June 21st, 2007
How to turnaround a big company
Is Marc Andreessen angling to be a management consultant?
The list is comical yet true and the links out to other sites are also a hoot–especially the one to Larry Ellison’s stupid comments more than a decade ago.
Here’s Marc’s list, which is being followed to the letter by HP CEO Mark Hurd.
1. Go dark and execute. In a nutshell Marc is saying new CEOs should just shut up. Case in point: Contrast Hurd to Carly Fiorina.
2. Throw your predecessor under the bus. Uh oh. Yang didn’t do that. Maybe later.
3. Identify three things that are working well and double down on those. HP has printing. Yahoo has a bunch of things working–but you’ll never hear about them.
4. Kill pet projects.
5. Lay off a third of the workforce. Marc argues that this will happen anyway so you might as well do it in one shot. Michael Dell and Hurd are roughly following this plan. Jerry?
6. Reduce layers and promote up and comers.
7. Find the one thing you have to win and put your best person in charge of it.
8. Find three untapped areas in the market and acquire the best company in them. Hmmm. This may explain those MySpace-Yahoo rumors. YFace?
9. Relaunch the company in six months with a coherent message and strategy.
There you have it. The plan is almost idiot proof (but something tells me it’s a little harder than laid out). Now go find a big company to turn around.
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and Editorial Director of ZDNet sister site TechRepublic. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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