You're completely eliding all the scandals and scummy behavior by various members of Uber under his watch. And while I sympathize with what his family is facing in their personal tragedy, that it occurred at the same time those various scandals came to a head is merely a coincidence in timing, if an unfortunate one for Kalanick.
Check the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph - I agree that he needed to be replaced due to the multitude of issues. I just think the execution of it was very poor coming within a week of his mother's death.
Remember, he was already "on leave" - whether he was honoring it or not. By public accounts, he wasn't. So the board said "ok, he's not going to change, let's remove him." My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk. Instead, they blindsided him at a hotel that he'd flown to halfway across the country to try to help the company (recruiting a COO) while his father's still severely injured. Had they done it in a more humane way, they might have been able to secure more cooperation in the long-term, and they could've begun to quietly get their ducks in a row during that 2-3 week grace period before giving him the ultimatum. Instead, they executed it at a moment of maximum weakness for him, which got the job done in the moment but set themselves up for him to go scorched earth in the long-term, undermining the whole exercise. Again, I do think they needed to fire him, but they'd bought a bit of time with him "going on leave" and I think it might have been more effective had they leveraged it rather than going for the immediate KO.
Perhaps we would've ended up here regardless, but maybe not.
Can we address the fact that Travis not honouring his leave was him calling for the resignation of a board member who practically personified the issues surrounding Uber at the time?
>Earlier in the day at an Uber staff meeting to discuss the company’s culture, Arianna Huffington, another board member, talked about how one woman on a board often leads to more women joining a board.
>“Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking,” Mr. Bonderman responded.
It seemed like uber was receiving weekly PR body blows up to that point. Bad stuff.
If you decide to fire somebody, does it ever make sense to wait? Not layoff, but firing an individual. If it's come to that, you pull the trigger. it's just messy, a reasonable period or mourning is different between different people and it's not clear that he was actually doing that anyways. Weeks will matter to the future valuation for the new CEO.
> My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk.
If we think that the board had not already had that talk, several times, months before... that's a sign that the board's even more incompetent.
