How is the world going to look like in 5 to 10 years?
Unfortunately the average Joe doesn’t ask himself this question. Rather, people go about their daily lives without putting any thought as to how their lives will be different in the future. This includes people working in service industries like transportation; such as taxi drivers.
It is no secret that Uber is overtaking taxis in most every market it enters, so not surprisingly last week Uber CEO Travis Kalanick got heckled by a couple of people while doing an interview with Stephen Colbert. The heckling part got cut out, but you can watch the interview below where he responds to those questions:
Unfortunately there is a good, bad and ugly side to innovation.
The good is that innovation is a better future delivered. But, sometimes that future doesn’t make sense for people who’s livelihoods depend on the status-quo. They cling to the certainty with which they live; rigidity, standing by old ideas, is one of the deadly sins of human nature.
But, innovation will eliminate their jobs, most of which are in the lower wage spectrum, the majority of the population; that’s the ugly side of innovation.
For those that use “disruption” to describe a company that wants to displace an existing industry, understand that disruption is not about slaying giants but about serving new customers. In the case of the taxi industry, new customers are people who own their cars.
Though people believe that entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick are out to deliberately create companies that put them out of jobs, they are not. It’s not Uber’s fault. The truth is Uber is part of a larger set of patterns – the internet, social networks and mobility – that in combination enable anyone with a car to become someone’s personal taxi. Call it the on-demand economy or whatever, the bottom line is this is going to be the future; and it’s just getting started.
As Kalanick asked during the interview, do you want to be part of the future, or do you want to resist the future?
Bottom line: The internet will disrupt every known industry, no one will be spared. Which means that every business will be a digital business or a dead business; adapt or die.