The Architect Mindset – Part I: Uber Might Have Been Unrecognisable
Uber, only if You Wanted a Luxury Ride!
Hopping into an Uber has become second nature for many of us.
However, not many people are aware that Uber might have driven off on an altogether different route, had Travis Kalanick, Uber’s former CEO not intervened in determining its go-to-market strategy.
Uber’s origins lay with Garett Camp, co-founder of Uber and its current Chairman, who was frustrated by his inability to find taxis in the San Francisco area. Camp, ever the consummate entrepreneur, saw a business opportunity in the problem. However, his business idea involved a buying a fleet of luxury Mercedes cars to be deployed as taxis, hire drivers, buy a parking lot and then build an app to allow for these luxury cars to be hailed.
He ran this idea by Travis Kalanick, an entrepreneur friend of his who had recently sold his company Red Swoosh.
Travis saw promise in a business idea that would solve the taxi problem plaguing big cities. However, had he gone with Camp’s solution to the problem, Uber, in the avatar that we know it today, might not have been born.
Finding Connections
Kalanick recollects how Camp called him one day saying that he had all the required paperwork for the parking lot ready and was about to invest in it. Kalanick’s keen ability to connect the dots between seemingly disparate subjects saw the folly in Camp’s idea.
Kalanick saw another problem that existed that could help solve the problem caused by taxi unavailability that plagued customers. Why buy a fleet of expensive cars, parking lots and hire drivers, each of which would need substantial investment, he mulled. There existed a nascent network of underused chauffeured luxury cars that could be matched to frustrated taxi customers. Kalanick suggested to Camp that all they needed to do was build a mobile app that connected these two communities, both interested in alleviating their respective pain points. Thus, was born the model of on-demand rides. UberCars, as it was then known, later expanded the service to include non-luxury cars too, a model that is a lot better known today.
Had Camp’s idea of creating a ride-hailing service built upon self-owned taxis and parking lots taken off, who knows if we would even have had the Uber that we know of today.
Kalanick’s ability to connect seemingly disparate phenomenon informed Uber’s strategy. Experts call this ability many things. We, at CitrusLearning, call it the Architect mindset and is much valued by the C-Suite.
The next story, based on an experience that we at CitrusLearning had with one of our clients, validates this fact.
The Big Jump!
Mohan (name changed to maintain privacy), a mid-level leader with one of India’s largest KPOs, who was recently part of one of our leadership interventions, typifies this mindset.
A professional who at that time had roughly twenty-two years of work experience, he had been chosen to be among the two individuals who would be mentored by the CEO of the organisation himself. The long-term plan, the CEO mentioned, was to have Mohan be part of the team that would counsel him on various aspects related to the business. That was in addition to working with the CEO on executing key projects.
He had earned the honour of being mentored by the CEO because he was seen to have made the ‘big jump’, as the CEO described it. In the CEO’s words, “Mohan has this ability to both analyse and synthesise. He has expertise within his domain, but he also has this unique ability to view things from a ten-thousand feet perspective, which then allows him to see how the various moving parts in the ecosystem interconnect – or need to interconnect – to form a unified whole. When it comes to me seeking insights or counsel, this kind of ability is invaluable, for it allows me to see the larger ramifications or downsides to a decision that I am making. It shows me how something that I am doing or planning to do could impact something else within the organisation. This sort of thinking is a big jump that managers need to make.”
What Exactly is The Big Jump?
The ‘big jump’ that the CEO was referring to denotes a manager’s ability to move from looking merely at things from the perspective of the function or unit that they are a part of, to the perspective of the entire organisation.
Or building upon the earlier lesson, moving away from thinking merely like a craftsman who designs and builds horse carriages, to thinking like the architect who designs how the entire transportation system in the kingdom – and consequently, how a horse carriage in that transportation system – needs to function.
It is for this reason that we label this mindset, i.e. the inclination to think about the design and working of the entire ecosystem, the Architect’s mindset.
The big jump, simply put, is moving from the craftsman’s mindset to the architect’s mindset.
We will explore what the Architect mindset looks like in the next lesson.
