Be Great, Be You: Building Character and Resilience for Organizations of Future | Jean Liu

Thank you Margaret for the kind introduction. Hi everyone, happy Women's Day. It's quite inspiring to join a community of women in data science, and it's an honor to share our story here.

Before everything, I can't help wondering: why do we have a community for women in data science but not men? And why do we celebrate Women's Day but not Men's? So I guess the biggest assumption here is women's perspective needs to be addressed more, and which I totally agree with. So while men have a lot of great qualities for us to admire, women offer some very nice perspectives that can help contribute to resilient organizations and build a better society. And the two key words that's on my mind that I want to share with everyone today is empathy and authenticity. By referring to authenticity, I'm here referring to the power of vulnerability.

First, I want to talk about empathy. And as an organization, we learned this in the hard way. We are young tech, and we have always felt that we are this confident and determined superhero, if you will, that we're solving the world's challenges. We're solving the world's transportation problem. And started in year 2012 as a taxi-hailing app, we didn't just limit our vision. We see in big cities how hard it is for people to commute, to go home, to go to work, how jammed the roads are, and how polluted the air is. So we have this dream: we want to fix the world's transportation problem and make every ride better, and make the cities more beautiful. And that's something that excites us every day here, and it keeps us moving.

And after years of effort, we have become the world's largest mobility and local services platform, offering over 10 billion trips a year worldwide. And we did make every ride more convenient, more efficient than before. And on this platform, we're the largest EV charging network, and 25% of the EVs are running on this network. In short, we felt good about ourselves until year 2018.

Two tragic safety incidents happened on this network that completely changed us. After a period of painful soul-searching, we realized we didn't really understand what business we're in. We were overly obsessed by the percentage point that we improve every day on all aspects, like on efficiency aspect, on safety aspect. However, we overlooked the damage of one extreme case, and we overlooked the dark side of humanity. And we learned transportation is not just about technology and big data, but also about individuals and lives. And we learned it in a very hard way.

And we learned that by being this confident and determined superhero cannot solve everything. We need lots of empathy, lots of empathy to understand who are the people we are really serving, to connect with them. That can help us to be who we really want to be. So we did a few things.

We invited hundreds of thousands of users and drivers into our own town halls to share their concerns. We went to different companies to study their safety standards. Went to airline companies, taxi companies, petrochemical companies, food companies. We even went to McDonald's. And when we expanded internationally, we remind ourselves we can't cookie-cut everything because every market has their own needs, and we truly respect the local users. So we tailor-make our product and service for different markets.

And we also made a very tough decision for an internet company. We switched from the traditional, classical, light internet model to a hybrid online and offline model. So in different cities, we set up the ground team for safety, for crisis management first, for service. And that completely changed our cost structure. However, we think that's for the longer good. And lastly, we're even more committed in technology. We keep investing in autonomous driving because we think that's the ultimate solution to kill all the road accidents.

So after trying everything, the results have been very promising. We have launched over 300 product features for safety, and the internal safety incidents got lowered 80%. But we know this is not just the end. It's the beginning.

And the second lesson we have learned is to be more open and authentic. After the incident, we faced a huge public scrutiny, which was suffocating, to be honest. And one day, our engineering head, a very cool guy, I like him a lot, he came to my office and said, 'Jean, can we just not listen to those voices? Can we just focus on what we're doing and give us one year's time, and we will fix everything.' And I totally understand him. Everyone wants others to think we are capable, we are perfect. And when we don't have a solution, the natural tendency is to escape from scrutiny and do the things that we consider right.

However, the fact is nobody is perfect. And the challenge we're facing is so complex. We're facing the darkness of humanity. There are so many problems that we couldn't figure out ourselves. So we need to open up and invite those voices, and we need to show our vulnerability and be the authentic self, so we can engage more people to come in and help us. And that's what we did.

So instead of pulling our own hair inside of the office and trying to figure out what's the best policies to set up for the platform, we actually created online forums to invite passengers and drivers and users in. And there are a lot of very sensitive topics. For example, shall we set up video or audio recording function inside of the car for safety purpose? And how do we handle data issues? Can drunk passengers, can underage ride by themselves? In the old days, we may think in the office by ourselves and think we'll present a perfect solution to everyone, just like a superhero. But after all these, we learned this should be a community co-design project because it involves everyone.

And also, when we face complaints, we did something very different. Of course, as a service company, we have lots of complaints from our users, and even from our internal staff, as the management, to be honest. And we did a very controversial way. We did something called 'Live Roast Show.' It sounds scary, right? It was scary because it was a live talk show that in front of hundreds of thousands of people, we invite our passengers and users to come to openly laugh at our silly policy or our mistaken algorithms, and for our young staff to laugh at management issues.

To be honest, it was painful for me, and I even got complaints from our staff that I call for too many meetings and I speak for too long. So today I need to mind myself, don't speak for too long. But everyone else seemed to have a good time. I think it was worth it, and I do think that's the most creative and effective way to really let the sharpest and most honest opinions out. And looking back, we think we did the right thing, and everyone here at DiDi becomes more courageous and confident.

Because we see when we show our vulnerability, when we are open, when we invite people to come in, we see more kindness from our users, we see more help from our users, and that was extremely rewarding. And that makes this organization more resilient, because no organization is strong and perfect from the very beginning. We need our users to come in and help us together. And that also got us through COVID-19. Because at the end of 2019, our business went back to the peak again. However, in two months' time when COVID came, we lost 80% of our business. But we didn't panic. We were resilient. We are a resilient organization now. So everyone stayed together and fought through this. And now the business is back to peak, and more importantly, everyone here is more committed and passionate and more confident about the mission we have: making every ride better and making our cities more beautiful.

Indeed, we have a DiDi Women's Network. The slogan is 'Be Great, Be You,' which is a platform we try to encourage career women. And a lot of times, I got young girls coming to my office and asked me, 'Hey Jean, how have you grown into you today? Can you give me some tips?' And I honestly share with them: I'm just a normal working woman, and I have a lot of my own struggles. Like I always feel I'm the socially awkward person. It's hard for me to find topics in social events. I think a lot of girls experience that. And I constantly feel guilty that I don't have enough time with my three young kids. And even every breakfast, I struggle between whether I should have another piece of chocolate muffin or controlling my weight.

My point is, I'm just a normal person. But I do believe normal people can create greater good, just like the women drivers on our platform. They're single moms, they're retired chefs, you know, they try to support their family. They have patients at home, they have young kids at home. But they all try to do something, and when they face challenges, they didn't really back off. They actually stand up and face those challenges. So everyone can be, you know, at the same time vulnerable but resilient, and at the same time empathetic and confident. I do believe the greatness comes from normal people. And for women's journey, you know, from a young girl to a career woman to a mom, all these experiences expand us and wake us up, and makes us more resilient, makes us more empathetic, authentic. The world is full of uncertainties ahead, and I do believe with these qualities, we can rise through the cycles together, and we will make a very different history. Thank you, happy Women's Day.