Khosrowshahi: Turnarounds demand painful personnel changes to establish seriousness
Dara Khosrowshahi · How great cultures are built and rebuilt | Masters of Scale · Aug 17, 2023 · at 10:51
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi discusses management turnarounds and organizational culture on a panel at the Masters of Scale Summit.
0:00 / 0:08exact quote · 8.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The minute when you actually make painful changes is when the organization in a turnaround knows you're dead serious.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Dara Khosrowshahi
Khosrowshahi: Culturally misaligned top performers become destructive as companies scale
“If the smartest person in the organization isn't aligned with you culturally, that can actually be pretty dangerous. And so as an organization grows, you make allowances certainly for your most talented people. But if from a cultural standpoint, they're not al…”
Khosrowshahi: Uber's early scale fostered a confrontational, rule-breaking culture
“The radical scale success of Uber that was unprecedented at the time, I think led to a culture that was highly confident, A culture that was confrontational, a culture that to some extent celebrated breaking the rules, all of which made possible what Uber buil…”
Khosrowshahi: Uber had to fix internal culture, not its PR strategy
“Listen, we don't have a PR problem. We've got an us problem. Like, first we have to fix ourselves, how we act, who we promote, etc. Then the PR can follow, because ultimately, especially in this world, the substance always comes out. You can't pretend anymore.”
Dara Khosrowshahi: Crowdsourcing culture yields average, indistinct opinions
“Because, you know, if you crowdsource, if you get the average of 20,000 people what their opinions are, you kind of get to the average opinion.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber pulled out of Barcelona because regulations protected taxicabs over consumers
“We pulled out of Barcelona just because we fundamentally disagree with something that the city government did. It was designed to protect taxicabs versus consumers, and when that happens, we won't do business there”
Khosrowshahi: Crowdsourcing company culture yields average, non-distinct opinions
“Because, you know, if you crowdsource, if you get the average of 20,000 people what their opinions are, you kind of get to the average opinion. You're not getting, you know, the really juicy stuff what makes you different.”