The appointment of Carol Bartz as Yahoo’s new CEO has drawn mixed reactions. Some say she is just the type of grown up manager the adrift organization needs to return to smooth sailing. Others say she doesn’t have the experience to lead a company in the cutthroat and rapidly changing Internet industry.

Time will tell, but it looks to me like Ms. Bartz is a good choice, coming as she does from a company (Autodesk) that understands its market, understands its brand, and (through 2008) has achieved five straight years of record financial performance. Ms. Bartz doesn’t strike me as one who would join Yahoo as mere caretaker, and that’s certainly not her charge from the board. She’ll need to stir things up (and possibly sell things off) if she’s going to straighten the company up, and I can’t imagine she has any plans other than that. She has witnessed firsthand what a well-focused organization can achieve.

The brass at Citigroup must have skipped that course in business school. I can’t help but wonder why the highly paid, highly educated, high profile leaders at Citi recognized the folly of the company’s financial supermarket strategy only after they appropriated $45 billion in taxpayer money. For that matter, I wonder why they didn’t see it from the beginning.

Unfortunately, a dizzying loss of focus is all too common in business. When things are good and the economic pie is expanding, companies can often skate by with a flawed strategy. But there’s nothing like tough times to reveal what an organization is really made of. In Citi’s case–despite a $25 billion market cap–not much.