Yahoo is getting innovative - no more telecommuting

Melissa Mayer took over as CEO of Yahoo in July 2012. At the time, I was sceptical when the board picked the third new CEO in just two years. The fact that the previous two CEOs had been fired reflected badly on the board's ability to select a new CEO. However, the stock market has been quite positive concerning Mayer's ability to turn around Yahoo (share price up 23% more than index during her tenure).

In defence of planned strategy

A long-standing tension among academic management thinkers has been between proponents of planned strategy and proponents of emergent strategy. In the caricature version, the planned strategy is determined on the top executive floor by a cadre of analytical, numbers-driven, MBA-holding employees in their 30s. They produce fancy reports full of tables, graphs, boxes and arrows. In the caricature version, the emergent strategy just happens when middle managers in their 40s and 50s, with lots of practical experience in the industry, decide to do something novel. These middle managers are free from the shackles of analytical thinking, instead they succeed through honorable trial and error learning. Often the debate between the two perspectives is held on a sandbox level.