Uber at the Intersection
Kenneth MIller | June 21, 2017
“We have met the enemy, and he is us”
—Pogo
So, Uber—some say the worst cultural catastrophe since Enron. Maybe, but I would argue that Enron belongs in a league all its own.
Enron disappeared in a cloud of dust, litigation and criminality. It disintegrated before our very eyes. 20,000 jobs lost. Retirement accounts decimated. Fines in the tens-of-millions levied. Executives frog-marched off to the pokey. Well over a decade later, its former CEO remains incarcerated. Mysterious sudden death and suicide are part of its tawdry legacy.
No, Uber isn’t Enron.
Except for the arrogance.
“If we are going to work on Uber 2.0, I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”
—message from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
to the firm’s 14,000 workers
Travis Kalanick is a really smart guy. A transformational talent. A disrupter of the First Order. In well less than a decade, he built a global phenomenon that, though still private, is said to have greater market value than GM. To call it a remarkable achievement is a gross mis-understatement (forgive me).
But the flip side of the ‘Uber 1.0’ coin is an organizational culture most appropriately measured on a scale ranging roughly from toxic to tortious, with a well-documented bias toward the upper end of that continuum. As the miasma within Uber has been highly publicized, we’ll not further describe it here. Suffice it to say the need for ‘Uber 2.0’ could be neither more compelling nor urgent.
While no one is suggesting Enron-like outcomes for Uber, it is a palpable world-class mess, and its transformation into what it can and should be is by no means assured. It won’t be easy, even were everything to be done perfectly starting today. Which it won’t. Because it can’t.
Whether Uber faces an existential crisis is an open question, but it is inarguable that it’s in dire need of a massive cultural makeover–a genuine transformation–something even Mr Kalanick finally seems to grasp, if perhaps not fully accept. But this is at best a Herculean task, at worst, an impossible one. Given the size of the Uber organization, coupled with its deplorable and all-too-public history, we have to assume a significant risk of failure. And while it is apparent that only an Uber 2.0 can surmount the accumulation of dreck left in the wake of Uber 1.0, it’s likewise obvious that can never be accomplished under the leadership of ‘Travis 2.0’. Or Travis anything-point-0.
Travis, meet Pogo.
For better or worse, Travis is–inside and outside the organization–the very public face of Uber 1.0. Notwithstanding his creative genius and the marvel he begat, his legacy is a case study in the perils of ego run amok in the euphoria of outrageous success. Regardless of any personal transformation he may achieve, Uber simply needs a new face.
‘Travis 2.0’ just won’t do.
But he remains on the company’s Board of Directors, and thanks to Uber’s skewed capital structure, he apparently still controls a majority of the voting shares. Clearly this, coupled with the void formerly occupied by the ‘senior leadership team’, adds materially to the challenge. It will indeed be a test for Mr Kalanick to recognize his own self-interest and recede into the background. Otherwise, Uber may be a lost cause–at least in terms of reaching its apparent potential.
MIT’s Edgar Schein–a genuine icon in the field of organizational culture–provided this cautionary note:
“Culture is the most difficult organizational attribute to change”.
So let’s accept that a rough road lies ahead for Uber under the best of circumstances–and these are anything but the best of circumstances.
The recent Covington & Burling Recommendations commissioned by Uber’s Board enumerate several important management actions that may help in this process—and others, respectfully, that probably won’t. And it’s telling that the first thought about how to transform a toxic corporate culture is to call in the lawyers. Really? Above all, Uber needs to discover its soul, and define exactly what it wants Uber 2.0 to look like–what it wants to be when it grows up. To achieve this and begin the process of transforming the culture will require:
- Enlightened leadership. Leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin—mirror images, if you like—it is not possible to transform the culture absent the presence and full engagement of enlightened leadership. As is so often the case, leadership is at once the solution and the problem.
- A genuine understanding of organizational culture. What it is, where it comes from, how it can be changed. Culture is hands-down the least understood and most chronically under-managed attribute of a vast majority of organizations. There are reasons for that:
1- It’s pretty arcane stuff—a practical, user-friendly approach is required to sort out and distill the massive body of published research into something that can be applied in the real world;
2-It’s hard work that requires substantial investment of time, patience, and persistence to produce results—and many leaders simply don’t understand what it can do for their organizations.
- Unwavering commitment. This is an incremental process, but there can be no ‘half-way’, or ‘toe in the water’ commitment here. If Uber is not prepared to make an ‘all-in’ leap in its quest to transform itself, it will fail. Nor can this be seen as a one-off project, or something to be compartmentalized in HR. The care and feeding of an organization’s culture is a full-time permanent part of every leader’s job description—full stop.
In all of this, we should be ever mindful of Einstein’s admonition:
“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them”.
Uber has certainly broken more than its allocated eggs.
Maybe this time it can make an omelet.
Maybe.