There is zero chance that Kalanick thought it was a good idea not to investigate an HR complaint from a promising engineer. That was not the culture he’d intended to construct. Nowhere in his set of values did it say that it was okay for managers to sexually harass their employees. Nowhere was it implied. In fact, by all accounts Kalanick was furious about the incident, which he saw as a woman being judged on issues other than performance. That, of course, was the opposite of “Best Idea Wins.” Somehow his culture was having a weird counterproductive side effect.
