Yahoo CEO Cuts Jobs Right Before Christmas -- Again
Yahoo's dismissal of about 600 U.S. workers, which began Tuesday, won't be the first time CEO Carol Bartz has presided over massive job cuts right before the Christmas holiday season.
In November 2003, when she was CEO of Autodesk, Bartz announced that the San Rafael, Calif., company would cut up to 650 employees from its workforce.
A Yahoo spokeswoman on Tuesday confirmed the latest round of firings at the Sunnyvale, Calif., company, which has continued to struggle since Bartz was hired nearly two years ago. The news about a planned layoff of about 650 people, or about 5 percent of the company's workforce, was first reported by All Things Digital. The affected employees work in Yahoo's U.S. product division.
"Today's personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo for revenue growth," the company said in a statement, according to Bloomberg News.
Bartz wasn't talking on Tuesday. But in a wide-ranging interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in February 2004, she talked about the management strategy behind the dismissals at Autodesk. (Full disclosure: As deputy business editor of the Chronicle at the time, I participated in the interview and edited the portion of the interview that appeared in the paper and can be found here at SFGate.com).
Layoffs, according to Bartz, are part of the ebb and flow of running a big publicly traded corporation, sort of like playing chess.
"We announced in November (2003) that we were cutting 550 to 650 people (at Autodesk)," she told a group of Chronicle business editors and reporters. "At the same time, we're adding people in other areas. So it's almost a chess board move that fits the strategy.
"We think we can run our company with a better model. That's what you're seeing in the stock price and the analysts' comments. We're getting the profit back in line (at Autodesk) with what a standard software company should be, as well as making sure we have enough investment for growth. It's a dual issue that all management – not just tech management – has to deal with."
"These last few years it's been hell to be a CEO," Bartz said later in the interview. "You can't do anything right. There's huge pressure to run very efficient companies. We would be irresponsible … if we didn't find a way to get our costs in line with what other people are doing."
To be fair to Bartz, employers do this all the time – even around the holiday season. And Yahoo cut an even larger number of jobs in 2008, before she joined the company.
And Bartz, who announced her first job cuts at Yahoo in April 2009, has a fiduciary responsibility to cut costs, increase revenue, and boost Yahoo's bottom line, which is lagging those of Internet companies like Google and Facebook. Here is her internal memo to Yahoo employees that All Things Digital posted Wednesday.
Still, with double-digit unemployment throughout the Bay Area and much of the nation, it's very unfortunate that hundreds of additional people will be without work, especially as the holiday season begins.
