Welcome to the Monthly Newsletter by Amer Kaissi
Edition #1, November 2019
For this first edition of «Leaders are Readers,» I would like to share with you the recently published «Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber» by Mike Isaac. Isaac is a technology reporter for the New York Times. His coverage on Uber’s leadership and culture won the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business reporting.
«Super Pumped» is not your typical leadership book. Rather, it is the interesting and bizzare story of Uber and its ambitious but arrogant founder Travis Kalanick. The main leadership lesson leadership is that not matter how fast the growth or how good the product is, a poisonous leadership style will always result in a toxic organizational culture that will backfire.
The leadership style of Kalanick was characterized by winning at all costs, ignoring rules and regulations, competing not just to gain market share but to humiliate the competitors, disrespecting & harassing women and severely underpaying drivers. Kalanick was brash, promoted a male chauvinist “bro-culture”, considered HR rules an afterthought, once referred to his company as “boo-ber” because it allowed him to attract women, and berated on camera an Uber driver who dared to confront him about Uber’s decreasing pay rates. While Uber’s product was loved by all, Kalanik’s narcissistic personality impacted the brand so negatively that Uber lost $20 billion in its market valuation due to his behaviors. The board ousted him in 2017.
«Super Pumped» illustrates that self-centered jerks like Kalanick can create great start-ups and lead them to unprecedented growth, but long-term success will not come unless there are humble, caring leaders at the top. As Kalanick himself admitted towards the end of his reign, Uber had grown exponentially but the company and its leaders did not “grow up.”
If you like these types of books, you have to check out “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup” on the story of Elizabeth Holmes and her fraudulent blood-testing company Theranos. Very similar themes of ambition, narcissism and deception run in these two books, although Holmes took lies and fraud to an even higher level than Kalanick.
I hope you enjoyed this edition. Every month, I will share with you one leadership or management book that I have read, and tell you what I learned from it. Please invite your colleagues and friends to sign up.
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Dr. Amer Kaissi is a Leadership Keynote Speaker and a workplace culture and high-performance teams’ expert.
