jr conlin's ink stained banana

i'm willing to believe that a month after my departure, i'm able to comment upon my previous employer with the sort of arm chair philosophy that many an analyst use. Quite possibly, without the heavy drinking or questionable pharmaceuticals, but "outsider" view. (As a general statement, i'll reiterate that i am a stockholder in Yahoo.)

So, this morning whilst idly reading the morning news, i saw that Mr. Icahn is now a board member. One wonders, considering the amount of vitriol exchanged between he and the board, what sort of relationship this will be, or even why this would be done, considering that the majority stock holders in the company pretty much backed the existing board. The board could have told Mr. Icahn to go stick it in a light socket and to darken their towels no more. He would have continued to be a gad-fly and trouble-maker, but it's not like those haven't existed in the past. No, i believe that this went a bit further than that.

One thing that i've been getting a great deal of lately are Proxy votes. As of today, i've gotten seven. i sincerely hope that each corresponds to a block of stock i own (although said stock is mostly split between two holding companies), rather than each individual share, however i've seen fit to fill them out the same and send them back in. i suspect that i'm not alone. i also suspect that since said ballots are duly collected and processed, a rather interesting picture had developed.

My feeling is that the big block shareholders didn't like or trust ol' Carl to do anything more than take a chainsaw to the company and sell it for parts. While a good way of getting rid of that DeSoto that's rusting away in the side-yard, it's not really the best way to deal with a company that's making several billion in profit year over year. So the big block guys all agreed to go with the devil they knew.

That left the "long tail" shareholders. Folks like me that held less than a million shares of the company, all dutifully filling out proxy votes and sending them in. While i have no idea how that voting went, i suspect "not well" from the point of view of the board. i'd suspect more than half, and possibly more than 3/4's of those probably thought the chainsaw approach was a darn fine idea. (i don't, but then, i've held shares for longer than a few weeks and have an outlook that lasts longer than an E*Trade commercial, so i'm not typical.) The board, not being idiots, decided that placating the long tail might be a darn good idea and offered the spot to Carl, along with a few others.

Now, old business school me is reminded that the Board of Directors is only one part of the total corporate being, and while they do have a great deal of sway over large ticket items (e.g. the sale of the company, who get's tapped as prime minister CEO, etc.) they don't have a lot of say in the day-to-day run-of-the-mill sort of things. Quite literally the run-of-the-mill. They're not going to have managers from a given project show up and give a review of themselves. They're not going to approve whether or not a company gets dual core p3's with 8GB or 16GB. That's the job of the managers and execs. So hyper-cynical me thinks that putting Carl on the Board is a bit of a Catherine the Great move. (The "Keep my friends close and my enemies closer" sort of thing. Not the "fun with ponies" kind.)

Well, i hope not the "fun with ponies" kind.

Only time will tell.