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Gerry | |
| SVP. Strategy. Yahoo! |
Today
Senior Vice President of Corporate Strategy at Yahoo! Inc. Gerry reports to the SVP of Corporate Development. Gerry also works closely with Yahoo!’s M&A and integration specialists. In his role, he has a three-fold charter:
- Helping the company’s executive team think through the game-changing strategic issues that Yahoo! faces as a leading online player.
- Establishing and enhancing Yahoo!’s corporate strategy infrastructure.
- Contributing to one of the company’s priorities: talent acquisition and retention.
Major challenges going forward include: working with one of the top management groups in the industry to help plan Yahoo!’s market plays in a dynamic competitive landscape and ramping up his team while handling ongoing deliverables on the strategy front in a very fast-moving environment.
At Booz & Company & Before
Gerry joined Booz & Company’s New York office in 1993 after graduating from Harvard Business School. He was attracted by Vision 2000 and by the fact that he could focus immediately on a particular industry sector. Gerry spent 18 months in New York, and then moved to Booz & Company’s Tokyo office in 1995. He left Tokyo in 1998 to work in the firm’s San Francisco office, where he served as a partner in the Communications, Media & Technology practice. Gerry left the firm at the end of 2004 and joined Yahoo! early in 2005.
Did your experience at Booz & Company give you a strong foundation for your current position?
My experience was invaluable and it’s one of the reasons Yahoo! hired me. The search for my position had been open for almost a year and a half. Yahoo! was looking for someone who was a partner in one of the top consulting firms, knew how to engage at the board and executive levels, was experienced in driving major projects, and could envision what the market landscape might look like down the road. Ideally, Yahoo! wanted someone who met all these criteria and had also spent three-to-five years in a corporate strategy role in a major technology or media company. While I didn’t fit that profile, I fit a lot of the other dimensions.
What skills did you acquire at Booz & Company?
I built an incremental set of skills and perspectives there that I couldn’t have acquired otherwise. At Booz & Company, I learned to clarify and structure debate around strategic decisions, and that’s how I’m able to add value at Yahoo! For example, we’re very interested in making sure that there’s a Yahoo! experience on the mobile phone. This involves anticipating how the mobile environment will evolve at a macro level. Is there likely to be some consolidation, and if so, what are the implications for Yahoo!? How is data usage likely to take off and how will that change carrier incentives? There’s a lot of value in being able to add a macro-level perspective to discussions on issues like these.
Then, of course, some of the skills you develop at Booz & Company as a senior associate and at the principal level around building hypotheses, designing work plans, and driving cross-organizational teams, have proven extremely helpful in my current job.
Would you recommend working at Booz & Company and why?
Of course. I think Booz & Company allows you to develop a tremendous skill set. Those skills revolve around how to structure projects, how to analyze issues using a hypothesis-driven approach, how to run teams, and how to present data in an executive-level decision framework. At the end of the day, for me, strategy is organized common sense. You do your analysis, get through all the data, debate it—and then make decisions that you can act on in the marketplace. I think these kinds of skills are developed only through the type of apprenticeship program you find at Booz & Company.
Right now, in my recruiting, I’m looking for people who show a good understanding of how the assets that Yahoo! brings consumers can change behavior and influence market adoption of certain technologies. At the same time, I need folks who can really structure and drive analysis—and get the right data on the table for Yahoo!’s executive team. You don’t find these capabilities in people who haven’t grown up in a Booz & Company type of environment. What I like about the Booz & Company skill set is that it positions you for success in a general management role while preparing you for executive-level interaction.
Any favorite moments or experiences at Booz & Company?
Yes, I met my wife at Booz & Company. That’s the highlight of my life right there! It was during my first week in Tokyo; she was starting her first week with the firm after receiving her undergraduate degree. I remember the exact moment we met in the Imperial Tower.
Any advice for people just launching their careers with the firm?
I think there are two key things to keep in mind when you’re starting out. The first is having a clear focus on who your client is. It isn’t necessarily the company that’s paying the bill. As an associate, your client is your job manager; for a job manager, it’s a principal or partner. Whatever you can do to make your client’s life easier will help ensure that you’re successful. Even now, in my current position, I need to do things that make my boss’s life easier and he’s doing things to make his boss’s life easier. Some folks lose sight of this, but I think it’s very important. I’m trying to convey this concept to my team at Yahoo!.
The second thing, of course, is to focus on doing a good job on every assignment. Take some time once a month or once every other month to borrow reports and analyses from other client teams and go through them, just to see different perspectives and how they attacked issues. Look at the basics: how they structure analysis and interpretation. I made reviewing assignments in other industries part of my training early on. This wasn’t part of the formal training program at Booz & Company, but I would sift through a bunch of filing cabinets and look at reports.
For instance, I hadn’t done a lot of work in the mobile area, but around the time that companies were bidding for PCS licenses, I looked at some of the economic models that were emerging. There are a lot of really smart people at Booz & Company who have great experience; you’re foolish if you don’t try to jump-start your learning curve by taking advantage of what they’ve already learned. If you try to reinvent everything, you’ll never get far. Spending some time this way will really help you accelerate your skill-set development.
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