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Travis Kalanick To Uber CEO Candidates: I'm 'Steve Jobsing' It And Will Return (recode.net)
Kara Swisher, reporting for Recode: Warring factions within factions, conflicting back-channeling, intense media scrutiny, questionable foreign influences and a capricious leader whose jarring moves leave everyone in a state of perpetual uncertainly. The Trump administration, right? Well, yes, but also Uber, as it nears its much anticipated decision on who will be its next CEO. And, according to sources, that top leader is not going to be a woman, as the board of the car-hailing company struggles to move forward. To add to the drama: Some directors worry that its former CEO Travis Kalanick -- who was ousted -- is trying to game the outcome in his favor, after he told several people that he was "Steve Jobs-ing it." It is a reference to the late leader of Apple, who was fired from the company, only to later return in triumph.
Travis continues to have delusions of grandeur, while pissing investors' money away. Steve Jobs actually built companies. This guy just spends other people's money.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The thing that these sorts of people fail to realize is that real leaders don't imitate; they define.
The moment somebody tries to replicate what a successful leader did, this person has inherently become a follower, meaning they can't be a leader.
To make matters worse, the imitator likely couldn't even fully or properly imitate their inspiration, either. This means that the imitator will have a greater chance of failure than even the imitated leader did.
This isn't just true for people. It's true for organizations and open source projects, too.
Look at Firefox. It's like it has tried to imitate Chrome, the true leader among web browsers. But it's like the developers behind Firefox just don't "get" what makes Chrome the leader. So Firefox tries to mimic the look of Chrome, but it's never anywhere near as good as Chrome is.
It's the same for GNOME 2, which tried to imitate Windows in many ways, and GNOME 3, which tried to imitate OS X. Neither version of GNOME could really compete with the desktop environment that was being imitated.
Systemd is another example. It tries to imitate the Windows approach, but with Linux as the kernel. And it's a total disaster, in my opinion.
A real leader, like Theo of the OpenBSD project, sets his own goals and his own direction. He doesn't try to mimic somebody else. He doesn't measure himself compared to others. He knows what he wants, and he gets it. He's a real leader, not an imitator.
The job of a CEO is to ensure the growth and financial success of a company. Poisoning the well of potential CEOs is a sure-fire way to spike that future growth. Not only does that prove you are NOT CEO material - it also means, Travis, you probably cost yourself several billion dollars. And guaranteed you will never come back because those with enough power/leverage to oust you will ensure you never return (lest they look like fools, and bring back a man who they not only rightfully pushed out - but one who negatively impacted the growth of the company once forced out).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So Travis, you're going to go off, start another self-driving company that is technically more advanced, wait for Uber to be almost dead, and then be bought out and brought back by the original company as a hail mary? And then re-invent the smart phone, which arguably saved the company more then anything else did? *grabs popcorn*
I'm not a part of the Cult of Jobs or the Cult of Apple, but I can acknowledge that Jobs was very good at determining what people would want before most people even realized it, and was technologically savvy enough to know when to attempt to push the product development such that it was viable and could be brought to market. He was also very good with at least evaluating interface design, don't know if that was more of a veto-power sort of thing or if he had a real hand in it, but either way, Apple products under Jobs generally had good design. That hockeypuck mouse on the first iMac stands out as the opposite, and I'm certain that we can find other glaring examples throughout the years, but by and large, both the software interfaces and hardware aesthetics were quite good, and were well liked by the nontechnical buying-public and even by some tech-savvy users.
I don't see how anything in this relates to Uber. Apple is a products company, while ultimately Uber provides a service, and a service that once the phone app portion is concluded is not different enough from competitors' services to stand-out. The CEO of Uber trying to compare himself to Steve Jobs is like comparing Apples and Automobiles. It just doesn't make any sense.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.