GE’s Jeffrey Immelt Is on Uber's CEO Shortlist
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Customers raved about Virgin America (and still do) even though they were largely a no frills airline - it shares a lot of similarities with Uber
I once lost a quarter billion in company value by bringing in a big brand name corporate CEO to satisfy VCs instead of continuing to make do with nothing but still-emerging domain experience and a passion for learning and evolving the customer experience.
In this kind of business, if the CEO isn’t relentlessly and ruthlessly proxying the customer needs, it will probably have a bad time.
I can understand the board's desire to put an elder-statesman style CEO in place to reign the "kids" in, but just because he went to Harvard doesn't make him an effective CEO.
I said it before and you can mark my word. This decision to hire Immelt as Travis' replacement only goes further to solidify my claim. Bad decision. Very bad decision.
I agree. Immelt is an HBS educated manager. <- Full stop. That's the only thing about him. He has no Silicon Valley experience and worked for the GE his whole life. The only thing I would hire him for is to stabilize the company to finally go public. I bet the VC's plan exactly for that. I would not expect any innovation in Ubers business from now on. Immelt will bring Uber in shape for Wall Street, VCs cash out and then the whole thing can go to hell. As bad as Kalanick was, he was aggressive and hungry for success. Immelt is nothing of that. Bye bye Uber.
These are outfits that have provided tremendous value to the entire planet. My view was that Uber could have followed the same trajectory. Now, not so much anymore.
https://www.wired.com/story/what-ubers-next-ceo-needs-to-say...
Less than half of GE's revenue comes from manufacturing.
http://www.businessinsider.com/marissa-mayer-childrens-book-...
What I referenced actually happened. Mayer gathered most of Yahoo in a confidential meeting and read them a cryptic excerpt from a children's book that nobody understood. If wasting everyone's time in that manner isn't condescending, then I don't know what is.
Here's an excerpt:
Mayer held the book up to show its last illustration. It was a drawing of a little red-haired boy riding a merry-go-round pony.
Hardly anyone could see the page.
No one understood what Mayer was trying to say.
Later on in the excerpt and in "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!" readers learn that Mayer was trying to say that, like Bobbie who finds joy riding a merry-go-round, Mayer values experiences over possessions — and that for her, Yahoo had been a great experience so far.
Which from the sound of it might make her a better CTO than CEO, but I certainly wouldn't judge her just by Yahoo. She likely has the capacity to do well at a growing company, with a clear path to profit (aka no more pivoting), which is exactly what Uber is and Yahoo was not.
Downsides: 1) Tenure at Yahoo! was unimpressive
If you cant see what's wrong, try finishing this sentence in your head "I don't want to be sexist, but women .."
Is it true age has a correlation with perception?
If so - is that truth itself ageist?
> a tendency to regard older persons as debilitated, unworthy of attention, or unsuitable for employment.
I think this clarifies things, doesn't it? Even if you somehow objectively prove that older workers are unsuitable, or less suitable, for employment, that doesn't make a philosophy against hiring older workers not-ageist. It just means that ageism is correct (to be clear: hypothetically. I am not endorsing that view).
It's too early to have 1) a non-technical CEO 2) a CEO without domain experience & passion
There's nothing to demonstrate this guy even cares about what Uber is doing in logistics and technology.
What are these folks thinking? Bring Travis back.
Are you sure you would've done better? Would you like it if the plurality of stakeholders in your ecosystem vilified you in a similar way? I'm sure you wouldn't. Cut Travis some slack!
Yeah, I suppose if you elide every reason he was removed he doesn't sound so bad.
If I was having background investigations done on rape victims in order to discredit them for my own benefit, I would deserve it.
"Trust, but verify" is well-regarded modus operandi. Why is it acceptable in other circumstances but not this one?
If "trust, but verify" can be a legitimate threat mitigation strategy, how does one conduct the verification in good faith and avoid such verification being labeled as being an "attempt to discredit"?
I honestly don't see how rape differs from any other accusation of wrongdoing with respect to due process. Is it not the right of the accused to question the accounts of their accuser and conduct their own investigation?