Yahoo! sales chief departure turns unpleasant

Nothing like a little viciousness over the weekend. Wendy Harris Millard, who has been a print and online media executive for a number of years resigned from Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) as domestic sales director. Millard has senior management jobs at firms including DoubleClick.

Yahoo! announced that it had promoted David Karnstedt to be head of North American sales [subscription required] for both search and display advertising. According to The Wall Street Journal, Millard was offered a job running sales outside the US. She seems to have been unhappy enough with the new world order that she went and got herself a job as president of media at Martha Stewart Omnivision (NYSE:MSO).

Millard's boss, Yahoo's executive vice president of Global Sales Gregory Coleman, broke a number of basic PR rules and made a nasty comment: "Yahoo requires a different set of skills to drive the business forward."

Millard's reaction was that it was too bad things weren't going better at Yahoo!, but she had resigned over the weekend and added her own dig: "I'm sorry they announced the story this way because clearly I resigned and I have a great new job."

Yahoo!'s press release shows that the emotional reaction moved all the way up the chain of command to Sue Decker. Odd that a company which already has so many problems and that has lost several critical employees would not let things go with just a one or two paragraph announcement.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/2 Wall St.