Why Uber Wins

I like to talk to myself and with others in hallways, in subways, and in taxis, it’s how I make sense of my thoughts, and thinking of Uber made me recall two talks from the past.

“Driving a taxi is a stable job” said an engineer in the early 90’s, who we had rented us a house. In addition to renting houses, he and his brother had pooled their savings to buy a taxi license in Toronto. And in early 2000, while driving me home from work an engineer turned taxi driver, who had faced two layoffs early in his career, said “Technology is not going to drive a taxi”.

Were they wrong? Not really, at least not back then, but not anymore, since technology will change everything around us, with no room discrimination, when its trigger is pulled, the bullet leaves and it will mutate all that is on its way:

1. your JOB,
2. your BUSINESS, and
3. your INTEREST

You know it, and by now they have had the experience in knowing what they need to know. Yet, even today we underestimate the power of technology, not on how it gets things done, but on how it mutates everything that it becomes a part of.

Look no further, look at how it mutated the music business. Where it caught most of its executive off guard, although they had a sneak preview of what’s on the works with the introduction of electronic keyboards, they didn’t act, since it only swung the pendulum one way, but with the internet they quickly run out of time to act. May be it is to be blamed on their ignorance.

By the way, if you think by becoming an ally with technology, you could ride its waves then you need to take a closet look at the historical performance of stocks such as Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. Even these technology giants are not exempted. No wonder they have millions and billions of dollars in their cash reserves. Perhaps they too have learned their lessons. As a matter of fact, not too long ago one of them borrowed from another for its survival, and today the one which borrowed is doing much better than its lender.

When technology can challenge the technology giants, what would it take for it to challenge your business?

How do you survive? Reverting to plain old thinking, with some sticky notes, is a viable and practical option, just like how it’s done at Apple. It’s what powered today’s businesses and is also capable of altering tomorrow’s course, by getting the business to gain or lose a few pounds.

One triggers, the other fuels, and both profit, oil (energy) and technology, inseparable. There are more cars on the streets today than yesterday, and did Uber play a role? Yes, it did, hence why it is investing billions of dollars on expansion. But the larger question is how it impacts the society at large, not just the taxi drivers and their families. And furthermore, how will the dynamics change when the driverless cars from Google come into play?

No wonder in a recent interview IBM’s CEO said “this is a thinking world”. She has struck gold, and I believe she leads the pack of individuals who can shed more light in us knowing the societal impacts of emerging technologies, positive and negative alike.

For starters think of Uber not just as a company, but as a model for thinking, and when its incorporated in your line of thought with respect to your line of business the light bulbs will go on. And if doesn’t, then you are not any different from the past executives of the music business. It’s that simple.

What is more eminent today than yesterday is that the mutating power of technology increases with each step it takes forward in its evolution. Where I believe with it we will do more, and in turn we will do less tomorrow of what we do today.

Having said that, if I were to report on technology as Peter Drucker would then what we saw yesterday as the internet is just the tracks. What we see today, is a few stations and people hopping on and off the rail cars. What we will see tomorrow is the goods getting transported in large volumes in the form of intelligent business triggers. It will mutate most business models, and all models I have come across in industries such as healthcare, financial, insurance, and automotive to name a few, just like how railroads changed the entire dynamics of cities and societies.

Uber as a model in itself is a disruptor and a threat. Ask your taxi driver.

And as a society we are not far removed from its influence. The last time I checked, we pay more in personal income taxes than in corporate taxes. Which means such shift in earnings will also largely impact the bottom lines of our governments.

Knowingly or unknowingly today our governments are sandwiched between Uber and the Taxi service providers, and tomorrow they will have to deal with Uber drivers and Google. But is it the best use of their time?

Or should they be borrowing funds to invest in their tax payers? Not just to build more technologies, but most importantly to invest in finding new way to create more jobs with advancing technologies.

When it comes to technological advancement we are not at the beginning, and definitely not at the end, therefore we must be somewhere in the middle. Like they say only when you get to the middle you get to see things with clarity. And there onwards it’s not the act that matters it’s the cause and what it causes that matters. So, how do we think this through? Perhaps a question is a good starting point.

“What is the shortage? Is it jobs or people to do the jobs?”

Answer is jobs. And these jobs need to stem from what you can offer that has never been offered as an individual or as a business by tooling yourself with emerging technologies, or by offering things that were once discontinued due cost overruns.

And to get started businesses need more thinkers, who are capable of continually reinventing what a business can offer with what it has and what it can acquire, and it has to extracted from anything and everything that is part of or associates with the business. The pattern you need to deploy for such thinking is drastically different from what you might have deployed in the past, since the assembly line for thinking has changed, where you need to make room for the learning machines to increase your productivity.

And frankly, going digital is not going to cut it, since a foundation has no purpose when there is no decision on who is going to live in the house and what kind lifestyle they can afford. Furthermore when everyone is playing soccer and everyone is wearing boots how will a boot make a difference in scoring? It’s needed, but its need has to be lead by thinking, complex lifestyle changing thinking. Its nimble thinking, where nothing remains rigid, and everything has to be malleable, even the ways of thinking is not exempted.

So let’s rediscover the fun in thinking!