Travis Kalanick will be impossible to replace, but he was doomed by institutional failures
Travis Kalanick refused to set boundaries where it mattered most, and as a result, is no longer the CEO of Uber
It finally happened. Travis Kalanick is resigning at Uber.
It is probably the most significant tech departure since T.J. Miller announced he was leaving the television show ‘Silicon Valley’.
Facetiousness aside, 2017 has been a remarkably controversial year for Uber. There have been numerous allegations of sexual harassment, Uber’s creepy-as-hell ‘Greyball’ scheme was revealed and Kalanick himself fell victim to a viral video.
Yet despite all of this, anyone who thinks Uber will benefit from the resignation of Kalanick is wrong. He will be nearly impossible to replace.
The Founder-first mentality is a myth, but there are certain companies that, if their leader steps down, will suddenly be navigating a complete disaster. Uber is one of them.
Kalanick is as synonymous with Uber as Zuckerberg is with Facebook, Musk with Tesla and Bezos with Amazon.
Neither Twitter nor Square need Jack Dorsey, Noam Bardin is not branded to his company (he is the CEO of Waze by the way) and many people think Apple will run better if Tim Cook steps down.
Uber is about to really, truly, struggle for the first time in its history. How it navigates the next 12-months will be the most important year in the company’s history.
Why? take into consideration our own local ride-hailing players.
Grab, Go-jek, Didi Chuxing and Ola are fantastic companies, but they are copy-cats and benefited tremendously from Kalanick’s ability to break the taxi monopoly. Uber came into countries, pissed everyone off, but eventually bent the rules enough for local players to grab a foothold.
It takes a unique personality — some might even say jerk — to directly challenge the aggressive authority the taxi industry held across the world. Kalanick did this, and also came out a winner.
If Steve Jobs can be revered in 2017, Kalanick should be held in similar regard. I mean, he rebuilt the global transportation industry!
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At this point, readers are surely infuriated about the ease at which I dismiss Uber’s sexual harassment culture, its Greyball programme and the company’s inability to prevent (and seemingly care) about sexual assault perpetrated by some users onto others.
Trust me, I am not.
Travis Kalanick 100 per cent, unequivocally, deserved to be fired…I mean, resign.
Institutional Failure
In American sports, coaches often get fired as a result of the crimes committed by their players.
But, if a player is about to commit a crime, can the coach impact whether or not the athlete goes through with it? Probably not.
In this case, Athletic Directors usually cite the term ‘institutional failure’ as the reason for the coach being let go.
It is a catch-all phrase that means, “No, you did not commit the crime, but you built an organisation that did not act as a deterrent, and thus, you are culpable”.
The most egregious example is the years-long revelations continued to bubble-up from the University of Baylor’s American football team. They have grown into such an abhorrent example of institutional failure that it has done irreversible damage to the University as a whole.
Kalanick is guilty of institutional failure — especially regarding the troubling sexual harassment culture that seems to have been commonplace at Uber. And thus, he deserved his fate.
Uber was built by giving the proverbial middle-finger to rules and norms, and yet the tumultuous future the company now faces is a direct result of Kalanick’s unwillingness to place boundaries where it matters mosts — namely the ability of an employee to feel safe in the workplace.
In the premiere profile on Kalanick in The New York Times, Mike Isaac wrote that,
“A blindness to boundaries is not uncommon for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. But in Mr. Kalanick, that led to a pattern of repeatedly going too far at Uber, including the duplicity with Apple, sabotaging competitors and allowing the company to use a secret tool called Greyball to trick some law enforcement agencies.”
It is difficult to imagine that, as stand alone cases, the Greyball revelations or the viral video of Kalanick verbally abusing a driver would be enough to push him out of Uber.
And if Kalanick was able to resolve the sexual harassment culture quickly, he could have survived that as well. Again, if the incidents stood alone.
But they don’t, and if we group them as a reflection of Kalanick’s leadership style (which me must, he is the boss) it is fairly obvious that he was flouting the rules outside the company, while lacking any control over within the organisation. And once the CEO loses control of the company, it is a fairly obvious time to resign.
Timothy B. Lee wrote in Vox that,
“Changing the culture of any company requires clear communication from the CEO that misogyny is unacceptable, backed up by sustained action. Rank-and-file Uber employees need to be confident that if they report misconduct to the CEO, he’ll take it seriously and hold offenders accountable.”
Uber board members obviously did not think Kalanick was up for this job and will begin the process of moving on.
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The company may never recover from the loss of Kalanick, but he lost control of the programme, and as a result, was forced out.
Kalanick fell victim to his own institutional failure.
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