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The disruption mindset often comes with a bunch of attitudes and assumptions that say it's OK to behave badly.
It isn't. And more importantly, for disrupters, that kind of behaviour will seriously undermine your business in the long term. Disruption is often ugly. It might be fun to revel in it, but when the disruption is over you're going to need people to like you. That's hard; you should work on that on the way up – not just when you're big. I used to work with Microsoft at the height of its pomp. Uber reminds me of it. Brilliant at execution, very certain, very determined, but not good at the softer, more ambiguous stuff it's going to have to face longer term. Not good at empathy.
We once marched up to Redmond and told Microsoft's people that it might help its business if it was popular and liked. They didn't buy it. They said they thought it was enough – better, in fact – to be respected and feared. They were wrong, but I can understand why they'd think that. The whole market hung on Microsoft's every move; people without computers were buying copies of Windows 95 because it felt so necessary. It owned the desktop; it owned computing.
When you're looking at the world from that position, you think it's enough to have the best people, to build great products, to be the most competitive. Why worry about the fluffier stuff? Then the internet destroys your monopoly and the Department of Justice sues you. Then you'd like to be liked. Then you realise that there's not just markets and efficiency, there's also what people perceive to be decent, and regulators and politics and "public opinion".
I get the impression that right now, Uber is burning with the self-righteous joy of being world-class executors and basking in the glow of customers who love the convenience and the service, of drivers who like the freedom and of pundits and investors who think that Uber is "how the future will work".
People love the convenience and the service, but do they actually love Uber? What happens when it has bust open the civic monopolies and created room for other competitors? It won't be the only company ever to solve those problems; it won't always be uniquely convenient. Then it'll realise that being trusted and liked wins you loyalty and gets you a price premium. Treating the people who work for you only as units of deployable resource lets you build great, scalable systems, but as soon as they can, those people will move elsewhere. Same with your customers.
Uber was built in a WEIRD place, one of the WEIRDest places on Earth. Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic. WEIRD is a term invented by social scientists who realised that most social-science assumptions are tested on the WEIRD (normally US college students) and then taken to be true. It turns out that many of the eternal verities of social science don't hold in the rest of the world. I bet the rest of the world is equally non-WEIRD when it comes to overturning their civic infrastructure. Some countries are a bit fonder of their public transport, of their labour unions, of their traffic laws. They just have a different sense of what's right.
Its errors over privacy and surge-pricing are fundamentally failures of empathy. It's easy, for instance, to see regulation as bureaucratic nonsense to be slashed through or ignored. Some of it probably is. But some of it expresses a long-established rough consensus about a social contract. You can't just bust through that and expect everyone to be grateful afterwards.
It has found a problem and it is solving it well and aggressively. But inevitably, over the long haul, you need some goodwill in the bank with your customers, your networks, your regulators, your community, and the public. That sustains a price premium and it gets you through bad times. There will be bad times. I bet the people in charge now aren't worrying about that because they don't plan on being there in the long term. That's a shame.
Uber is the standard bearer for a particular form of disruption, which is making it famous and getting it news. It's also making the company a lightning rod for all the ugly aspects of that disruption. It probably doesn't care. It should. Ryanair used to think being disruptive was enough, and having really low prices meant you could afford to be rude. It's now learning to its cost that this is not true.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
