I don't know about you, but if I was in his shoes coming in trying to fix a company with a compromised integrity like this, I would be making it very clear to the employees on day 1 that anyone who continued the same old crap or showed similarly questionable judgment (whether to the company's benefit or otherwise) would be fired instantly, end of story. I'd bet that would change things mighty quick. And I don't think this is the only solution either. So yeah, I think it's very doable if the CEO is serious about it, and he very much seems to be. I'm more than open to see evidence to the contrary, but until then, I think it's quite wrong and unfair to assume they would be continuing their previous practices.
Culture is much harder to change than you're making it out to be. The employees are not his subjects that can be bossed around and ordered to behave in a certain manner. That's old school management thinking (from 50+ years ago) that's very ineffective.
The culture is one of the hardest things to change once it has been established. It prevents companies from entering certain market segments; from competing in certain ways; from taking certain actions. In a large company, it's so difficult to change, that it's easier and more effective to establish groups outside of the company to pursue new initiatives.
For example, this is the reason why AWS is separated from the retail segment inside amazon. Why Walmart won't compete with Nordstrom. And why large companies regularly create subsidiaries to innovate on new ideas or pursue new market segments (and they're often established off-site, so the corporations culture doesn't carry over).
GM makes a great example about how difficult that can be. They spent billions on Saturn as an experiment to build a new car company. Later they tried to integrate Saturns success into GM by adopting their culture and other practices... but it didn't matter what the management wanted... Saturn died and GM didn't change. Saturn's culture didn't infect GM--GM successfully killed a culture that tried to change them, even after seeing the success of Saturn.
> The employees are not his subjects that can be bossed around and ordered to behave in a certain manner. That's old school management thinking (from 50+ years ago) that's very ineffective.
Why the false dichotomy? How is telling your employees "you will be fired for lack of integrity" equal to "bossing them around"? This is quite the straw-man and it undermines the rest of your points for me. It's not like the only 2 options out there are to order people around like your servants or let them do whatever illegal hell they want. He could be strict about the red lines on integrity without ordering them around like his servants with regards to general management. Why do you make it seem like the only possibilities are the extremes?
What is "lack of integrity"? It can't be defined granularly enough by a CEO. He can make an example of some particularly egregious behavior--and that does help--but there are millions of small decisions that happen every day.. and the employees will need to decide if each of those actions represents a "lack of integrity" or not. And the truth is, they already have some practices, that they aren't going to question unless directly prompted to do so. Just as you repeat numerous rituals and habits regularly--you don't reexamine them until something forces you to.
What this means is that the CEO cannot order everyone to behave with integrity. They must be convinced of what integrity is, what type of behavior that represents, etc. So that when they make these small decisions, they are consistent with the culture the CEO is trying to create.
You can't order them to behave with integrity--because that's so vague as to be meaningless. Everyone will make up their own definition of integrity, and it'll always fit so they turn out to be right.
So I don't see the false dichotomy... There's no order a CEO can give that will change the culture in the way you describe (at least not in a large company like Uber).
(I think it's worth pointing out that the people inside of Uber who made the bad decisions likely didn't see them as bad or wrong. Their mission and culture supported those decisions, and they believe them to be right. So when you say 'behave with integrity'... that's meaningless, because they believed they were right when they made the wrong decision initially. They were already acting with what they believed to be integrity.)
Yeah, it's impossible to define it. But thankfully, you don't have to unambiguously define ethics and integrity for all of humanity and posterity to get somewhere useful. We're not writing probably correct algorithms here, we're dealing with humans. Some linear combination of "something illegal", "something you don't want landing on the New York times next to your name", "I know it when I see it", and "if this still isn't clear for you, you test me at your own risk" would be sufficient to take care of it: either they'll figure it out by themselves or they'll find out the hard way.
The clarity of that rule only exists in your head. Each person will draw the line differently, assess the risk differently, etc. Saying "I'll know it when I see it" does not result in a culture change. That just results in the CEO randomly enforcing his rule when he finds out about something he doesnt like.
Again, like I said, it doesn't need more clarity than however clear or vague it is at the moment. Either people will figure out how to stay away from the gray area and whatever they understand your red line to be, or they won't and will instead have to find out the hard way. Your mere assertion that this won't work isn't any more convincing than mine that it will work.
Well actually in management it is well known that your method wont work. There's a history of your approach, a lot of research and things we've learned from corrupt corporations, etc and there's a reason it's not used anymore. History, methods, purpose etc of corporate culture is quite interesting, and I fully encourage you to read more about if it interests you. Uber's new CEO has a monumental task ahead of him.
You're arguing they deserve the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. Most people seem to feel they've done enough damage that it's on Uber to prove they're worthy of trust.
