THE THERAPEUTIC VALUE OF KALANICK'S EXIT

‘’Everyone has an idea. But it’s really about executing the idea and attracting other people to help you work on the idea’’

---Jack Dorsey

Finally Uber’s hitherto worsening crisis appeared to have come to an end last Tuesday with the resignation of its henchman CEO, Travis Kalanick due to pressure from its board. Uber, as has been widely reported from January, 2017 until last Tuesday has been going through one ‘’wahala’’ (the popular Nigerian expression for trouble) after another but bothering more on the PR front than on its internal core competency with regards to its business model (and I mean here, its tech skills).

Prior to last Tuesday’s development, especially as the ride-hailing business leader went through the thick and thin of its wahalas the business press became agog with calls for its cofounding CEO to relinquish his position, but these Travis Kalanick continued to pay deaf ears to, not because (in my belief) he was just acting tough but as the problem-solver he has defined himself to be he was thinking of an uncommon solution to Uber’s problems. After all that is what the entrepreneurship that gave rise to Uber’s founding was all about.

In the very second article on this blog titled, UBER’S PROBLEM SOLVER-IN-CHIEF IN CRISIS?, published on the 11^th of March, 2017 I concluded that irrespective of whether or not Kalanick remained in office as Uber’s CEO an alternative to the right solution to Uber’s problems never existed. I also alluded to the well-known maxim that the correct definition of any problem would facilitate an arrival at the right solution. Travis Kalanick may have finally come to defining Uber’s problems as his honourable self, and whether he was pressured to leave by his board or not he has done the right thing for now. Elon Musk, after all, would always advice that we don’t stop until we are stopped.

Talking about stopping, for Travis, will mean asking where he started. And as far as the Uber project so much has been documented but none without Kalanick’s magic. Kalanick was (and still is) in love with Uber, married to Uber, and though an imperfect husband would always want to stay married to Uber. Globally speaking Uber is the one ride-sharing business, and if Uber (before last Tuesday) was Kalanick then Kalanick was the world’s ride-sharing business. According to a report by Olivia Zaleski and Andre Tartar of Bloomberg, on the 23^rd of August, 2016 supported by data from SimilarWeb, ‘’Uber is the most popular Taxi App in 108 of 171 countries’’. In the local North American market for last year Uber’s lead could be likened to what Google is to its competitors in search.

The reaction of Uber’s board by pressurising Kalanick to resign, and his acceptance to so do was therefore necessitated by the need to , atleast, keep the Kalanick’s built Uber at its enviable position of global leadership in the ride sharing business--- a position that is being threatened by Lyft’s surging market share courtesy of Uber’s wahalas. It is for this reason that one sees Kalanick’s resignation as capable of bringing some therapeutic value to the henchman CEO and his beloved baby, Uber.

Whether a company is of the highly competitive Silicon Valley variant or another, its take-off and early growth requires more of entrepreneurial energy and talents than managerial skills (I make the assumption that we can make a distinction between the two). As the venture finds its feet and begins to grow, however, the need for the introduction of good managerial skills to mesh with the start-point entrepreneurial talents become better pertinent. Often, the difficulty and the point of slippery slope is that of the right timing, and seamless functioning of both sets of talents/skills. It is easier when the leading/founding entrepreneur possesses both, but more difficult when s/he doesn’t and has known successes from just hard-core entrepreneurial talents.

Sometime in 2015, before last year’s LinkedIn $26bn sale to Microsoft, Reid Hoffman was on the Emily Chang’s anchored Studio 1.0 show where, amongst other things, he explained the reason for bringing on Jeff Weiner as CEO of LinkedIn. According to Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn cofounder and Chairman at the time, he was strong on the entrepreneurial side but not on the daily running of an organisation. Jeff Weiner, to him, was the one person with the right skills for that responsibility. Again, Google’s founding and growth story has well been told; the distinctive roles of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt also well documented.

For Travis kalanick, therefore, what he lacked and which formed the basis for his compelled resignation should now begin to unveil to him. And this, necessarily, does not make him a bad guy. In an article titled, ‘’ Mark Zuckerberg was Travis Kalanick before we ever knew the name’’ Bryan Clark likened Mark Zuckerberg’s personality, in the early phase of Facebook, to Travis Kalanick’s and short of concluded that the former would probably have suffered same fate as the latter if not for the timely intervention of Silicon Valley big names like Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, and Steve Jobs.

At the 2005 Stanford University commencement, the late Steve Jobs told three good stories, one of which he called Loss and Love. In this story Jobs narrated how he was fired by the board of the very company (Apple) he cofounded with Steve Wozniack in 1976, and the terrible sense of loss he felt. In this crippling sense of loss, however, he found out he loved what he was doing prior to his firing, and as he settled to pursue anew this love of his the historic game-changing events which took him back to Apple happened.

In Travis Kalanick’s DNA will be found, boldly engraved, his love for Uber; the love, and probably in higher dosage, he can continue to show better, by consciously seeking what he lacked, than anyone else even as he remains on Uber’s board. And who knows, it will only become a matter of time for him to emerge again, but this time as the proverbial builder’s rejected stone, and if not for Uber then to another organisation. This, more than anything else, is the therapeutic value that Kalanick’s resignation will bring not only to himself but also to Uber or whatever becomes his next.