Robin Chase, Zipcar, and an Inconvenient Discovery: Leading Organizations

Case Study

Paulina Torres Bejar

Quantic School of Business & Technology
July 12, 2020

Starting a business is always hard but for Robin Chase; Zipcar Founder and an autonomous
leader who knew her strengths and how to influence people and relying on her team was
the key that drove her to a successful startup idea. Not only has she used her charisma and
value-based leadership to inspire people around her vision, but also, as an emergent leader
and her team-oriented leadership skills helped her to encouraged her team members and
stakeholders to develop a new business model new to the market as her idea was to
contribute to a common good; help the community reducing transit and the possibility for
every citizen to drive a car easily and very possible, the problem that she was facing during
the early stages of the company, was almost the most common problem any entrepreneur
deals with, lack of experiences in the industry but even though she knew several ideas and
similar projects to Zipcar failed in the past, she kept loyal to her idea and defended it
building two strong teams, an inside team known as her project team and an advisory team,
also known as her consultants.

Personal strengths and weaknesses determine how leaders will perform in their careers,
and it influences the way a company is managed. In the following chart, there’s an
evaluation of Robin Chase’s leadership style, through a strengths and weaknesses analysis.

STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES
• Inspire people around a vision, creating • She knew very little about the new
a passion among them to perform. industry she was entering
• Trust in her team • Limited pricing skills
and Invited to join the company if the • She came up with several pricing
person shares the same philosophy, perspectives that made the business
values and business vision model confusing
• Intellectual Honesty • As a leader, she should know that not
• Trust her intuition all projects success, it is always a
• Self-awareness possibility of failure, so resilience is an
• Networking and enthusiasm by selling important skill she was missing at the
her idea beginning
• Excellent communications with her
team
• Visionary
The strengths she has as a leader helped her to build a strong company culture, she knew
since the beginning that Zipcar has to be founded no only to help people to move easily by
driving a car but also, she had an environmental vision for her project. Chase’s hiring
philosophy of knowing that people are skilled at what do and also, she was very encouraging
when it came to educating her team members about what Zipcar was hoping to accomplish,
construing a strong mission for the startup in its early stages, because since the very
beginning Chase had it very clear on how she wanted to develop her project and her brand,
she wanted to transmit the importance of the process to every stakeholder, team members,
subscribers.

Every leader has weaknesses and understanding their own and learning how to manage it,
is important to drive the company to a success path. Through the early begging of Zipcar, a
weakness was identified as she wasn’t sure if it was the right time to launch the project and
even though she has any dates to meet and without the technology, she wanted to launch
the service with, and this led her to be unsure on the pricing strategy, she was very
enthusiast but she must have built resilience and knew that the project might have had
possibilities of failing at any stage.

How I would have differed from Chase´s decision? I will wait until the project has stronger
pricing analysis and try a beta first with the technology it requires, but, understandably, she
felt under pressure by delivering it to demonstrate the state that the project was what she
sold to every stakeholder but if in the case the project has to be launched because we
couldn’t meet the date, I would have said this was a Beta and we need to rebuild the price
strategy, we apologize and the affected customers will be rewarded somehow.

A key to success is the ability to be intellectually honest about the state of the company i,
and a bright way and how would I managed to deal with this problem as a CEO, is by telling
the customers the truth, but would a fee modification alarm customers? of course, it can
happen that some of them will get angry and cancel the service because they already
subscribe with the fair you first settled, but you are accepting the mistake and redesigning
the pricing strategy to meet the company’s financials KPI’s, attracting more costumers and
little by little gaining trust again, no one is free of committing mistakes but to keep on track
in business you must react quickly and come clean to the clients is a great idea.

An example of this situation is, I would have a team backed with all my employees to design
a team strategy with an apology approach to the customer telling that the service has to be
upgraded and the price has to lift to maintain the company alive to keep giving them a
perfect customer experience, but it will be ensured that this customer loyalty will be
rewarded in the future with some incentives for example free miles, coupons, once the
company has settled in the market. The consequences of not acting quickly with a response
like this would have led the company to a fail ending as a scam and it would be very difficult
to take it out form this client’s perception.
An example of this situation is, I would have team backed with all my employees to design
a team strategy with an apology approach to the customer telling that the service has to be
upgraded and the price has to lift to maintain the company alive in order to keep giving
them a perfect customer experience, but it will be ensured that this customer loyalty will
be rewarded in the future with some incentives for example free miles, coupons, once the
company has settled in the market. The consequences of not acting quickly with a response
like this, would have led the company to a fail ending as a scam and it would be very difficult
to take it out form this client’s perception.

i[1] Tarang Shah and Sheetal Shah, “Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and
Build Billion-Dollar Successes,” in Venture Capitalists at Work: How VCs Identify and Build
Billion-Dollar Successes (New York, NY: Apress, 2011), 1.