An Engine for Growth

In January 2009, Yahoo!’s board brought in CEO Carol Bartz to get the Internet company off a rocky path. In June of that year, Bartz recruited Susan Burnett as senior vice president of talent and organization development to develop the company’s discouraged, shrinking workforce. At that point, the company’s stock had been falling for nine years since its peak in 2000. Stock closed at an all-time high of $118.75 a share on Jan. 3, 2000, but after the dot-com bubble burst, the company settled at a low of $4.05 on Sept. 26, 2001.

In late 2009 Bartz and Burnett did something every executive at Yahoo! had neglected to do since the company’s inception in 1995 — they envisioned a strategy for growth.

“Before I started at Yahoo!, Carol interviewed me, and I asked her, ‘What does success look like?’ She said, ‘Number one thing is improve the quality of management and leadership here because that will improve the quality of our results.’ I wrote that down. It’s what I’ve executed against since day one, and it’s what has gotten us on a steady path of transformation,” Burnett said.

Founded early and grown aggressively, Yahoo! was able to store away enough cash to get through tough times at first, but when the company began mass firings to boost its earnings, Burnett had to create a platform to promote employee engagement, performance management, career development, succession and learning technology strategy — plans that didn’t exist before.

“The last two years have really been retrofitting the foundation of Yahoo! from a technology business perspective and also from a cultural, behavioral perspective,” said David Windley, chief human resources officer at Yahoo! “We grew with many different properties, but we didn’t have a baseline ... It’s almost as if we woke up one day, and on the surface we knew we were a big company, and you would think we’d have the advantages of a big company, but the reality is, we were a set of small companies and there was no leverage.

“What we’ve had to do over the last two years is redesign the underlying platforms, the technology of the company, from a business perspective. Then from an HR, cultural perspective we’ve had to align with the new culture, which is a much [more] influential, interdependent company versus people operating under silos.”