Advice for a new CEO: Focus on execution

With Jerry Yang stepping down from the CEO job at Yahoo, I was thinking about what kind of advice he could get. Yahoo has many passionate users and there are many hoping that they will get back on their feet. After all, they were one of the first and most successful innovators when it comes to building a viable Internet business, even if they have had less than stellar exececution in recent years.

Execution is one of the most underrated disciplines in Silicon Valley, which is a shame. Lots of tech companies rely more on luck, hoping that some cool new technology from the labs will make everything right. Once in a while, that works, but it’s a bit like being in the hit record business. (Which has not been a particularly good business in recent years.)

Even if you have great upside potential with some new new product line, you are still better off developing a culture of high performance and solid execution. That’s one of the reasons that Apple has been wildly successful in recent years. They have the right combination of cool products, narrow focus, and strong execution.

I recalled an article from another Internet pioneer, Marc Andreessen, from about a year ago in which he gives his advice to incoming big company CEOs on how to complete a big company turnaround. His key message: “Go dark and execute.”

Identify the 3-5 things that are working surprisingly well in your business, and double down on those. Any big company, no matter how moribund and poorly run, has a number of products and projects that are going better than expected — and usually come as a complete surprise.

Drawing on Peter Drucker’s classic admonition to “focus on opportunities, not problems,” figure out what these surprise successes are and double down on them. Promote their general managers, elevate their business units in the organization, give them more funding, and get out of the way.

Identify the 3-5 things that are consuming a lot of money and time and yet going nowhere, and kill those. A good starting point is your predecessor’s pet projects — line ’em up and shoot ’em. Frankly, they don’t even have to be consuming that much money. They’re almost certainly consuming time and management bandwidth, and they need to go.

There’s more to it than what I’ve quoted, but it’s good advice for an incoming CEO at Yahoo or perhaps any company that has gone adrift. It’s all about execution.