*Hubert Horan: Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Twenty-One: Mike Isaac’s ** **Book Ignores Economics and Financial Results and Gets the Uber ** **Story Almost Entirely Wrong* /By Hubert Horan, who has 40 years of experience in the management and // //regulation of transportation companies (primarily airlines). Horan has no // //financial links with any urban car service industry competitors, investors // //or regulators, or any firms that work on behalf of industry participants/ One of the recurring themes of this series has been the poor quality of Uber coverage in the mainstream business and tech press. On September 3rd, Mike Isaac, who has been covering Uber for the New York Times since 2014, published Super Pumped! The Battle For Uber.[1] Isaac’s central argument is that Uber is a fundamentally successful company that was nearly undone by ‘[CEO Travis] Kalanick’s boundary-pushing behavior, unabashed pugnacity, and eventually, the CEO’s own personal decline.” (p. xviii). “Uber was the unicorn to end all unicorns” (p. 6), with the potential to “drag the entire transportation industry out of the analog world and into the digital one” (p. 64). Uber represented the “best and worst of Silicon Valley” (p.xviii). It was “a company worth tens of billions of dollars that succeeded in changing the way we move through the world, yet nearly destroyed itself in a bonfire of bad behavior, ugly decisions, and greed” (p. xx) and provides a cautionary tale “about how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong” and threaten the survival of “a multi-billion dollar empire.” (p. xix). The misogyny and rest of the bonfire of bad behavior directly reflected Kalanick’s personality, and became rampant because Kalanick prevented the Board from exercising normal discipline and control. Isaac argues that Uber was brought back from the depths of its 2017 crises when key Board members realized “Uber didn’t have an image problem, it had a Travis problem” (p.235) and began to assert their role as the adults in the room, initiating the “Battle for Uber”. When an outside investigation led by former Attorney General Eric Holder produced damming findings, the Board forced Kalanick’s resignation as CEO. Since his hiring, new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has worked to “systematically undo nearly everything his predecessor had stood for.” (p. 331) Every component of Isaac’s argument is wrong. [...] continua qui: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-p...