The Importance of Developing a Business Strategy

A couple of nights ago I was having dinner with a few friends and one of them raised the question to me of what is the job of an orchestra director. More specifically speaking, "what does he do during the concert waving his hands back and forth." I gave him the following explanation:

An orchestra director is the most important element in an orchestra. First of all, what you see in when you go to a concert is the result of hours, days and weeks of rehearsals. In other words, what you see is the result of developing and implementing a strategy. In case of an orchestra, he deals with how loud is the horn section going to sound, how soft will the strings play a certain passage, when will the musicians hold a silence, and with how much intensity they will play. Not only he does this, but also he assigns importance to the musicians, like who leads and who follows. He also rewards when he has to and he fines when he has to as well. Then you have his role as representative of the orchestra, meaning that he does public relations, he speaks for the group, and all those responsibilities. In essence, he's the face of the orchestra.

At a live concert, an orchestra normally employs around 50 musicians, all of them playing the same piece at the same time. If one of those musicians falls out of tune, or say, loses his tempo, he has to follow a leader who is setting the direction of the piece. He certainly (normally) wouldn't follow the guy sitting next to him, because that guy may have lost the tempo as well. He also wouldn't follow the guy sitting to the other side, the guy infront or the guy behind for the same reason. If he did, and that guy was out of tempo, then they would create a dissonance (a horrible sound), which would make the rest of the musicians lose their tempo or worse, lose their concentration altogether. That's why, they follow the director, because among other things, his hand-waving is keeping the tempo of the piece. Musicians always follow the director.

Another example is protagonism. Let's say the oboe player has a duet at one point in the piece with a clarinet player, but he feels he should be playing louder than the clarinetist. However, since it's the director who's in charge, the oboist cannot simply start playing louder just because he feels so. Instead, he suggests his thought to the director, who either approves or rejects it. That's because, the director is the one in charge. It's his orchestra and it's his interpretation of the piece. That's why they follow the director, because his hand-waving expresses the sentiment the orchestra must bring to the piece. Musicians always follow the director.

So as you can see, an orchestra director, develops and implements a strategy. Sets a mission and works that every one in the orchestra is on board to execute it flawlessly. Companies work the same way, whether they have a CEO, President or General Manager. Normally companies with a good director (CEO, Prez, GM) perform well. If you don't have one, then you may be living the same decline Yahoo is facing.

Since 2012, Yahoo's orchestra director is Marissa Mayer, former Senior VP of Products at Google, known for her behavior of being a perfectionist and keen attention to detail. Unfortunately these solid characteristics haven't been enough to turn Yahoo's decreasing revenue, net-profits, market share and other key performance indicators. Today Marissa faces being let go by the companies' board of directors, an announcement that would bring a seventh CEO in less than ten years, which brings me to the title of my entry:

After all these years, has Yahoo truly developed a business strategy?

Personally, I don't think so. Looking at Yahoo's main page, I don't even know what to make out of it. The first thing that pops into my mind, is that it's like an orchestra playing a classical piece with a no orchestra director. I glance at the site for minutes and I ask to myself:

1. Is this a news website? If so, what kind of news does it specialize in? Like, all kinds?
2. Is this a mail website? If so, why are there so many news on it?
3. Is this some sort of failed version of Twitter? If not, then why do they have "Trending" like Twitter does?
4. Why are there so many options on the left bar? Sports? Autos? Finance? Shopping? They have nothing to do with each other, they have nothing in common... at all.
5. Why is there so much stuff of everything on this webpage? What is this, 1995?
6. And more importantly... why is it that the former SVP of Google Search and Products, the woman who supposedly came up with the idea of having Google's main page feature nothing but a search box and Google's logo, and who had long and heated discussions with all the other top Google executives fighting them to keep Google's main page as clean as possible, who is now CEO of this Yahoo website, has so much stuff of everything on the company's main page, featuring exactly everything she stood against with on her former job?

It just doesn't add up to me. You see, twenty years ago when we were just discovering the internet, it didn't really matter whether if your main page had tons of stuff or not. Yahoo, Excite, Altavista and many others, had their main pages filled with dozens of options. But then Google came in and prooved that keeping it simple was the way to go. Billions of Dollars later in revenue, they rest their case pretty easily.

Yahoo on the other hand, seems like stuck in time, failing to realize this undeniable fact, and meanwhile settling with having no direction whatsoever or no strategic approach to their business model. Needless to say, I believe that after four years Marissa has done a few things here and there product wise speaking and even internally, HR-wise speaking. But other than that, the clock is ticking faster for her to apply what she should have done in the first place when she sat on her CEO desk at Yahoo: Develop a Business Strategy.

Today, Yahoo is dozens of things offering dozens of products, and arguably succeeding in none of them. More importantly, it lacks direction. At the end of the day, Facebook is still a social network. Twitter is a quick interacting network. Google is a search engine. Bloomberg is a business news resource. It is as simple as that, companies have stuck to their core competencies. Yahoo, hasn't. It's 2016 and if you ask me what Yahoo is, I would respond the same way I responded back in 1996: it's some website.

Never let your company sail without a business strategy, that tells you and your employees what the company is, what it does and what is its core focus. And of course, always have a director for your company's orchestra. A good director.