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Over the weekend it seemed that any pundit with an inkling of ambition was talking about Yahoo’s “Peanut Butter” memo. We at the Militant Geek custom TShirt shop, who are only occasionally ambitious, let it slide until Monday.

Written by a Yahoo Senior V.P., Brad Garlinghouse, the peanut butter memo is the stinging call to arms that we’ve been arguing is long overdue.

I believe we must embrace our problems and challenges and that we must take decisive action. We have the opportunity - in fact the invitation - to send a strong, clear and powerful message to our shareholders and Wall Street, to our advertisers and our partners, to our employees (both current and future), and to our users. They are all begging for a signal that we recognize and understand our problems, and that we are charting a course for fundamental change

Apparently laser-beam time capsules were not enough signal for Brad. But where’s the peanut butter he referred to? Make with the metaphor!

We lack a focused, cohesive vision for our company. 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.

Our inclination and proclivity to repeatedly hire leaders from outside the company results in disparate visions of what winning looks like — rather than a leadership team rallying around a single cohesive strategy.

I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular.

I hate peanut butter. We all should.

Awww, Brad - don’t be a hater!

In other Yahoo! news… they bought some more companies that are kind of like the companies they already have. Big kudos go out to Bix, MyBlogLog, and Kenet Works for being the latest nuts to be smoothed over into that big peanut butter sandwich now known as Yahoo! With leaked internal documents like this who needs critics?

You can read the full memo on Paul Kedrosky’s blog.