That’s what they’re getting, with the new hire Carol Bartz. Any company that says their leader is a taskmaster worries me, because you can’t lead through bully and strong-arm-tactics. This isn’t leadership, it’s a dictatorship and in the end – fails.

Now, I can say one thing for sure, Yahoo, has lately been a complete failure and starting in a new direction with such a limited and limiting viewpoint is destined for failure. Here’s a few excerpts from Fortune Magazine article, “Yahoo’s Taskmaster” by Jon Fortt.

Carol Bartz is shrewd, strong-minded, blunt, and disciplined. (Don’t even think about leaking company information!) But can this no-nonsense tech veteran come up with a plan to save Yahoo?

Out of respect for Yang, though, she found herself in his living room, asking him to draw her an organizational chart. “It was like a Catholic school kid diagramming a sentence,” she later told business partners. Lines crisscrossed everywhere, with no clear system of accountability. By the time he finished, the hooks were in. “I got it,” she told Yang. “What you need is a manager.”

Bad as things are, though, Yahoo remains one of the most popular online destinations, and users spend more time on Yahoo sites than on any other major web property, including Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Bartz has the opportunity to harness that popularity to get the business growing again. But first she’ll have to come up with a strong vision for Yahoo, a mission that seems at odds with her reputation as a taskmaster and disciplinarian. Is Yahoo a media company, selling advertisers access to its 562 million worldwide unique visitors? Is it a technology conglomerate that builds and delivers applications and services over the web? Or is it perhaps something else altogether?

Check out the rest the article and decide for yourself but I never met a great leader who was a taskmaster and disciplinarian. I know great leader who meet tasks head-on and use the discipline to grow a business, most end up being, option motivated ‘managers’ with little vision and no measurable net results.

MikeToots_looking for the new leadership for a new era.