UBER'S PROBLEM SOLVER-IN-CHIEF IN CRISIS?

Picture credit to DIPTI NAIR AND HARSHITH MALLYA (FROM THEIR REPORT ON ‘’ 9 GEEK LESSONS TO ENTREPRENEURS’’ ON 16TH JANUARY, 2016)

The story line, from various sources, ran like this. Two buddies were visiting the Eiffel Tower famed Paris from the United States of America in late 2008.This visit was to last for a week, and for the purpose of attending a conference which coincided with the snowy winter period, in Paris. During this visit the two American visitors were treated to highly esteemed hospitality ----the food, booze, and good music (and they might have picked some fine cologne and perfumes on their way back home).
On one of those nights, after some hours of feasting, drinking, and listening to the vibes it was time to get back to their hotel rooms but the fast-paced Americans couldn’t get a cab on time. One of them decided that was a problem at hand worth solving, perhaps not just in Paris but also in San Francisco where delays and holdups characterised local transportation system. These friends were Travis Kalanick and Gareth Camp, the results from their problem solving efforts became UBER, and today UBER (valued at over $65bn with presence in over 55 countries) is the world’s number one ride-hailing services provider and the fastest growing start-up. From its inception to December of 2016, UBER, like most organisations, has never been without problems yet it grew in performance and fame due largely to the entrepreneurially geeky personality of its cofounder and CEO, Travis Kalanick. And like UBER, Travis Kalanick’s pre-UBER entrepreneurial journey was also not problem- free but he triumphed. At the ‘’Start-up India’’ initiative of the Indian government in January, 2016 Travis Kalanick said of himself, ‘’I am the Problem Solver-in-Chief at Uber. Just like math professors who relish tough problems, we too were looking at challenging problems’’. In another report, posted on ET TECH by Amit Taneja, Travis Kalanick was quoted as having said, ‘’I always tell entrepreneurs I mentor to bring in their hardest problems to me so that I can inspire them by sharing an even harder experience’’.
In what is seen as a twist of events UBER has continued to be in the news, from January of 2017 to date, over issues that many believe threaten the company’s continued existence. From demonstrators clampdown on the company for Travis Kalanick’s membership of President Trump’s star-studded committee of advisors, to a female former software engineer’s public revelation of sexual harassment by a male superior, to Waymo’s accusation of stolen driverless car technology now taken to the courts, and the unearthing of supposedly credible information as to the company’s plan to negatively outwit regulators UBER has been thrown head-deep into a serious public relations crisis.
Doing what he has always defined himself to be, Travis Kalanick has not just been strolling in and out of the office as if all was well with the company he cofounded and still soulfully and psycho-emotionally wired to. He has since resigned from his membership of President’s Trump advisory council. He has called meetings to openly and honestly apologise to UBER employees as far its publicly disapproved culture. He went a step further to engage Eric Holder, a former US attorney general to carry out an independent investigation into the matter of sexual harassment. And only recently, Travis Kalanick went public to say he was looking to hire a chief operating officer (COO) to help him co-run the company. It appears, though, that UBER’s current problems are not yielding to the problem solver-in-chief’s prescriptions, leading to the thinking now making the rounds that Travis Kalanick should step down by hiring a replacement CEO. Davey Alba of WIRED (the online edition of 03/09/17) with the caption, ‘’Travis Kalanick Doesn’t Need a New COO. He Needs a new CEO’’ wrote intelligently and beautifully on why UBER’s cofounding CEO should vacate his leadership role to keep the company’s highly competitive employees intact from fleeing to other employers.
Will Travis Kalanick be open to thinking in this direction? And if he does will he want to vacate his control of his ‘’dearly beloved UBER’’? Can he be contrarian enough to eke out a solution not seen by the public, including John Sullivan? (A professor of management at San Francisco State University) who is of the opinion that ‘’Uber needs a complete turnaround and not merely a tweak’’. Travis Kalanick, unarguably, at the age of 40 has done exceedingly well not just financially but more on the front of defining what true entrepreneurship really is. Will he want to add or take away from this?
The late professor Abraham Zaleznik of the Harvard Business School, according to The Economist, once advised that ‘’…if we want to understand the entrepreneur, we should look at the juvenile delinquent’’. In my view, this translates to entrepreneurs either getting things right or wrong. For any problem solver to arrive at a correct solution he must first correctly arrive at what the problem is. How, then, does Travis Kalanick define UBER’s present crisis? Irrespective of how, UBER’s problem solver-in-chief must figure out the solution to the company’s deepening crisis, and whether or not he steps aside there doesn’t seem to be an alternative to figuring out the very right solution.