You hit the nail on the head. Mediocre, petty middle managers are the algae that are sucking the oxygen out of Yahoo.
I may get jeered for saying this, but a non-trivial amount of it was a result of Jerry. He kept his buddies around in high places for too long, and the rot set in. There were VPs in Yahoo who contributed absolutely nothing (and probably are still around, but I left). But they were always blocking progress just to stroke their own egos. Once you have nepotism and incompetence at the top, it just flows down naturally and the next thing you know there is widespread politics and infighting between teams. It becomes a feedback loop; the good people leave, and are replaced with buddies of the current incompetents.
The way to fix this is to actually make the problem worse for a while, by segregating the groups into independent units. Then you fix each of these units, one at a time. Then you bring them back into the fold.
Can anyone there do it? I doubt it. Most of the decision makers are too busy playing politics.
I may get jeered for saying this, but a non-trivial amount of it was a result of Jerry. He kept his buddies around in high places for too long, and the rot set in. There were VPs in Yahoo who contributed absolutely nothing (and probably are still around, but I left). But they were always blocking progress just to stroke their own egos. Once you have nepotism and incompetence at the top, it just flows down naturally and the next thing you know there is widespread politics and infighting between teams. It becomes a feedback loop; the good people leave, and are replaced with buddies of the current incompetents.
The way to fix this is to actually make the problem worse for a while, by segregating the groups into independent units. Then you fix each of these units, one at a time. Then you bring them back into the fold.
Can anyone there do it? I doubt it. Most of the decision makers are too busy playing politics.