A week after the publication of a scathing New York Times feature last month that borrowed analysts' comments to paint a picture of Yahoo as a fat, bloated, floundering company with a sudden incapability to execute, the company's charismatic senior vice president, Brad Garlinghouse, wrote a company memo calling for a dramatic corporate reorganization. His plan would call for a realignment of Yahoo's business units and the trimming of up to 20% of its current payroll.

There's nothing in the memo for Garlinghouse or anyone else at Yahoo to be personally ashamed about, beyond the acknowledgment that the Times story painted a representative, if not accurate, picture of the company. No names are named, and although he calls for the institution of a system wherein heads that can roll should roll, he does not point out which heads specifically.

However, the relative success of the memo in garnering approval within Yahoo's corporate ranks may be in question today, as a result of its having been "leaked" -- to understate the phrase -- to the Wall Street Journal, to Reuters, and of all places, to Yahoo News itself. WSJ ran the memo in its entirety.

With nothing in the memo that could damage Garlinghouse's reputation (more likely, it could bolster his standing), it seems likelier that whoever leaked the memo is a supporter of the plan it outlines. This raises the possibility that Garlinghouse's plan, while embryonic in this form, may not yet have gained support among his superiors.

It already has a name: "The Peanut Butter Memo," in reference to an analogy Garlinghouse draws about "spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world." A company can appear to sculpt itself into any form it wants, he describes later, with a thin layer of peanut butter, while masking the fact that at every point in the structure, there's a lack of depth.

"We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company," Garlinghouse writes. "We want to do everything and be everything - to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out. We are reactive instead of charting an unwavering course. We are separated into silos that far too frequently don't talk to each other. And when we do talk, it isn't to collaborate on a clearly focused strategy, but rather to argue and fight about ownership, strategies and tactics."

A simple excising of the mere five instances of the word "Yahoo" in this 1,900-word essay could enable this memo to apply to a great many American companies.

In its portrait of Yahoo as a company already behaving like a lumbering, overgrown giant, the Times frequently compares it to Google, which is perceived to be evolving its advertising engine at a much faster rate (many Yahoo projects are a year behind or more), and which succeeded in acquiring YouTube despite Yahoo's best efforts.

But the article may have jumped to conclusions in presuming that the success of the YouTube acquisition is a certainty for Google, given the complexities of the legal troubles the combined companies could face in copyright and other departments.

A slight downturn in audience measurements for YouTube and other sites in the social networking category (though YouTube concentrates more on videos) during the month of September, is being interpreted as a sign that growth in this segment may be limited, not only by economic factors but also by the whims of the sites' own members. Unstable brand loyalty may be one factor working against major players including YouTube, whose number of clips viewed per session plummeted more than 9% just between July and August, according to figures from comScore Media Metrix.

Rather than declaring Yahoo a failure for not having absorbed YouTube, Garlinghouse instead takes his company to task for not being able to generate its own competitive projects from inside its own ranks. With so much talent on board, you'd think the company would do something with it.

Says Garlinghouse, "We lack decisiveness. Combine a lack of focus with unclear ownership, and the result is that decisions are either not made or are made when it is already too late. Without a clear and focused vision, and without complete clarity of ownership, we lack a macro perspective to guide our decisions and visibility into who should make those decisions. We are repeatedly stymied by challenging and hairy decisions. We are held hostage by our analysis paralysis."

It goes on. The memo doesn't insult or ridicule any division or anyone in particular, though it does list pairs of divisions and business units Garlinghouse says have been assigned parallel projects, with authority and objectives and agendas that overlap one another, though without progress being made on either side.

Last week, Yahoo announced it had acquired the social networking site Bix (not to be confused with the old Byte Information Exchange). Bix's niche is that it encourages members to come up with unique contests amongst one another, which it then provides the software for members to manage. Once a contest is announced, other members may volunteer to serve as judges. Media submissions, such as videos and dubbed karaoke tracks, serve as contest entries.

Bix thus joins the Yahoo Media Group video project and the Yahoo Search video project, and Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Groups, as another possible redundant outlet for what should be Yahoo's burgeoning talent and expertise. What are Yahoo's business plan and objective for Bix? As Yahoo VP for product strategy Bradley Horowitz explained on his company's blog, it doesn't really need one. All Yahoo needs to do is apply its raw prowess in simply making things bigger, and the plan and objective should find themselves - just as they should elsewhere.

"So how does Bix fit into Yahoo!'s strategy?" Horowitz writes. "Bix, which was founded in January, is a young startup - not unlike Flickr, del.icio.us, Upcoming.org, and Jumpcut when we acquired them. All represented emerging social media trends with great potential. Imagine where Bix's creativity could go once we scale it to over half a billion people worldwide. For example, we're currently looking into possible synergies with things like Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Video and our entertainment properties."

"We end up with competing (or redundant) initiatives and synergistic opportunities living in the different silos of our company," Brad Garlinghouse writes. As a result, "We have lost our passion to win."

Some of the key aspects of Garlinghouse's strategy to resume a winning position involve determining once and for all who manages projects. There are so many managers in the house, he argues, that no one is clear at any one time where the accountability truly lies. In a newly realigned Yahoo, he says, senior roles could be held accountable for particular lines of business, rather than have multiple people managing pet projects at their own pace.

But in determining what the line-of-business-oriented divisions of the company truly should be, Garlinghouse states, the company could very well trim its corporate payroll by 15% to 20%.

If any credence can be given to rumor sites that give audience to anonymous, distraught employees from companies everywhere, Yahoo employees may be taking measure of how well its current business divisions are playing with the boss, by judging which division's promotions are given most prominent space on Yahoo's home page.

By that measure, Yahoo Media Group's leader, former ABC Television chief Lloyd Braun, continues on a losing streak that has run more than two years, outclassed on the home page by long-time senior VP Jeff Weiner, who leads the Search and Marketplace Group. It's Weiner's group that employees consider "old Yahoo" as opposed to "new Yahoo" - the analogy here being a reference not to peanut butter, but to "New Coke."

Garlinghouse may have dropped a subtle reference to this apparent practice, if it exists -- judging divisions' relative "score" by their placement on the home page -- in his memo, in which he advises, "Kill the redundancies. Align a set of new BU's [business units] so that they are not competing against each other. Search focuses on search. Social media aligns with community and communications. No competing owners for Video, Photos, etc. And Front Page becomes Switzerland."

It is a noble gesture that Brad Garlinghouse has made, in spelling out the challenges that lay ahead for a company he clearly, dearly loves. But his own challenges may have been made evident today, by the need for this memo to have been released for public dissemination, in order for it to gain traction.