What Yahoo is Getting Wrong and Microsoft is Just Understanding
November 14, 2013
Marissa Mayer has been quite the figure since taking over for Yahoo. There’s been the order to stop employees from working from home based on evidence that people working from home weren’t producing as much as those in the office.
Now, apparently there’s a new system of quarterly reviews that has not been going over well internally. Reading through that article, all I could think of was Roman decimation.
It’s also remarkable as it happened just before Microsoft eliminated a near-identical policy.
Maybe I’m a bit naive or idealistic thinking that happy, worry-free people do the best work, are more likely to be retained or are generally better for the world, but this strikes me as just wrong. It’s the wrong focus. As a worker, it would make me far more likely focus on making sure I’m ahead of my peers instead of how we can, as a team, work toward some overarching goal.
Even in this world of individual impact, freedom and power, a well-constructed, productive team is far better than a few individuals looking out for themselves. Have we lost sight of the value of teamwork? Have we missed out on the opportunities of uniting towards a goal instead of each individual working towards what’s best for them as if that will give an organization a better end-result?
Now, I’ve been resolved for quite some time to work on small, agile teams, purely from a personal preference that that structure fits me, but if I ever talked to a company where the culling of the weak was a routine, I’d run the other way.
We were all the weak, ineffective team players once, but with experience, work and encouragement and guidance from those around us, we became better. The whip and threats do not make someone better. Maybe I’m just too idealistic.
