There's a new recipe at Time Warner's
Lots and lots of peanut butter.
Brad Garlinghouse is joining the meandering cyberspace giant as its president of Internet and Media Communications. If the name rings a bell, it's because Garlinghouse penned Yahoo!'s
In the leaked corporate memo, Garlinghouse lashed out at his own company's complacency, its lack of focus, and the evils of being spread too thin -- like peanut butter.
Foundation-rattling executives aren't usually boardroom favorites, but even Garlinghouse made too much sense to ignore. Sometimes, the best person to push a struggling company's face into a mirror is a seasoned insider.
A few months after Garlinghouse's memo, Starbucks'
Garlinghouse survived the manifesto because he was absolutely right. By the time he stepped down two years later, Yahoo! had done little to make itself relevant.
If there's any irony in his move to AOL -- after a one-year stint at a Silicon Valley private-equity firm -- it's that he is going from a laggard to a laggard's laggard.
As bad as Yahoo! may have seemed, AOL can sometimes feel like a poor man's Yahoo!, as evidenced by the company's AOL Mail and instant messenger offerings that Garlinghouse will be overseeing. Of the four major free webmail providers, AOL is the only one to shrink over the past year. Yahoo!, Microsoft's
Garlinghouse is clearly moving into a fixer-upper situation. What do you do when folks don't want an "@aol.com" email appendage? If there is an online brand that can use tubs of chunky-style peanut butter to provide some chewy substance, AOL is it.
AOL is trying. It lured Google ad exec Tim Armstrong to the company as its new CEO earlier this year. Armstrong -- and now Garlinghouse -- don't strike me as the kind of executives who would take AOL's slow fade lying down.
Complacency, of course, would be a recipe for disaster (no matter how much peanut butter you spread over it).
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