Really? Uber Needs Damage Control
Really?
I have met Travis Kalanik and I am an avid Uber user. I love the service. After spending a decade getting frustrated with Taxi drivers that could not find Logan airport in Boston, I have come to appreciate Uber’s great service. But when my 16-year old refused to take an Uber home today because he felt the company was evil, I started to think that may be too much has happened over the last couple of weeks for Uber to bounce back completely. Is it too late for Uber to learn from its mistakes?
It’s been a bad couple of weeks. Uber’s SVP of Business Emil Michael propelled the company down the slippery slope when he “outlined the notion of spending ‘a million dollars’ to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press – they’d look into ‘your personal lives, your families’, and give the media a taste of its own medicine.” The same story mentioned how a different Uber manager had accessed a reporter’s travel records.
Uber has a history of carelessness in talking about data privacy. It published a blog in 2012 that essentially calculated the proportion of rides that were linked to one night stands (the “rides of glory”) across various cities. And it did so on the company blog. More recently there are several other instances of careless remarks about privacy by various Uber employees, even including Kalanik. Adding to this, rumors about intentionally canceling rides to frustrate competitors, and a number of relatively isolated local level “brush fires.” Definitely a hands full for Uber’s public relations folks, who include David Plouffe, one of the leaders of the Obama campaign.
How can Uber recover from all of this? As a big fan both of of Kaladnik and of the Uber service, I hope for a speedy recovery, but fear long-lasting repercussions. The issue is less the difficulty of mending fences with the public and the press, but more the challenge of transforming an organization that caused these problems to begin with. In the end, Uber needs to stop the guerilla fights with Lyft, press, and politicians, and embrace its success. In ramping up its service across most major cities Uber already defied the odds. It succeeded in building a great service and a major brand in record time. So why not take a breath of fresh air and enjoy this major American success story? Can the organization driven by a relentless, almost fierce intensity be capable of stepping off the accelerator and live the dream it built for itself?
Perhaps most of all, Uber should take its incredible passion for execution and turn it inward. Proven by its ability to scale up a world class service and ensure consistency of quality across disparate cities and countries, Uber now needs to look inward and realign its values. More than worrying about ramping up its next city, Uber must focus on driving a culture of integrity, privacy, and customer respect across its internal organization. There is no excuse not to focus on this. Too much has been built already to mess it up by a number of careless, unnecessary mistakes.
Travis, your customers should still be your biggest fans. Help me reinstall enthusiasm in my 16-year old by driving the internal changes your organization needs. Your service will show.