Right now, a leader needs to do two things: Communicate clearly, act decisively, and project confidence. That's three things, but Jerry Yang can't even do one of them. In a two-part interview with Kara Swisher, Rupert Murdoch's pet eyeball-poker, Yang fails to sell, or even tell, Yahoo's story:

What we said was that the quarter showed some strength in U.S. search and performance display, but more weakness in branded, especially at the end in the U.S., and more so internationally. Obviously, no one knows when the market is going to bottom out, and I am certainly not an economist. You can talk yourself into a loop, but no one really knows where it is going yet. There have been redundancies and geo-consolidation that we had not addressed that we are doing now. I look at these cuts as both a short-term and long-term effort. That is the kind of comprehensive look we are doing across the company. I am not going to comment specifically on AOL. Carl [Icahn]is fine and he has got a lot on his plate as well. But he has been a very useful person to have on the board and, of course, it is a different role for him than before. For the most part, he is very constructive, but he is still Carl and he doesn’t hesitate to share what’s on his mind. I don’t have a lot of new things to say. We’re still talking, as I have said, and hope to get things resolved. We have not started it, but no one has walked away. I don’t have anything new to report there either. My dream is to transform Yahoo as a platform and product company and I think we are on the way to really doing that. And, in this uncertain environment, I think I am absolutely the right person.