Jeff Immelt Pulls Out of Running for Uber CEO
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I worked for Ms. Whitman at eBay. She is exceptionally smart and very good at being a leader. I met her a few times, and after the first time, she remembered who I was and what I did at the company every time after, even though I was inconsequential to her.
This skill however was also her downfall. I was at eBay when it grew from 3,000 to 13,000 employees. As it got bigger, she could no longer know what was happening everywhere.
Her leadership success comes from knowing everything that is happening and being able to make sure the right people are doing the right things and talking to the right people. But it breaks down when she can no longer have total knowledge of all happenings.
I think she'll make a good leader at Uber, but given that they are already at 12K+ employees, I wonder if she's learned to delegate better since I last worked for her. I hope she has, because it was really her only weakness.
If you can only micromanage a bunch of people, and you grow beyond where you can do that, and the mission fails because people no longer know what you want, then surely you've not provided leadership?
What is great leadership? An ability to excel in well-parametrised circumstances? Or doing well enough in a broad set of situations?
Steve Jobs was a great leader. He only worked well in specific circumstances, circumstances he sought to produce and maintain. The failure in the Whitman anecdote above is not in the scaling limit to her leadership. It is that she failed to detect it before she passed it. Presumably, she has learned her lesson.
This is seen often in startups where the people who are good at starting the company may not be the ones who can scale it who may not be the ones who can sustain it.
Fun fact about Meg unrelated to her abysmal corporate leadership - the legalization of marijuana is "the worst idea she's ever seen." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman
What a leader!
I think it is alright to have doubts on marijuana legalization as long as you can have some facts on your side. But reasonable voters giving a pass because the candidate might be pandering to extremists now and will not act on it when elected in future is bs. This is what got Trump elected (look at recent pardon of Joe Arapaio, putting idiots in charge of all scientific bodies, etc.).
Plenty of startups have been lead to success by founders with zero business accumen. Why not look internally for someone who knows the product inside and out, and actually still cares about the company rather than showing up for a payday?
At this point, Uber is a big machine not all that different than that of other large companies in day to day operations. There probably is a value in having level headed professional brought in at this point given the turmoil the company has been going through.
Whether Immelt is the right CEO is the question.
I think it's Tyler Cowen or someone from his blog who has the answer to this. It's the star system. It's relevant for sports, entertainment, CEOs, and anything else where the premium for an established player is significant.
Hire a new guy to do a star job, and you take a risk. Hire a guy someone else already hired, and you're just doing what's normal. New guy may be cheaper, but once he's elevated to stardom, his pricetag will as well. So no great win there. New guy may fail though, and they you will look stupid. Why'd you hire an untested guy? Maybe you should be replaced, too!
Established guy may fail, but many things can cause failure. You just got unlucky. OTOH if he does well, he's worth every penny.
New guy may do well, in which case you're fortunate for seeing what anyone would have seen.
If you've ever thought it was somewhat hard to explain why some people seem to be elevated while others with seemingly similar skill are left on the shelf, this is one mechanism. Add in actual skill difference and it starts to get interesting.
Wrt to Uber, there probably are a bunch of execs who've been there a while and know the place. They could probably do an ok job of it, but because the board are in a position where Uber really needs to be turned around properly, the people who could that best won't get the chance.
https://fortunedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/screen-sho...
With 50 employees, you might succeed just by having a phenomenal head for details, and managing to know everything the organisation is doing, and remembering everyones names. When small, that skill is useless (anyone can remember the names of every employee when you only have a dozen); when larger that skill can't be applied (you can't know everything happening in a company with offices on multiple continents). Occasionally you find someone who, by sheer chance, is good at every stage of growth, but they're very rare.
Hence why growing organisations almost invariably change CEOs to match their changing management styles as they grow. At 12k employees, Uber is starting to get to the stage where they need someone in charge that's really good at managing the people who are in charge of managing to teams of people who manage the people who actually do stuff; if they're going to keep growing they certainly need that.
> Plenty of startups have been lead to success by founders with zero business accumen.
Very few of them have been led by the same founder with clear success for their entire growth path from 1 to hundreds of thousands of employees. It's not about business accumen; it's about scale. If it helps, consider a software project: A very small project could be done by one person over a few days; a very large project might have many teams of programmers over a few years. Think about how different they are--they'll need need totally different approaches, technologies, etc., and many skilled programmers who might excel at one might struggle or be unhappy in the other.
Imagine it's your job to hire a new CEO for a gigantic corporation. Do you take the safest option and hire a CEO with CEO experience? If not, and if the inexperienced CEO failed, how do you expect to justify your keeping your job?
Money makes the world go round. Anything else is CYA.
Apparently they have a partnership with HPE, which is of course what Meg runs. Transitive laugh/cry.
Vishal Sikka has both exceptional techincal skills and management experience. And he is available for a new job!
Like Travis, Sikka is very bullish and calls himself a "kshatriya warrior". I think that Sikka and Travis would be quite compatible with each other.
I think that's what they board is trying to avoid. They shoved Travis out because they didn't like his style. I don't think they want someone else with his style.
I am not aware of anything innovative that has come out of IT body shops, Do you have any examples of something innovative that they have done ?
source - http://money.cnn.com/2017/08/27/technology/jeff-immelt-uber/...
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/meg-whitman-stands-by-state...
Edit: Just to be clear, if it's not already: Part of why I ask is because I think Carol Bartz would be a fine candidate to give Uber the reality check it seems to need. She's a bullshit-eliminator. But there's a question as to whether Uber is merely a place where there is a lot of bullshit (this I think most people agree on) or whether it's a place constructed of bullshit. If the latter then there's not really much hope for a Bartz type figure to succeed.
I don't think Uber is constructed of bullshit but do they ever need a Bartz. Unfortunately, Kalanick has constructed an après moi, le déluge situation.
"Donald Trump no longer pursuing Uber CEO job"