When CEOs join their employees in the trenches it can translate to considerable gains in productivity for their companies. But Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi took the idea to a whole new level when he literally took the wheel and became one of his company’s drivers for several months. It began as an effort to understand the experiences of drivers during the pandemic, but the experiment eventually forced Khosrowshahi to “reexamine every single assumption that we’ve made.”
“I think that the industry as a whole, to some extent, has taken drivers for granted,” Khosrowshahi said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Friday. Since Uber was founded in 2009, its goal was to offer passengers a seamless riding experience, according to Khosrowshahi, who succeeded Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick as CEO in 2017, even if sometimes that goal came at the expense of drivers.
