Yahoo! and You Too

Kicking off our 2013 BusinessNext Social conference (formerly the Social Media Business Summit) on day one is Stan Slap, president of the international consulting company called, by remarkable coincidence, “slap.” Stan has a history of accomplishments as a CEO with as many as 5,000 employees reporting to him and has served as a director of several companies with their CEOs reporting to him, which he prefers a whole lot more.

Stan has directed the successful expansion for companies ranging from Patagonia to Pennzoil. He designed the plan that helped Oracle sell their strategic intent to 40,000 employees in 167 countries and developed employee re-engagement plans for HSBC, Europe’s largest bank. He has created winning brand strategies for companies from Deloitte to Black Entertainment Television. He has invented many successful advertising campaigns, consulted to leading advertising agencies and personally written slogans for companies from Coca-Cola to Checkpoint Software.

I had the pleasure of working with Stan in 2002-2003, back in the days when he spiked his hair and his book Bury My Heart in Conference Room B was merely a life changing experience. Ten years later, thousands more people are living their values at work, and Bury My Heart in Conference Room B is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller.

Stan’s latest thinking – advice to Marissa Mayer on how to go about restoring Yahoo! to its former glory – is featured today on Forbes.  Stan begins:

“I don’t know Yahoo! personally; they’re not one of my company’s clients. But I know how cultures work and how to work them. The turnaround that Marissa Mayer is attempting will be decided by the reactions and actions of its manager, employee and customer cultures – in that order. You may not know Yahoo! either but these are the same three groups that are deciding the success of your own company while you read this sentence. Listen up.

A culture is not simply a bunch of managers, employees and customers. When they form as a culture, each of these groups is far more self-protective, far more intelligent and far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence.”

In the article, part of Mark Fidelman’s “Socialized and Mobilized” column, Stan outlines Marissa’s main challenges — to foster the manager culture’s willingness to treat the success of the company like a personal cause; to win the trust of an employee culture pre-conditioned to be weary and wary; and to regain its brand status, which has been the subject of sightlessness inducing self-abuse — and how to overcome them. 

To hear more of Stan’s take on business today, be sure to register to see him live and in person on January 6th at the BusinessNext Social conference in Las Vegas (powered by BlogWorld).