I’d buy the FT only for the Lucy Kellaway Monday column. Today’s is another gem all about how Little Mistakes cause the Biggest Trouble. How true this is for Scott Thompson at Yahoo who resigned last night as a result of telling a porky on his CV where he had claimed to have a Computer Sciences degree. He then tried to cover it up causing a complete meltdown in trust.
Thompson is replaced by Ross Levinsohn who has the wonderful pedigree of ‘masterminding’ News Corp’s pretty disastrous acquisition of MySpace in 2005. Some might say an even worse CV than Thompson's.
I am a keen user of Yahoo Finance. But even that has been plagued by gremlins in the last year. Yahoo is a classic example of a once great company which just failed to react to its fast changing market. It compounded its difficulties by the appointment of a series of unsuitable CEOs – none of which had the passion or market understanding to force through the changes needed.
Of course, in hindsight their most disastrous decision was to spurn Microsoft’s $45b offer in 2008. Today Yahoo is worth just $18b.
Anyway, Daniel Loeb from hedge fund ThirdPoint now gets three places on the board. So what next?
On Reuters, Lawrence Haverty, of fund manager with GAMCO, said "The disfunctionality of this company is relatively unparalleled. Nothing they do seems to work. Right now I think a sale of the company is the best option. We believe the assets are worth somewhere north of $20 a share on a break up basis."
Let all this be a lesson to those contemplating buying into Facebook at $100b next week.