"You are doing important work. Please don’t stop." That's new Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, in her first memo to employees Thursday. Sure, that might sound like an odd message for a company that has lost half its stock value over the past seven years. But if you've been following the years-long Yahoo! drama, you know that it's not unusual for the company's leaders to tell employees that they should keep on truckin':
"(Staying) true to who we are has helped us pull through the recent uncertainty we've faced, and will continue to be an asset as we move ahead," cofounder Jerry Yang wrote to employees in 2008. In a joint 2011 email, Yang, cofounder David Filo and Chairman Roy Bostock told employees, "You are instrumental to the success of our business — we can’t do it without you."
Of course, Yang and his fellow Yahexcutives most likely knew they weren't just writing to their staff. It's become commonplace for Yahoo! memos to be leaked. Mayer's memo - marked "Privileged and confidential" - was out and about on the web by the end of the day. These leaked memos and emails provide an interesting look at the business behind what remains one of the web's most popular destinations, which nonetheless has seen decreasing revenue and an accompanying revolving door in the executive ranks. Here are 10 memorable quotes from that correspondence, listed chronologically:
1. "...we’ve identified many areas that we all feel we can improve upon. our productivity efforts, based in part on what we heard from you, will involve initiatives such as streamlining our organizational structure through reducing layers and increasing spans of control, and eliminating redundancies"
--Yahoo! cofounder and then-CEO Jerry Yang, announcing layoffs, October 2008