, take a long hard look at Yahoo.
- Of course, I recommend doing that with HBR in general. It’s expensive, but most local libraries have it. So go, grab a comfy chair, and learn something↩
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