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Comment by jsnathan | Hacker News Reader

I think a good idea would be to host an innovation challenge.

They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions.

Also bet it would cost a fraction of what they pay McKinsey.

Edit: In fact, why stop there. How about making it a quarterly challenge. With follow-ups on what ideas they decided to work on and progress reports. Make Yahoo the People's company. Just my 2 cents.

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Even the best idea will face the hostility of a management that brought the company to where it is today. It never works.

Well I can't speak to their internal culture, but if it's either take advice from outside, or go under, maybe management over there needs to re-evaluate its priorities.

Definitely.

Everyone who is there now and especially rose through the ranks at some point stood behind and toed the line that brought them to that point ("Cheered for more desktop ads, agreed and liked the 'Mavens' metric"). Now they'd face a significant cognitive dissonance if they did an about face and said "Yap that was stupid, what were we thinking!?". It just doesn't happen.

It can only happen with new people, so a lot of existing ones have to be pushed out of the door. But new ones take a while to on-board, they are outsiders and so on, they'll face internal resistance in the changes they propose.

It's the downward spiral of doom. They'll start laying off people to save money. The more people they lay off, the less likely good people would want to go work there. The less progress they'll make, so they'll have to lay off more people etc.

Unless Jerry Yang wants to and can pull a Steve Jobs...

Jerry Yang already pulled a Steve Jobs with his Alibaba investment. He just never gets the credit for it.

If they lay off the right people, it's more likely good people would want to go work there. Those good people would be able to make more progress with less unnecessary pushback from people experiencing cognitive dissonance, and the layoffs would slow and ultimately hiring (of more good people) could pick up.

McKinsey isn't going to get them there. That's a move of a dying company. Marissa Mayer needs to do this herself. If she doesn't know who the right people are to keep versus release, that's a bad sign.

> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey, but in this day and age, how about turning to the crowd for help? If they posted significant cash prices (say $1m total) and let their users vote on the best ideas, I bet they could find some fresh directions.

It would be fun to watch, but the markets would rightly interpret it as "we have no idea what we're doing".

If I read the article right, it looks like the investors already think that :)

Seriously though, if you use enough buzz-words, like crowd-sourced virtual incubator, or Kickstarter for Innovation, or whatever, I'm sure you could sell the idea to all the stakeholders somehow.

I see, very good. Other options for branding the idea: Yahoo Ventures, Yahoo 20% Time (for internal "ideation"). In fact I'm now convinced it's a good idea!

One problem I think with that (at least in principle) is that the people who are already with the company, and (at least hypothetically) have some sort of desire / incentive to see the company succeed, have a particular skillset.

To completely abandon that skillset in order to form fit the company to the most popular idea from the crowd could possibly be disastrous. Perhaps it would work if they made a conscious effort to ensure the idea the crowd proposed aligned well with the skillset / experience the employees already have.

> They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey

This usually means a the execs need to take a political difficult action (layoffs, etc.) and need the "cover" of a highly paid firm to look like "experts" suggested it to redirect blame away from the execs.

>I think a good idea would be to host an innovation challenge.

>They are already bringing in outside consultants from McKinsey

i think these 2 things are incompatible to say the least. McKinsey indicate completely different stage in a company lifecycle.

I didn't know that McKinsey knows Tech.

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