Khosrowshahi: Uber crowdsourced new cultural norms directly from employees
Dara Khosrowshahi · Uber’s Dara Khosrowshahi: Bringing a culture back from the brink | Masters of Scale · Nov 10, 2023 · at 24:38
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi describes how leadership overhauled Uber's corporate culture by soliciting values and themes from employees across the company.
0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So we crowdsourced, actually, from our employees. What do you think should represent the culture of Uber going forward? There were some themes that came to the surface. As a team, then, we got together, and we picked the themes that we thought were the most relevant themes, and we created what we call our new cultural norms, the uber-tut-auto cultural norms.”
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: Turnarounds demand painful personnel changes to establish seriousness
“The minute when you actually make painful changes is when the organization in a turnaround knows you're dead serious.”
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”