New Uber CEO: No more excuses for assholes

UPDATE: Nov. 7, 2017, 2:59 p.m. EST Updated with confirmation that Uber employee photos were lifted from its website.

New Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has been tasked with changing Uber's culture.

On Tuesday, he announced just how he plans to do that. It starts with tossing out the old rules—including some pushed by co-founder and now-disgraced former CEO Travis Kalanick.

"As we move from an era of growth at all costs to one of responsible growth, our culture needs to evolve. Rather than ditching everything, I’m focused on preserving what works while quickly changing what doesn’t," Khosrowshahi in a post on LinkedIn.

Among the things to go is the company's love of "toe stepping," a term popularized under Kalanick that meant anybody at any level could say just about anything they wanted. Nobody had to worry about stepping on toes.

Sounds good in practice, but Khosrowshahi has seen the downside.

"For instance, “toe-stepping” was meant to encourage employees to share their ideas regardless of their seniority or position in the company, but too often it was used as an excuse for being an asshole," he wrote.

Khosrowshahi is only a couple months into his stint leading Uber, which was left reeling by scandal over its internal culture. More than half of its executive leadership left the company after journalists uncovered a variety of morally bankrupt actions, including a culture where sexism and harassment went unpunished.

Those actions didn't come as a complete surprise. Uber grew from a small startup to a massive success thanks in part to its willingness to break rules. The company has done everything from flout local taxi laws to purposefully manipulating the platforms of competitors in an effort to attract drivers and riders to its own app.

Uber's willingness to break the rules helped turn it into a company valued in the tens of billions of dollars, but also led to the downfall of many of its top executives.

Now, Khosrowshahi is working on repairing Uber's internal problems in hopes of keeping it from flaming out. Uber had been on track to become a global power, but setbacks around the world and growing U.S. competition from Lyft have called into question whether Uber's ambitions had grown too big.

To change the company, Khosrowshahi wrote that he asked employees to help come up with "new values."

The result is a new set of "Cultural Norms" for the company.

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.

We do the right thing. Period.

We act like owners. We seek out problems and we solve them. We help each other and those who matter to us. We have a bias for action and accountability. We finish what we start and we build Uber to last. And when we make mistakes, we’ll own up to them.

We persevere. We believe in the power of grit. We don’t seek the easy path. We look for the toughest challenges and we push. Our collective resilience is our secret weapon.

We value ideas over hierarchy. We believe that the best ideas can come from anywhere, both inside and outside our company. Our job is to seek out those ideas, to shape and improve them through candid debate, and to take them from concept to action.

We make big bold bets. Sometimes we fail, but failure makes us smarter. We get back up, we make the next bet, and we go!

Most of those norms are pretty basic motivational poster stuff. The one big thing would be "We do the right thing. Period." Uber has built its business on doing anything to get ahead, period.

Of course it wouldn't be Uber without just a little controversy. USA Today reporter Jessica Guynn asked on Twitter where Uber got the photos of people that topped Khosrowshahi's post. Another Twitter users responded with a website that appeared to have the same photos available as stock art.

Uber's "comms" Twitter account responded that the people in the pictures are Uber employees, but that they're looking into why their photos appeared on another website.

The photos were confirmed to have been lifted off of Uber's website.

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