Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer Defends Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick (sfchronicle.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has absorbed blistering criticism for the way he handled allegations of sexual misconduct at the San Francisco riding-hailing service. But he can at least count on the support of one big name in Silicon Valley: former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer. Speaking at the annual Stanford Directors' College Tuesday, Mayer defended Kalanick, suggesting that he was unaware of the toxic culture brewing at Uber because of the company's rapid growth. Mayer's name has come up in reports as a possible replacement for Kalanick at Uber, though there's no indication the company has had talks with her. "Scale is incredibly tricky," Mayer said. "I count Travis as one of my friends. I think he's a phenomenal leader; Uber is ridiculously interesting. I just don't think he knew," she said. "When your company scales that quickly, it's hard." Mayer then compared Uber's situation to the early days of Google when it first brought in Eric Schmidt as CEO to help co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page manage the company.

Comments

What?

[HalAtWork]

After firing men with prejudice she's now backing up a man who took advantage of women in the workplace?

Re:What?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Power protecting power is the most common prejudice, even back to the Magna Carta days.

Re:What?

[swb]

Definitely this.

Shareholders chasing him out isn't about him being a bad leader, but them just protecting their interests and the company's PR standing.

An "uninterested" third party CEO criticizing him and saying there was a standard of leadership he failed to achieve opens the door to other CEOs being held to higher standards or facing criticism, too. So Mayer's defense of him seems not unexpected.

On the other hand, I think she does have some kind of point about this. To my naive mind, scaling a company like Uber up as fast as it has sounds like surfing a landslide that only gets bigger and faster. You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.

As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.

The irony in all of this is that we pay CEOs like they were all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful and deserve to reap 99% of the rewards of the entire organization because they were 99% responsible for all of it getting done. This seems dubious on the surface, more so when executives like Mayer make the (possibly reasonable) excuses that he really isn't all-seeing, all-knowing. I mean which is it, CEOs are superhuman or they're not? If not, why pay them like they are?

Re:What?

[hipp5]

You have to delegate a ton of shit and can't pay close attention to a lot of it, especially if a lot of your energy is devoted towards business expansion, not existing operations.

As for the harassment culture, I always wonder at what point you can hold one person responsible for a culture populated by hundreds or thousands of individuals. Maybe he was all bro culture at the beginning and new hires just picked it up and perpetuated it.

More than likely this is the case, and that is his failing. As you correctly pointed out, a CEO can't deal with every minutia of a company. Their job, therefore, is to set the culture and expectations such that the peons who deal with the minutia do the "right" thing. A good leader knows that simple signals can have ripples throughout a whole company. Founding a company on bro culture leads to a company where harassment is tolerated.

Not his only failing

[ranton]

I could probably buy that Travis Kalanick was unaware of his company's toxic culture because of his other duties if that was the only example of him being careless and an overall jerk. But it isn't. It is pretty hard to defend Travis Kalanick as being a good person. And whether he is a good leader depends on your viewpoint about how important employees are to a company.

If financial success of a company is the only important metric, then sure Travis is a phenomenal leader. But if you actually care about the people he is leading, it's hard to describe him as a phenomenal leader. Travis Kalanick is a great leader in the same way Michael Jackson's abusive father was a great parent.

Re:Not his only failing

[serviscope_minor]

If financial success of a company is the only important metric, then sure Travis is a phenomenal leader.

More like if the ability to raise venture funding is the only important metric. Financially, for everything except venture money, they're doing rather badly.

Birds of a Feather...

[0100010001010011]

You mean Marissa "I was back at work a day after giving birth so everyone should be able to do that" Mayer is friends with the "I'm going to run my company the way it was run when it was a startup"?

In my industry experience the mark of a good leader was one that could see alternative points of view and that possibly, just possibly, not everyone agrees with theirs.

Mayer may have been a half decent CEO if she sat down and thought "Hm, maybe some women don't have an in-office baby sitter and would like to spend time with their children" or "Tele-working works for some of our best and brightest, maybe we shouldn't force them out". Nothing infinitely complex just a realization of different strokes for different folks.