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Yahoo's pending plans for layoffs have curious timing. You see, a number of Yahoos were in the job market already. A fair number of them have restricted-stock grants which vest in February, removing a last reason to stay. And yet managers are encouraging employees who were ready to quit to stay on through the layoffs. Why?

To comprehend such bad business, you'd have to understand Yahoo's HR bureaucracy. Managers are alloted a certain headcount. When an employee quits, under the current hiring freeze, the manager's headcount is reduced, but they get no credit for making the cut. If the manager keeps the employee on, but puts his name on a layoff list, then they both win: The employee gets a severance package, and the manager gets to cut an employee he'd have lost anyway.

And so it would be easy — painless, really — for Yahoo to take its natural turnover and repackage it for Wall Street as "layoffs." But paring a mere 500 employees, as the current trial balloon has it, wouldn't begin to address the rot at the heart of Yahoo. Remember, Yahoo's ranks swelled by 50 percent in the last two years. It would have to cut 4,000 employees merely to get back to the size it was in 2005. "Yahoo's a big company now" is the excuse I consistently hear from defenders. Well, 'twas not always thus.

Yahoo's problem is inertia. Command and control have broken down; strategic plans, whatever their wisdom, founder in the implementation. The layoffs are merely another symptom of this disease. Current management's orders to cut have as much chance of getting executed as their orders to grow.