Company-wide emails to staff are generally an imperfect way to communicate, since a chief executive cannot say anything too interesting for fear of a) it getting leaked or b) breaking financial disclosure rules.

The trick is to seem personable and appealing and generally leave people who bother to read the thing feeling a little bit happier than before.

By this standard, I think Jerry Yang’s leaked email to Yahoo employees following Microsoft’s hostile $44.6bn bid fails. The problem is that it suffers from cognitive dissonance.

The dissonance is between the fact that it is written all in lower-case without apostrophes, as if Mr Yang was still a Silicon Valley start-up geek who eats pizzas and camps out under his desk, and the corporate management-speak that he employs.

Take this example;

as weve said, no decisions have been made about microsofts proposal. our board is thoughtfully evaluating a wide range of potential strategic alternatives in what is a complex and evolving landscape. and weve hired top advisors to assist through the process.

Uh-huh. And what exactly does that mean? I suppose something like: "We don’t want to be taken over by Microsoft but we can’t figure out what to do instead so we’ve asked some investment bankers to do some thinking for us."

The memo is not all this bad and it is a step up on Bob Nardelli’s management waffle in December. But, if your vocabulary calls for upper-case letters and apostrophes, you should give in to them.

February 7th, 2008 in Technology | Permalink