'We Can Deliver Customers on a Global Basis'

A fresh batch of recruits just arrived at Yahoo! Inc.'s Santa Clara, California headquarters, and Heather Killen wastes no time in starting the next stage of their Yahoo!-ification. Gathering the recruits in a sunny conference room named for a flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream, Killen, the company's de facto globalization evangelist, wants to make sure that each of those employees sees the world as others at Yahoo! do: as an Internetopia of limitless marketing possibilities, a world in which the sort of high-bandwidth/short-pathway brainiacs that Yahoo! favors carry the company banner to the ends of the earth. They globalize Yahoo!'s brand like Coca-Cola's -- and yet they localize Yahoo!'s content in order to draw would-be members into a universal database that collects and categorizes every user on the planet into neatly defined demographics.

"It's Audiences 'R' Us!" Killen tells the recruits. "What do you want? Male, 18 to 24? Interested in skiing? Carries a Visa card? Travels on business? You want a direct-mail campaign that targets people who fit that profile in a dozen different markets around the globe? Yeah, we can do that."

The nodding newcomers seem to get the idea. But Killen, a sprightly 42-year-old Australian with a sharp wit and a tongue to match, takes nothing for granted. Dressed in a pin-striped Italian suit, Paul Smith reading glasses, and stiletto-heeled Gucci sandals that add 3 inches to her petite 5-foot-4-inch frame, the company's senior VP of international operations launches into her well-rehearsed stump speech on the importance of being global.

"Don't think about 'international' as being part of our business. It is our business!" she says in the scolding tone of an Aussie schoolmarm. "It's not a department. It's not a business unit. It's the whole business! The full schmear!"

Killen then points to a whiteboard where the word "international" has been listed among a series of bulleted phrases outlining Yahoo!'s strategy for global expansion. "No more 'international'!" she says sternly as she eyeballs the word on the board. She then makes a high-pitched "Er! Er! Er!" sound as she uses the base of her palm to erase the word entirely. "My goal is to eradicate this word from our vocabulary. No more 'international'!"

Meet the new face of global business. From the day that she signed on in 1996 as employee number 121 at Yahoo!, the former Salomon Brothers investment banker and former Ziff-Davis executive has been wrestling with the global dimensions of the Internet economy. She has been loath to build the sort of separate international fiefdoms that she's seen in other companies -- dollhouse versions of parent organizations that replicate every function and department as if they were entirely discrete companies. Instead, she and Yahoo!'s other top executives have tried to fashion a tightly integrated organization that mimics the Web-ified world that Yahoo! champions.

Killen has drawn a diagram on the board that shows a Jupiter-like U.S. operation with a collection of international moons circling it. Then she points to another picture, one with a flat horizontal bar (Yahoo!'s big corporate umbrella) that supports all of the international operations lined up beneath it. "This is supposed to be the Internet, right?" she asks the group rhetorically. "Remember how it started? It was supposed to be a centerless, self-healing network. And that's what our organization should look like."

These are heady times for global-minded executives like Killen. In the course of just a few years, Yahoo! has transformed itself from a basic Internet directory into a global-marketing powerhouse -- with more than 150 million users worldwide and burgeoning operations in more than 20 countries. The result is perhaps the first global brand of the Internet Age, a name that is fast becoming as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola or McDonald's. To make sure that happens, Killen and her compatriots have adopted what some have dubbed a "glocalization" strategy. Their goal: to fashion a global marketing-and- technology template while democratizing decision making. Yahoo! offices worldwide could then adapt the model to local markets but also could share their best ideas across the Yahoo! network.

"This is the new model for global management," says Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times foreign-affairs columnist, globalization guru, and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). "In the Cold War era, the motto was 'The Buck Stops Here.' But nowadays it's more like 'The Buck Starts Here.' Top management has got to lay down a broad strategy and grease the wheels -- otherwise, there will be chaos. But with the physical distances you're dealing with and with the speed at which you've got to get things done these days, if people down the line aren't empowered to make and to execute important decisions, you're in big trouble."