I’ve always taken personal pride in my ability to make a timely decision and have always thought it made me a better manager. I still think that’s the case, although I once had a thug of a boss who seemed to believe the opposite, that a quick decision was a bad decision no matter what decision was at hand. Later, I found out why—it was because he was chronically unable to make a decision about anything in any kind of reasonable time frame and felt threatened by people who could.

Timely decision-making doesn’t always mean that you make quick decisions, although sometimes that’s the case. Timely decision-making means that you make an intelligent, informed decision in time for the people below you—the folks who must execute what you have decided—to do the job properly.

There’s nothing more aggravating than to have someone with decision-making authority fiddle around and not make a call in a reasonable time frame for proper execution. This trait is common among weak managers who are looking over their shoulder and are worried about getting second-guessed, or by people worried about their jobs. It’s a problem that seems to be running rampant at Yahoo today.

A story at BusinessWeek.com focuses on a lot of the problems facing Yahoo, including the recent staff reorganization (see “Boss Basics: When in Doubt, Reorganize”) and the earlier plan to offer a change-of-control package to every Yahoo employee in case of a takeover by Microsoft (see “Yahoo’s Big Innovation: Pay Off the Workforce”). These are key signs that the company is losing its management mojo. But here’s another one that BusinessWeek magazine discovered: managerial indecisiveness.

“The central complaint revolves around slow decision-making, a long-standing issue,” according to BusinessWeek.

“New services still must run a gauntlet of meetings and approvals that can delay them for months. ‘It was difficult to get things done,’ says Greg Yardley, a product manager who left earlier this year. Another executive agrees. ‘There has been dissatisfaction from some of the executives who didn’t fit,’ says Mark Morrissey, senior vice president for global ad products. ‘But there are situations where you have to make hard decisions and get focused.’ ”

The inability to make a timely decision is a big problem for most companies, but it is absolutely a killer in Silicon Valley, where rapid decision-making on “Internet time” has been seen as a competitive advantage at the area’s high-tech companies.

But as BusinessWeek notes, indecisiveness is just one more problem for Yahoo on top of an ongoing exodus of top management and a lack of faith in the recent reorganization of the company. “I was so wrong,” says one former Yahoo executive who grew disillusioned with the efforts of CEO and founder Jerry Yang. “This thing can be saved, but not by the current management team.”

That may or may not be true, but one thing is certain: Yahoo needs to make some big decisions and make them quickly, before more key people make for the door. Given the company’s recent track record, though, I wouldn’t hold my breath.