Just six weeks after taking over as chief executive of Yahoo! from cofounder Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz has now made it quite clear who’s in charge and what demands she’ll place on her executive team. On February 26, Bartz announced an overhaul of the embattled company’s management. The new, streamlined structure is intended to make the company “a lot faster on its feet,” Bartz wrote in a post on Yahoo’s official blog. The changes, though largely expected after recent reports in the blog BoomTown, are no less momentous for a company that for years has been hobbled by slow decision making and ineffective execution of those decisions. As far back as 2006, one executive who has since left, Brad Garlinghouse, penned a now-famous “Peanut Butter Manifesto” that outlined those management problems. The new management organization has all major executives reporting directly to Bartz, who lamented in her blog post that there’s “plenty that has bogged this company down.” “It looks like she isn’t afraid to go in with a chain saw,” says Kevin Lee, CEO of search marketing firm Didit.

Questions 

1. In what specific ways has Yahoo’s new CEO, Carol Bartz, changed the company’s organizational structure?

2. Why did she make these changes? In what ways does she expect the new structure to benefit Yahoo’s strategy and performance?