Just got — and really enjoyed — Doug Weaver’s musings on the new Yahoo! CEO in his Upstream Group newsletter, the Drift (latest not yet posted). The gist is that Carol Bartz is an outsider to the insular little Web 2.0 world, but that may be a good thing rather than a problem:
Those not part of our echo chamber “don’t get it” or “can’t possibly keep up.” Well, as Dwight Schrute famously said on “The Office” in a PG outburst: “That’s Bullcrap.”
Truth is, this a business. And business is about leadership and management. It’s about establishing a future vision for an enterprise and then hiring and empowering people to realize that vision and navigate the competitive landscape. It’s unfortunate, but many of the “experienced hands” in the internet business may have forgotten this. We become victims of our own success, slaves to our own cleverness.