Newspeak
Workplace culture begins at the top.
Watching the slow-motion car crash that is Uber’s annus horribilis — its distastrous year — we’ve all had time to reflect on the company’s culture. Now that Travis Kalanick, Uber’s hard-charging, trash-talking, regulation-flouting CEO, has been shown the door and given fewer than five stars, we can see that the culture he created can be blamed for his company’s woes.
Tech firms didn’t invent company culture, but they did elevate it to a selling point. When you’re offering essentially identical products — cloud storage, smart phones, ride-sharing services — you distinguish yourself by promoting the values within your company as your secret sauce. What elevated Google above AltaVista? Besides slightly better tech, it was the company’s culture, which was summed up in its early days with the motto “Don’t Be Evil.”
Uber’s culture under Kalanick could be summed up as “Don’t Be Deterred.” Nothing — not rules, propriety, or decency — should stop the company’s will to power.
Unlike Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who’s currently roaming the country assimilating data and spreading good cheer like a friendly extraterrestrial, Kalanick styled himself a wrestling “heel” like Jake “The Snake” Roberts or “Rowdy” Roddy Piper.
It’s easy to forget that despite its monstrous valuation and Kleenex-level linguistic product placement, Uber has only been around since 2009. Since its founding, the company has been in hot water for mistreating drivers, threatening to leak information about journalists, getting around city ordinances with something called “grayballing,” and fostering a culture of rampant sexual harassment, among other accusations.
All of that can be blamed on its culture. After a former engineer named Susan Fowler detailed sexual discrimination and harassment within the company, the New York Times reported that a manager had groped a co-worker’s breasts and another threatened to beat someone with a baseball bat. At most companies that sort of behavior would be grounds for dismissal: Until very recently, that was just Uber being Uber.
Sometimes when I think about Uber, I’m reminded of Slytherin, the “bad” house from the Harry Potter series where “cunning folks use any means to achieve their ends.” Potter fans may argue that Slytherin’s residents aren’t all bad, but like Uber, its culture suggests moral flexibility verging on wickedness.
A company’s culture begins at the top. The values of its founders imbue the entire operation with his or her beliefs, quirks and, inevitably, flaws.
Why is Apple defined by perfection, its hardware and operating system hermetically sealed “walled gardens”? Because of Steve Jobs, whose adoptive father told him to paint the backside of a fence to “show that you're dedicated to making something perfect,” according to biographer Walter Isaacson. Why is Amazon, another company with a rough-shod culture, hellbent on controlling all retail on earth (and possibly space)? Because of Jeff Bezos, who originally wanted to host his “everything store” at the URL relentless.com, prompting the Economist to quip, “if it was a little lacking in touchy-feeliness, it captured the ambition nicely.”
Like Kalanick, Uber is not here to make friends. If the Nietzsche fanboy name he chose didn’t signal as much, the culture Kalanick created at his company reflected someone who saw himself as beyond good and evil. In the end, his downfall exposed him as human — all too human.