美国国家公共电台 NPR Can Arianna Huffington Save Uber?

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Uber is in a crisis. This week, the ride-sharing company's president resigned after just six months on the job. Morale 1 has been shaken following a damning account of sexual harassment 2. The board is so concerned about the CEO's ability to lead, they're looking for a number two to help steer 3 the company. And now, in a curious plot twist, media mogul Arianna Huffington is emerging as chief of Uber's campaign for a, quote, "culture change." Here's NPR's Aarti Shahani.

AARTI SHAHANI, BYLINE 4: Uber decided 5 to hold a conference call on Tuesday, a press briefing.

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON: Thank you everyone for joining us this afternoon. I'm Arianna Huffington. And I joined Uber's board of directors a year ago.

SHAHANI: Huffington is Uber's only female board member. And she is leader of this call.

HUFFINGTON: The purpose of this call is not to create yet more headlines.

SHAHANI: During this last year, Uber employees tell NPR, Huffington has not been a high-profile presence at the company - until, that is, four weeks ago. Right after a female engineer, who was a former employee, wrote a detailed 6 open letter alleging 7 she was sexually harassed 8 and management failed to step in, Huffington stepped up. She suddenly appeared at the weekly all-hands staff meeting - Tuesday morning, 10 a.m. - addressing everyone. She's counseling CEO Travis Kalanick.

HUFFINGTON: And going forward, let there be no room at Uber for brilliant jerks.

SHAHANI: No room to brilliant jerks. Interestingly, not a single man from Uber was on the call. Kalanick and other men were busy interviewing candidates for the position of chief operating officer. So the work of explaining the company commitment to clean up became women's work, though Huffington says it's exciting to have so many amazing women on the call. They are real leaders at the company, not actresses put on for a show.

HUFFINGTON: It's not like we got them from central casting.

ROSABETH KANTER: We have to wait and see what Uber does next.

SHAHANI: Rosabeth Kanter is a culture change expert at Harvard Business School.

KANTER: Having three or four women appear to speak for Uber, which has never had a female presence visible before, could be just tokenism. And it doesn't really signal change. We have to see what the men do.

SHAHANI: And there is a lot to do. If sexual harassment were the only problem at Uber, Kanter argues, they could fix it. And she wouldn't worry so much about it. But Uber's got a lot of relationships to repair with more than 600,000 people in the U.S. alone who drive for the company, many of whom feel mistreated, with local elected leaders, some of whom say Uber is illegal.

KANTER: Uber has to be conscious of all of its stakeholders in a different way - all of them, all constituencies. And they haven't particularly been conscious of those.

SHAHANI: Uber is not the first Silicon 9 Valley company that was started by young men, so-called brogrammers (ph) that needed to grow up. But Uber is different from, say, Google and Facebook, which have had their share of meltdown because Uber is far more reliant on outside partnerships 10. So, she says, they've got to be that much more emotionally intelligent. The bar is higher.

KANTER: There's so much more to do than just having a female presence and some ways to make sure that the young guys know how to treat women appropriately.

SHAHANI: On the call with women leaders, one of them did talk about drivers specifically and say Uber needs to bring more humanity to the way they interact with drivers. While Huffington is committed to holding the CEO and management's feet to the fire, as a board member she's indicated she is not interested in the open position for COO or another staff role. A spokesperson for her tells NPR she has her own company to run a company, a company whose mission it is to end stress and burnout. Aarti Shahani, NPR News, San Francisco.