His departure was first reported by Beta Beat, and confirmed by a spokeswoman, who added that he was asked to step down because of staffing issues and low morale — not because of the company’s operations.

Clearly, there’s signs of trouble in paradise: This time, pretty pictures of luxurious vacations in exotic locations, like Turks & Caicos, can’t cover up what’s really going on at the New York-based start-up. Prior to Patterson’s departure, a handful of executives left, including Jetsetter’s Chief Marketing Officer Barry Herstein; VP of merchandising and operations Heather Leisman; and former head of marketing Stephanie Dolgins, Beta Beat reported.

In Patterson’s absence, Rob Deeming, who has been at Gilt for the past three years, and recently was in charge of opening Jetsetter’s U.K. office, will become acting general manager.

Beta Beat, who interviewed Gilt’s CEO Kevin Ryan about the executive shake-up, also reported that the travel division has faced other problems with getting its international operations up and running and was burning a ton of cash. However, the company claims Jetsetter is on track to record $100 million in gross bookings this year and to be profitable next year.

This is not the first internal shake-up at Gilt Groupe, which trimmed roughly 10 percent of its employees, including some of its management team, earlier this year. At the time, Ryan downplayed the situation by saying that the cuts are designed to get the company to cash flow positive by the second quarter, and profitable by the fourth quarter. But other reports painted a fairly grim picture of the situation.

Prior to Jetsetter, Patterson was part of the founding team at Kayak, where he was VP of marketing.

What’s left? A lot of white space, which creates a calmer environment for reading and digesting information. A new middle column, which Microsoft calls Snapshot, displays task-oriented content to help people do things like making restaurant reservations, getting directions or seeing movie times. And Bing’s most unusual new feature is a flush-right column called Sidebar designed to automatically surface names of relevant Facebook friends and others around the Web who could best help you with a specific query.

Bing’s Snapshot column helps users do things like make a hotel reservation. Its Sidebar column, far right, shows friends who may have answers to help with a person’s current search.

The new Bing is automatically available to about 20% of users starting Tuesday. If you’re not one of the 20%, you can see the new interface and Sidebar on Bing.com/new. By June 1, all features will be automatically available to everyone.

I’ve had access to this revamped Bing for the past week, and its prospects are promising. It feels cleaner and clearer. Sidebar’s integrated social knowledge of friends linked to Bing through a person’s Facebook account—or people from Twitter and blogs who are suggested by Bing—can turn the solitude of Web searching into a group activity. For example, a search for Napa Valley restaurants smartly brings up the name of a friend who recently posted a photo album from Napa, a colleague who lists Napa Valley as his hometown as well as a well-known blogger who reviews restaurants in that area. Sidebar maintains a neat list of your queries and the responses, saving you the trouble of hunting through past Facebook posts.

Compared with the way Google integrated Google+ “personal results” with regular search results—which ruffled a lot of feathers—Sidebar is more sophisticated.

But Bing’s Sidebar faces a challenge: People aren’t used to searching like this.

As fun as it is to poll people—even specifically suggested people—in queries, we usually search alone. Many of the things I type into Bing are quick ask-a-question-get-an-answer searches, and Sidebar’s format requires waiting for someone’s response. It’s possible that it just takes time to adjust to this new way of searching, but I’m comfortable with the Web sources that I already know and trust. (No offense, Facebook friends.)

Additional partners, including LinkedIn, Foursquare and Quora, will eventually be included to help with queries in Bing’s Sidebar. Some of these will work later this summer. For now, Twitter provides the biggest source of people from around the Web who might know the answer to your query.

Bing will continue to make improvements, according to Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing search. By late June or early July, you’ll be able to tag friends in queries even if Bing doesn’t suggest those people as relevant to a query. This would have helped me when I searched for restaurants in Boston, where my foodie sister has lived for 11 years, though she didn’t automatically appear as a suggested source. Then again, when I searched for a Mexican restaurant in Kirkland, Wash., called Cactus, a friend who “liked” another Mexican restaurant in nearby Seattle popped up in my Sidebar.

I didn’t realize this friend had ever visited Seattle or that he enjoyed one of Seattle’s Mexican restaurants enough to “like” it on Facebook. These helpful, serendipitous experiences may be enough to keep people using the Bing Sidebar.

Bing’s Sidebar queries currently have a clumsy way of working with Facebook. If I query three people who are auto-suggested as friends who might know the answer to my question, the query only shows up on my Facebook page, not on the pages of people who were questioned. They must visit my Facebook page to see responses, an extra step that may discourage ongoing conversations. An Activity feed in the Bing Sidebar shows all Facebok friends’ query activity, but people look at Facebook more often.

The middle column of the rebuilt Bing, called Snapshot, doesn’t always display content. When it does, it is geared toward helping people accomplish specific tasks, like booking a hotel room or restaurant table. In a search for the Oval Room, a Washington, D.C., restaurant, Snapshot showed a map of its location, four ratings from websites like TripAdvisor, hours of operation and a link to OpenTable for making a reservation.

A shrunk-down version of this new Bing—including its cleaner look, Snapshot and Sidebar—will be available this week to run on smartphones including Windows Phone, Apple’s iPhone, Android phones and RIM’s BlackBerrys. Microsoft says it will work on tablets by early July.

The new Bing is sure to get people talking—and its Sidebar is likely to tell you something you didn’t know about a friend that may or may not help you make a decision. But until it gets more accurate and more partners, I’ll use Sidebar like a side dish: It won’t make a big impact on my overall search experience.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com

Other examples that have punctured my attention bubble in recent years are platform-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service and storage-as-a-service, and there are probably many more. Then they get turned into ever-weirder acroynyms: Saas, PaaS, Iaas. You get the idea.

Today, Netsuite, the cloud player whose traditional approach is essentially to run your business from the cloud, today contributed its own new thing offered as a service: Commerce. (Cue the acronym: CaaS.)

One of the big things that businesses have to do is buy and sell goods and services from other businesses. The most basic example is that widget makers have to buy cardboard boxes from a supplier, because the goods don’t show up on the loading dock by magic. The same goes for every bit of physical stuff a business needs and also the services it pays for to keep its operations running smoothly.

Netsuite isn’t just managing the back-end business-to-business commerce, but also the direct-to-customer type of commerce. And the experience works pretty much anywhere a customer may be coming from: On a phone, tablet or PC, in a store or on social media.

As customers have essentially come to expect to be able to buy anything and everything online, the traditional back-end commerce engines like Microsoft Dynamics, Great Plains, Sage and even SAP were imperfectly combined with patchwork solutions for selling on the Web. And the bits of the system that faced customers have rarely if ever been unified with the ones that also face suppliers, which has a way of complicating things like inventory, the supply chain and everything else that stems from basic ebb and flow of supply and demand.

And things are getting even more complicated as machines are programmed to automatically buy things from other machines based on a pre-defined set of circumstances.

NetSuite has built what it calls a commerce engine — dubbed SuiteCommerce — that speaks directly to the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) functions that are already its bread and butter. In English that means that the new engine comes into the process already knowing what everything is, and also who everyone is. That makes it ready to wheel and deal not only with customers but also with suppliers. And when you get down to it, that’s a good way to reduce a lot of friction in any business, which is pretty much what cloud computing is supposed to be about.

The commerce service was probably the biggest news to come out of Netsuite’s SuiteWorld conference in San Francisco today, where CEO Zach Nelson (pictured) gave a keynote address. The company also announced a partnership with Square, the maker of little white credit-card reading thingies that you can insert into an iPhone or iPad for the purpose of accepting payment. Square’s Register application has been integrated with SuiteCommerce, so if you see more businesses using Squares, maybe this has something to do with it.

In an invitation sent to All Things D, the company says: “Meet PayPal’s new president, David Marcus; be the first to speak to PayPal’s new, brand-name retail partners; and get an exclusive sneak peek at how PayPal plans to make payments easier than ever for tens of thousands of mid-size merchants.”

The two-and-a-half-hour event will take place on Thursday at the company’s San Jose campus.

It’s unclear which retailers will be on hand, but so far, the company has been working with major retailers, like Home Depot, and there have been other unconfirmed reports of a relationship with Office Depot.

To date, eBay’s CEO John Donahoe has been careful to characterize this year as an experimental period, where the company will be laying the groundwork for its entrance into the physical payments space with several deployments. It is not banking on scaling the operation until the following year.

Right now, PayPal has presented two solutions to retailers, including a plastic credit card that allows purchases to be charged to a PayPal account and a mobile payments solution, which allows customers to enter their mobile phone number and a PIN into the payment terminal without the need for the phone to be present at the time of purchase.

The approach is much different than what Google Wallet is pitching, which ironically launched its product exactly a year ago next week. Google’s deployments, which relied on near field communication technology, have been hindered by low adoption by both retailers and the carriers.

Google’s strategy is a shift from its previous practice, when it partnered with only one hardware maker at a time to produce seven “lead devices” that showed off the newest Android software features, before releasing the software to other device makers. The change is a bid to exert more control over the apps that run on smartphones and tablets powered by Android, thus reducing the influence of wireless carriers over such devices, these people said.

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Apparently the final reassurance analysts and investors were looking for was that the company is indeed still growing.

Despite taking several measures over the past couple of months in the wake of an awkward fourth-quarter earnings revision, Groupon has not been able to regain investor confidence and has watched its stock price slowly dwindle to half its IPO price of $20 a share.

Today, the company’s stock opened at $14.93 a share before settling at $12.17 at the close, up 3.7 percent.

At least two analysts were bullish on yesterday’s first-quarter results, upgrading Groupon’s stock to a buy.

Sterne Agee upgraded Groupon from neutral to a buy and set a price target of $20. In a note to investors, analysts Arvind Bhatia and Brett Strauser wrote that the strong first quarter “alleviated several concerns,” including Groupon’s ability to have operating leverage. An additional plus, they wrote, is that the stock is trading so far below its IPO price.

Likewise, Mark Mahaney from Citi wrote that “we’ll grab this deal,” and upgraded the stock to a buy with a $22 price target. Four factors drove his decision: 33 percent quarter-over-quarter revenue growth in North America, international margins turning positive for the first time, marketing spending declining for the fourth quarter in a row and the very low stock price.

As my colleague Ina Fried reported yesterday, Groupon’s first-quarter revenues topped the company’s prior forecast as well as analyst expectations, totaling $559.3 million during the period, compared with $295.5 million a year ago. Operating income was $39.6 million, including an expense of $28 million related to non-cash stock-based compensation.

The strong results helped overshadow the company’s previous follies, which included the financial revision in the fourth quarter due to higher than expected holiday returns and the disclosure that auditors had determined it had a material weakness in its financial processes.

In a conference call with analysts, Groupon’s CFO Jason Child, who is under fire over the gaffes, said: “There’s some specific tasks that we have implemented and are going to implement. We’ve certainly added some people, and have some more work there. We have 48 countries and so we do have accounting personnel and controllers in every single country.”

In addition, Groupon has taken several precautions over the past couple of months to ensure the mishaps won’t happen again.

For example, Groupon has hired Kal Raman to build out the company’s internal controls and processes as the SVP of Americas. He previously held executive roles at Amazon, eBay and Drugstore.com. Groupon also nominated two new members with accounting prowess to the board and has been working on its financial controls.

Child said that since being tripped by holiday returns, the company has implemented a more granular statistical model that maps returns on a weekly basis.

“From a process standpoint we are in good shape, and there’s some technology that is especially helpful with a company like ours,” he said. “We made a lot of progress this quarter, and will make a lot of progress next quarter, and hopefully in the next quarter or two, we’ve done all the steps necessary.”

Groupon’s auditors won’t review whether the company has rectified its financial processes until the end of the year, so even if the company moves faster the label will remain.

In a recent letter to shareholders, Groupon’s CEO Andrew Mason said he did not have regrets on moving too fast.

“Although there are risks in moving too fast, companies often don’t survive long enough to apologize for moving too slow,” Mason writes. “Perhaps more importantly, by moving quickly, we reached a scale that has helped us solidify our market leadership, and accumulated data that is enabling our future and helping us continuously improve the experience of our customers.”

On Tuesday, the company’s stock price closed at $11.09 — a price it has not seen since December of 2003. Another ugly decline for RIM, which has shed more than three-quarters of its value in the past year alone.

Evidently, the brief run-up in RIM’s stock price prior to the unveiling of the company’s long-awaited BlackBerry 10 operating system at BlackBerry World earlier this month has proved untenable. And the prospect of watching the first BB10 phones go head to head with the next iteration of Apple’s iPhone this fall has sent investors fleeing into the woods.

RIMM data by YCharts

As I write this, RIM’s market cap is hovering at just about $6 billion. Hard to believe that just five years ago that number was about $80 billion, and RIM was the most valuable company in Canada by stock market value.

The largest U.S. auto maker will continue to expand its use of marketing through Facebook’s pages, in which companies can display content at no cost, these people said.

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The No. 4 U.S. carrier said that it is eliminating some jobs and outsourcing others, while also staffing up in some areas, such as business sales.

“T-Mobile previously announced its intent to restructure and optimize operations throughout the company in order to best reposition the company, given today’s demanding and rapidly evolving marketplace,” the company said in a statement to AllThingsD. “This week we are communicating to our employees a series of additional organizational changes to best position T-Mobile to powerfully compete and return to growth.”

Parent company Deutsche Telekom has agreed to pump billions of dollars into the struggling carrier to help modernize its network and launch high-speed LTE service. At the same time, T-Mobile has continued to lose contract customers and has said it needs to better align its cost structure even as it tries to regain lost ground.

As part of last week’s earnings report, the company said it aims to beef up efforts to sell to businesses, among other efforts.

Earlier this year, T-Mobile announced a first wave of cuts that included the closing of several call centers and at the time indicated further restructuring was on the horizon. The company has also said it is exploring whether to sell its cell towers.

According to a memo obtained by the Verge, CEO Philipp Humm says affected workers will be notified this week if their job is among those being cut.

“We have tremendous employees here at T-Mobile and we truly wish we could retain all our talent, but our business realities require hard choices,” Humm said in the memo. T-Mobile said most workers will learn their fate today or tomorrow.

Due out this summer, the Vaio E Series 15 and 17 laptops offer revamped designs and technology to speed boot-up times after the computer has been in sleep mode. The new models join the previously announced Vaio E Series 14, but bring with them the option of larger displays — the Vaio E Series 15 sports a 15.5-inch screen; the Series 17 has a 17.3-inch screen.

The laptops feature a wraparound design with rounded corners, and will be available in white, black or silver. Each of the new models has a large trackpad; some include a backlit keyboard.

A feature called Rapid Wake + Eco promises to have your laptop up and running in seconds after it has gone into sleep mode. The Vaio E Series 15 and 17 also offer a built-in Webcam and technology to boost speaker volume. If you want to watch movies from your laptop, there’s an option to add a Blu-ray disc drive.

In general, the E Series is designed for everyday tasks and is built with families and students in mind, so if you’re looking for something a little more portable and powerful, Sony’s Vaio S Series would be a better fit — and it just so happens that there are two new members in that family, too.

The Vaio S Series 15 and 17 laptops offer a 13.3-inch display and a 15.5-inch display, respectively, and are made from lightweight materials including magnesium, aluminum and carbon fiber. The Series 15 weighs less than 4.4 pounds, and also has the benefit of an HD display with wide viewing angles.

A smaller size doesn’t mean less power, though, as both the S Series 15 and 17 will get a boost from the latest processor from Intel, called Ivy Bridge. Sony will also offer optional accessories, such as a docking station and an extended battery.

Like the E Series, the S Series models are expected to ship this summer, but pricing and specific release dates for all the laptops have not been announced at this time. Current E Series models run in the $500 to $600 range, while laptops in the S Series cost between $725 and $1,500.

That can’t be right, can it?

Not exactly. That scenario is what Gawker’s Scott Kidder encountered when he read a story on Adweek’s site today, but that’s not what’s supposed to happen.

Instead, Kidder should have had a choice of filling out a one- or two-question survey or sharing the story on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Bug, not a feature, says a Google spokesrep, via email:

Generally, Google Consumer Surveys are designed to show a market research question along with an alternate, publisher defined action, such as signing in or sharing a piece of content. Along with the surveys, we also offer a number of controls to prevent abuse of the system. Unfortunately, in rare cases, as a result of these controls, a prompt runs without a survey question included. This is not the intended behavior and we are currently working on a fix.

[UPDATE: This is now fixed, a Google rep says.]

Okay, fair enough. As far as the survey that AdWeek users are supposed to see, which acts as an ersatz pay wall by generating a small fee for AdWeek and Google every time someone fills it out: Annoying and a little clumsy, but not terrible.

I’ve read about the tool, and I’ve used it several times, but each time I encounter it I think something’s broken on the site. Then I remember what’s happening, make a couple of clicks without giving it a lick of thought — today’s survey was about professional medical supplies, I think, but I really have no idea — and move on.

Hard to see how this is useful for the survey sponsor, but I’ve always found online sponsor polls to be baffling. So perhaps it’s a less-bad option.

In any case, it’s a couple of clicks, so I’d prefer that to having Adweek crap up their site with slideshows, or forcing me to make lots of clicks to read a one-page story, which happens all over the Web these days. I also prefer it to Facebook’s “frictionless sharing” via “social readers,” which end up automatically belching up my friends’ reading habits into my feed, whether or not either of us wanted that to happen.

And in the big picture, unless the site you like is using the “borrow money from investors, pay back by selling to Facebook” plan, you’re always going to end up paying something to use it.

Either you pull out your credit card, or you lend them your eyeballs so they can rent them out to advertisers. And if you don’t like those options, you’re going to end up with a much emptier Web.

The discussions center on a possible partnership for production or developing manufacturing technology for organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, television sets, the people said.

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to review the Ninth Circuit’s rejection of the Mac clone maker’s claims that Apple violated antitrust law by refusing to license Mac OS X to third-party hardware manufacturers. In doing so, the court let stand an earlier ruling barring Psystar from peddling PCs with the Mac OS X operating system preinstalled, circumventing the technological measures Apple uses to prevent unauthorized copying of Mac OS X and assisting others in doing so.

Which means this is likely the last we’ll be hearing from Psystar, which was already bankrupt when it embarked on this little adventure, though the company’s legal counsel continues to put on a brave face.

“I’m sure that the Supreme Court will take a case on this important issue eventually,” K.A.D. Camara of Houston law firm Camara & Sibley, told CNET.

Somehow, I doubt that. Recall that Psystar was found to have violated Apple’s exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works by installing Mac OS X on its hackintoshes in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

In what may be the last headcount addition before Facebook’s forthcoming multibillion-dollar IPO, Facebook “acqhired” the full team from mobile photo-sharing service Lightbox on Tuesday, continuing its mini-spree of snapping up engineering talent and companies.

“The Lightbox team has incredible experience developing innovative mobile products that people love,” Facebook told AllThingsD. “We look forward to welcoming this world-class team of engineers to Facebook.”

It’s also something of a reunion for CTO and mobile head honcho Bret Taylor. As he noted on his Facebook page on Tuesday, Taylor worked on Maps with Lightbox co-founder Thai Tran, back when both were Googlers.

It’s not an acquisition. All seven members of the London-based Lightbox will join the company, but Facebook won’t acquire user data previously held by the service.

Users will have until June 15 to download their information from Lightbox, after which the company will shut down the service. After that, Lightbox says, the company will be open-sourcing some of its code for Lightbox, and posting it to Github for all to see and use.

So it’s obviously another step toward figuring out mobile for Facebook. The company realizes it needs mobile talent; Facebook acquired mobile discovery start-up Glancee last week, and of course bought Instagram last month for a whopping $1 billion.

Facebook is smart to bring on more minds that are focused on the problem of mobile. It’s mostly for product building, no doubt, but perhaps some of these hires will move toward making mobile a proper revenue stream for the company.

It’s also worth noting that Lightbox was predominantly focused not just on mobile, but on coding for the Android platform. The seven-man team, then, could be a perfect boon to Facebook’s Android brainpower. Instagram, on the other hand, was iOS for the majority of its existence, only recently releasing an Android application after hiring more engineers to tackle Android.

And in today’s mobile landscape, everyone needs Android-specific engineering talent. The platform accounts for more than half of smartphone market share in the U.S., while nearly broaching 50 percent of smartphone platform share globally, according to Canalys.

The most important thing gained? The newly hired Lightbox team’s bragging rights. Who else can say they were Facebook’s last talent grab before going public?

(Photo of Lightbox team members Nilesh Patel and partners at Mobile World Congress in February, courtesy of Lightbox.)

Getty Images News | Justin Sullivan

Here we go again. After just four months, Yahoo has taken the CEO reins from Scott Thompson and passed them to interim CEO Ross Levinsohn, marking the fifth change in the company’s top job in the past four years. During this time, the company’s market cap has deteriorated from $28.53 billion at the end of June 2008 to $19.04 billion today, clearly indicating what the revolving CEO suite and associated roller coaster has done to shareholder confidence. But what about the impact on the 13,300 people employed by Yahoo?¹ Clearly, this is something the Yahoo board of directors and Levinsohn — however interim he is — must address, if they hope to achieve a turnaround.

Think about it: Yahoo employees who have weathered multiple rounds of layoffs have also had to adapt to the frequently changing leadership tides created by the revolving door at the top of the company: Jerry Yang, Carol Bartz, Timothy Morse, Scott Thompson, and now Ross Levinsohn. Not surprisingly, this has impacted Yahoo employees’ faith in senior leadership over time.

According to social jobs and career site Glassdoor, morale at Yahoo has softly teetered from quarter to quarter. On a five-point scale, employees have given the company a high rating of 4.3 (satisfied) in the first quarter of 2008 to a low of 3.0 in the second quarter of 2009; however, the rating has settled around 3.4 (okay), for the most part.

However, the employee sentiment surrounding how well each Yahoo CEO has led the company has had a much more turbulent path. When Carol Bartz started off, she had a 91 percent approval rating in her first quarter, but by her last quarter on the job, it sank to just 33 percent. For Thompson, it was too short to tell if his 48 percent approval was a starting-off point based on employee satisfaction, or if it was his personal high note.

Evidence of this employee turmoil, along with a desire for more direction and stability, can be found in many of the anonymous reviews left by Yahoo employees on Glassdoor in recent months:

As one Yahoo senior financial analyst comments, “Develop a clear strategy, and stick to it! Way too much disparity in communicating what it is the company stands for.”

A Yahoo principal engineer adds, “The lack of vision is really astounding … Executive management should try better communicating with senior management and solicit their input when making such major personnel changes. There should be clear strategic goals conveying what is trying to be accomplished.”

Another Yahoo employee notes that Yahoo “lacks a clear vision of what the company is all about. The sooner they figure this out, the sooner they can focus their resources in the right direction.”

Employees know the company best. As a leader, you may think you know, hear and understand your company’s challenges, but if you fail to listen to your employees and therefore fail to address those challenges, you will likely find the road to growth and change within the company tougher than expected.

Now, perhaps more than ever, Yahoo’s executives and board should listen to and focus on what’s at the heart of the company: Its employees. Some proven strategies that can support stabilization and rebuilding the business include:

Leadership must extend beyond one title or one person. There are a lot of executives on the Yahoo management team beyond interim head Levinsohn, some of whom have extensive tenure with the company, including co-founder David Filo. This team needs to quickly build consensus on strategic priorities and collectively own responsibility to make sure this is communicated and understood by the entire Yahoo employee population. The new permanent CEO should build on this foundational direction, not deviate from it or completely change it.

Define your vision, stick with it and repeat. Where the company is headed should be articulated in one clear, crisp statement, and as CEO or as a senior leader, it should be used and touched on routinely in all communications, both internally and externally. There is a lot to get done as a leader; there is a lot to convey. But without purpose and vision, efforts to move a business forward will fall flat.

Don’t mistake perks for culture. In the Valley, where talent wars are fierce, we often regard perks as synonymous with culture. While a hefty paycheck, bonuses and other perks like free food, on-site dry cleaning or on-campus childcare may help recruit top talent, they don’t do much to retain talent the way a solid and positive culture does. A good culture takes time, and emanates from a work environment that provides room for — and rewards — creative thinking, and allows opinions to be heard and to be challenged.

Get personal. I suspect that the trust level of senior management has been seriously compromised, and this last blow regarding Thompson’s degree has hurt whatever trust was left. It’s going to be a tough road ahead for Levinsohn and his succession when it comes to winning the hearts of employees. But Yahoo’s senior leadership can make it right, if they make it personal and swing for the fences in communication by hosting small group meetings and by truly showing that management is listening to the wishes, desires and dreams that employees have for the company and for themselves.

This is another critical juncture for Yahoo. With the board and management team in transition, it is especially important that time and resources be dedicated to rebuilding a new social contract with Yahoo employees around the world. Employees come to work every day and vote with their feet for the company to succeed, and it’s the responsibility of senior leadership to work on bringing together the troops to get the company back on track.

Rusty Rueff is a corporate and philanthropic board director, career and workplace expert consultant and writer, as well as start-up company adviser and investor. He currently serves on the corporate boards of Glassdoor, the leading social jobs and career community, and HireVue.com, a video interviewing platform designed to improve the recruiting process. Rusty is also the co-author of “Talent Force: A New Manifesto for the Human Side of Business” (Prentice Hall, 2006).