Uber’s boardroom can lead to a culture turnaround

The last thing Uber needs right now is to have anyone recount their recent setbacks, but the company’s quick, Icarus-like fall from grace tells us much about how tech companies going through hyper growth can go wrong.

By 2016, the ride-sharing tech firm was a segment leader, present in 570 cities worldwide and with 12,000 employees.  Yet, just since the beginning of the year, Uber’s company culture, marked by “sharp elbows,” has rapidly become a liability.

First there was the video of CEO and founder Travis Kalanick chewing out one of the company’s own drivers. The latest and biggest blowup has been lawsuits alleging a toxic company culture of sexual harassment.

The key is to preserve the great parts of the culture that drove their market leadership; relentless focus on results, and now augment the culture for their larger scale (i.e. add an appropriate level of processes and gender rebalance).

The past few weeks saw attempts to clean up the company’s...