A bumpy ride

The recent ouster of Travis Kalanick, the maverick founder-CEO of ride-aggregator Uber, shocked the global startup universe, especially the Silicon Valley, for myriad reasons. For one, Uber has been the poster boy of all the great things that happened in technology and business in the recent past and Kalanick is rightly revered for building a cutting-edge business virtually out of thin air and growing it into the world's richest startup, valued at about $68 billion, with presence in dozens of countries. That said, Kalanick’s ouster, under pressure from Uber’s investors, has not surprised those who have been following the new-generation gig economy company, famous for its innovative yet aggressive business model and unabashedly self-obsessed work culture. Of late, 40-year-old Kalanick as well as his eight-year-old enterprise have been embroiled in a series of controversies inviting investor ire and delivering embarrassment to shareholders. While Uber has been accused of promoting unethical, predatory business practices across the globe, Kalanick himself faced charges of being an abrasive leader. No wonder then Kalanick’s resignation reminds the business community in India of the unceremonious exit of Rahul Yadav from Housing.com. Yadav too had to give in to investors’ pressure after his aggressive, seemingly self-obsessed leadership style drew flak from regulators, clients and the public at large.

Kalanick or Yadav are no isolated examples. Thanks to the cult built around Apple founder Steve Job’s tough and uncompromising leadership, several business leaders follow what management thinkers term a ‘toxic leadership’ pattern, promoting intimidating ways that openly encourage bullying and, at times, misogyny. Rather than building an atmosphere of participatory, democratic decision-making, these leaders merrily vote for top-down, centralised leadership. As a result, they incentivise offensive and often illegal business tactics (such as circumventing transport and labour regulations in many countries) solely targeting market leadership; their success, mostly thanks to the abundance of investor money they initially enjoy, adds legitimacy to unpleasant ways of doing business, only to be cloned by peers and followers. Not surprisingly, these leaders soon find themselves in a legal and economic quagmire, as in the case of Kalanick or Yadav. On his part, Kalanick advertised such practices as innovative and deployed an army of attorneys to fight cases whenever such methods met with legal challenge.

Such business leadership concepts do not augur well for entrepreneurship in general and the gig economy in particular. It’s time some old-school discipline was brought into the leadership approaches of Gen-Y top executives. It is vital for the sustainability of innovative businesses that business leadership is democratic and the models refrain from exploiting regulatory flaws. Toxic leadership can damage the idea of enterprise. The exit of Kalanick should start a course correction.

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