Speculation: Yahoo's botched coup

[geek]

The Wall Street Journal hears two seemingly contradictory accounts of Terry Semel's departure from the Yahoo chief exec job. One report: some directors were surprised by the emergency board phonecall, held on Sunday, at which the 64-year-old former studio boss resigned. But another source said directors, after conferring informally, had concluded on Friday that Semel should give up his position. And it's that same source who tells the Journal that there will, contrary to Yahoo's official stance, be a search for a permanent replacement -- that, by implication, Jerry Yang, the founder, is a stopgap in that role. So, how to parse the truth from that confusion? Here are four possibilities.1. The person who was "surprised" by the timing might just have been spinning, in order for Terry Semel to maintain the fiction that he had decided to abandon the top job on his own accord. On balance, though, this is unlikely. I doubt the Journal's Kevin Delaney would swallow such a line so easily.
2. On the other hand, the two accounts may not in fact be that contradictory. It's quite plausible that there was a smaller caucus of directors, those not so obviously in Terry Semel's pocket, who maneuvered against him last week. (Ed Kozel wrote the farewell letter to Semel, chairs the audit committee, and was appointed before the Yahoo boss came in, which suggests both influence and independence.) That they told the Yahoo boss he no longer had the confidence of the board. And that Semel's allies were indeed surprised by the announcement that he was leaving. The survival of Semel, even in the titular role of non-executive chairman, is further evidence that the board was divided: the face-saving gesture may have been the price of swaying the Yahoo chief exec's former allies.
3. As for the permanence of Jerry Yang's position: that's more of a mystery. I can't believe he's outright lying about his intentions; that would quickly become apparent if Yahoo was to conduct a search for a new chief exec. There is another possibility: that the rebel board members do indeed believe Yahoo needs to hire in an outsider; but they needed the support of Yang to make their move, events moved too rapidly, and they were fearful of leaving Yahoo rudderless. So they put Jerry Yang in his current, improbable position, not because they believed in him, but because there was no other way to remove Semel.
4. Jerry Yang fancies himself as Steve Jobs. He knows he doesn't have the full confidence of the board or anybody else, really. But the 38-year-old billionaire doesn't have anything else to do, he's seen a big company being managed from close up, and he wants to prove himself. If Yang surprises, or merely presides over Yahoo's bounceback from its current predicament, the pressure for a big-name chief exec hire may just fade away. Only problem with this theory: if Yahoo does perform well, that could just as easily count as proof that Sue Decker, the former CFO who will manage the day-to-day of Yahoo as president, is finally up to the top job.
There are two philosophies: the conspiracy theory of history, according to which every event can be explained as the outcome of a protagonist's cunning plan, and the cock-up theory, which assumes that the actors bounce around, randomly, in a fog of confusion. So what are we to believe about the regime change at Yahoo? A good putsch is well-planned, bloody, and cathartic. Yahoo's -- typically, for a company which has such difficulty in making clear decisions -- was botched.
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