Uber Strategy and Culture

Uber Strategy and Culture

The article we chose to analyze was a story from The Economist titled “Uber is facing the biggest crisis in its short history”. Uber has had a meteoric rise since the company began in 2009, and while they face challenges, they seem poised to emerge as the leading autonomous ride provider in North America.

The strategic challenges that Uber face can be broken down into 2 areas of concern.

Culture

Up until the middle of last year, Uber’s culture could best be described as one of team work. A small business that thought that it could do the taxi game better than taxi companies, meant that Uber started very small with a very well understood culture that similar to Starbucks, identifies employees as partners.

At the beginning of 2017, 3 things happened that caused outsiders to have a long hard look at Uber’s business practices and the internal running of the company. First, and most damaging, in a blog post, a former employee wrote about how her sexual harassment allegations were ignored by Uber HR. Secondly Jeff Jones, Uber CEO left the company after 6 months because he felt that ““the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber.” ^ other executives left under similar circumstances with some having only been in their positions for as little as 3 months.

Lastly, Travis Kalanick was caught on tape arguing with a driver about fare cuts which when the tape was published online, looked terrible for Kalanick.

While the culture of Uber had always been one of measured confrontation and aggression, this seems to have led to the issues that Uber had with sexual harassment and other cultural issues. In the middle of 2017, Former Attorney General Eric Holder made cultural recommendations to Uber in the wake of their sexual harassment issues. They were internalized by the company and resulted in Uber’s new “Cultural Norms” statement released at the end of 2017.

Uber’s Cultural Norms

We build globally, we live locally. We harness the power and scale of our global operations to deeply connect with the cities, communities, drivers and riders that we serve, every day.

We are customer obsessed. We work tirelessly to earn our customers’ trust and business by solving their problems, maximizing their earnings or lowering their costs. We surprise and delight them. We make short-term sacrifices for a lifetime of loyalty.

We celebrate differences. We stand apart from the average. We ensure people of diverse backgrounds feel welcome. We encourage different opinions and approaches to be heard, and then we come together and build.