There is an ongoing debate in the world of sports, as to whether marketing and success is about the team, or about the celebrity power of individual star athletes. Years ago the NFL made the decision it was about the team. The NBA very consciously made the opposite decision. That individual stars were the key to success.Without collusion or even a formal meeting, it certainly appears that Silicon Valley, long ago, made the decision that companies often rise or fall on individual celebrities, and their power to sell, market and capture the public imagination.
Steve Jobs of course remains the penultimate example. So to is Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick. The problem is that in the case of Kalanick, that image is tarnished. This is the world we are going to look at with the executive editor of Fortune, Adam Lashinsky. He's just written Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
.My conversation with Adam Lashinsky:
