What lessons can Silicon Valley tech executives learn from what went wrong at Yahoo?
There is only one lesson, and that is there is no reinventing an old business, especially one at this scale. There is no such thing as “too big to fail” in the tech sector.Ask Polaroid, Kodak, MySpace, or AOL. Ask Nokia, Blackberry, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. When your business is centered around a core technology or the momentum of a technological wave, your entire business will be left holding the torch when the technology is left behind by the market. Nothing replaces new technology but new technology, and the fact that you’ve been left behind already implies the new wave has arrived together with their booming businesses, and they are not you.A company is not made of a work force that can easily switch tasks. If the business relies on A, B, and C, their resources will adapt, evolve, and deeply root themselves in A, B, and C. They cannot switch from A to X or B to Y efficiently or quickly. And if there is a business displacing yours with X, Y and Z, well, they’ve already established themselves. The kicker? It’s the exact same advantage you had when you displaced others in your heyday. Nothing has changes, except the times.Businesses have no pivots. If anything, they have seeds of new businesses and opportunities they see. Employees will bring these things with them, but these are building businesses from scratch. If they were truly worth it, they’d be new businesses. Think Twitter.Only the public and naive entrepreneurs believe companies can reinvent themselves. Mayer did everything she could to reinvent Yahoo, but if anything she proved there was nothing left to reinvent. They weren’t going to reinvent search, photo hosting, or social media. They did their best to acquire and aqui-hire in those departments, but there was too little available. It was too little too late.Nothing went wrong. That’s the lesson. It all just went. Entrepreneurs are serial for this reason. They don’t reinvent businesses. They sell, and move on to invent their next business. Tech executives are job hoppers also for this reason. Mayer will end up with another job that will likely pay more than the remaining 99% of us. For better or worse, there is nothing wrong with this picture.
Need help to see what I did is correct? (Financial Acct: Ethics Case)?
a, also include the executives, employees, stockholders of Boeing, Stockholders of Douglas (basically anybody connected to the companies, because they can all be affected) c: Time Period Assumption, Full Disclosure Principle, Matching, Materiality (assumptions/principles refer to specific concepts in accounting) f: investors and analysts can't rely on the Financial statements to be accurate, which means they have no reliable data to base decisions on. Get use to this type of format for ethics questions, you'll see many of these.
If executives mix theirs financial with the company’s is bookkeeper/accnt liable?
If the company is private, I don't believe there is any liability. If the company is public, you may have responsibility to be a "whistle blower". Since the owners did private direct financing, I doubt its a public company, but weirder things have happened. First things first. The loan may be an arrangement with the ownership of the company. It is possible for the arrangement to pay the home equity loans is senior to all other debt, and direct payment in this situation would not be unusual. In fact there is more risk if it is not directly paid; if the executive does not make payment liens could be called and there may be some pledge on behalf of the company's assets at risk. The credit cards are also not unusual. What matters is what they buy with the credit cards and if proper internal controls are adhered to. Every company I have worked for issued CC's directly to employees, in the name of the employee, but they had to provide proper control documentation for all purchases. My advice, if you are not comfortable with some of the ongoings is to ask your supervisor to explain things. If he refuses, go up the ladder. Be polite in these questions, after all everything may be perfectly normal. If you are still unsatisfied, go to the audit board of your company.
Is it better to work for private or public company?
Depending on your rank within the company, what motivates you to work or the individual goals you've set your self, the answer as to which is a better place to work will be different. An executive level employee whose goals might include creating a sustainable business might prefer to hold such a position in a private company away from the pressures of producing impressive short term results that do nothing for the long-term health of the company. A lower level employee might be better off working for a public company that is mindful of the fact that employee satisfaction factors into it's market capitalization and therefore makes it a priority to ensure employee's well being. A public company has easier access to capital that is valuable for growth of the business. This is not always easily matched by a private firm. Of course, whenever a public company fails to turn a profit and costs have to be cut, the cost-cutting will start with 'downsizing' in that regard, the employee might feel safer in a private company that is more than likely to expand more cautiously that a public company, thus minimizing the need for ever downsizing.
What went wrong with Yahoo? It was once worth almost $125 billion, but today sold to Verizon for $5 billion.
There is no one single reason that Yahoo "went wrong", which I assume means that they aren't seen as one of the top couple of internet companies like they once were. There are product reasons, strategic reasons, and cultural reasons. Some top of mind examples though:Focusing so much for years on Panama (Google Adwords competitor) and search in general, when they ended up losing to Google and eventually outsourcing this to Microsoft.Becoming too unfocused. Yahoo tried to do everything and triggered the famous Peanut Butter Manifesto from Brad Garlinghouse that summarized this problem well.The shift from a desktop world where everyone used home pages to a mobile and social world. Yahoo failed to build their own successful mobile and social products or to acquire any. Yahoo got too bloated, and nobody would ever make the cuts needed to both headcount and its products/properties.Buying Flickr, then letting it languish. Buying Flickr for $35 million was a bargain when you see how huge social photos are today. They could have turned Flickr into the next Facebook or Instagram and instead didn't invest properly in it.Failing to acquire Google and then Facebook. Yahoo had opportunities to buy both of these companies when it was clear they were going to be big successes and instead wouldn't pay what was needed. For example, they had a deal to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion pretty much accepted, then Yahoo's earnings came out and the value of the deal dropped to 800M due to stock compensation and Zuckerberg balked when Yahoo wouldn't change the deal to put the price back up. Think about the value of Facebook today and that Yahoo didn't acquire them over a $300M difference.Leadership changes. Looking at companies like Google and Facebook you'll see that the same leadership has essentially been in place the whole time. Yahoo has had a shifting cast of CEOs and executive teams that has never provided a longer term vision and execution path to take shape.Acceptance of lower quality employees. By the time I worked at Yahoo from 2007-2010, there were still a ton of great A-quality people there, but there were also a lot of B or C-quality people who were not outstanding at their work. This starts to eat away at the company and make the A-players go work elsewhere.There are more reasons, but these provide a good summary...
How can a bank statement of a company be helpful to make investment decision?
It is not a bank statement what you would be looking at. A bank statement is summary that contains all transactions performed and all the deposits or credits made to one bank account. Also, it contains the balance on that account weather is negative or positive. You would use that type of document in order to grant a loan to a person who is applying for a loan. However, you would not be able to use a bank statement from a company or entity in order to make an investment decision unless you are an investment analyst, advisor, broker or bank manager yourself.The real data that you must look at order to make an investment decision about a company is called “the profile and performance” This data tells you how good a specific company is doing and how well it has performed in the past. It also tells you the specific amount of shares that it owes and how many it has sold to investors and the people so far.We are looking at MC Donald's performance of one single day. The most common feature to look is that it is represented in color green. Those companies represented in color red are to be avoided and the big number shown above is the cost per share or stock so in this case a single stock of McDonald's would cost 129 dollars. Stocks that are expensive are actually a very good option to invest. Sometimes it is not good to invest in Stocks that are extremely cheap because that could be an indicator that the company is going down.Now we are looking at McDonald's performance of 5 days.Now we are looking at McDonald's performance of 1 month.Now we are looking at MCdonald's performance of one year.This is an investment and financial report for McDonald's. Outstanding shares means the stocks that are owned by its members and floating stocks are the total of stocks that the company has issued to the general public for buying. In this case, McDonald's has issued 818.58 million stocks.This is another type of financial report for McDonald's. It tells us its reported earnings in quarters and quarters mean a period of 4 months.If you notice in the pictures that contain McDonald's price per stock it has been a steady price which talks very good about a company. Company that have one price for one month and one very different price for another are companies to take with caution.