And yet- as much as I'd like to be wrong, as much as I wish it were different, their investors don't care (except one wrote a medium.com post), their board doesn't care, and their business will most likely survive this short blip and continue as before. In 6 months, will this dustup matter?
There are two basic allegations in Fowler's blog post:
1. There is a horrifying amount of sexual harassment going on at Uber, far more than you'd expect from "a large organization will eventually hire some people who are douchebags," and that sexual harassment is institutionally tolerated at least.
2. Uber has a management culture of politics, infighting, and undercutting each other.
From a moral perspective, #1 is a bigger deal than #2. But from a bloodless amoral "can we get our money out of Uber" perspective, I'd expect investors to be much more concerned about #2.
#1 is pretty easy to deal with. Fire a dozen people in a high profile way, re-instruct HR, and then probably even if you have two dozen (or more) sexual harassers still in your organization, they will be good enough about hiding their tracks that you'll be able to go long enough for the furor to die down. And since large numbers of people just don't want to sexually harass other people, even if they're given lots of opportunity, you probably won't have to fire such large numbers of people that your organization will trip up.
#2 on the other hand: If that culture really is pervasive throughout the management, then they'll have driven all the non-political managers away. What do you do about that? You can't fire everyone between your execs and your ICs. You can't survive long-term with a management culture of backstabbing and empire building -- especially when you're trying to go through a super painful and disciplined process of weaning your company off multi-billion-dollar expenses towards a very distant line of profitability.
I don't think #1 is as easy to deal with as you may think. In any other normal company, sexual harassment normally stems from isolated individuals, or at worst a particular department.
But from Fowlers account, it sounds like the culture is well and truly embedded through the whole company. Heck, even HR is burying the issue.
Company culture (what is enabling both #1 and #2 issues) is established by the CEO and board through what they explicitly and implicitly (through omission of action) allow. That means, the problem is at the CEO-level - that's not an easy problem to solve.
Sure you can fire the CEO ... but now #1 is as big a concern to investors as #2.
