Using the Potter Box to Understand Organizational Decision-Making

In this presentation, I show how the Potter Box was used for a semester-long project in a business class to examine the 2017 problems facing Uber. The value of applying the Potter Box to Uber is 1) to provide insight into the role ethics plays in business decisions, and 2) to examine the role the corporate culture plays in how businesses balance their values and loyalties to their stakeholders. Students concluded at the end of the semester that Uber’s culture worked while it was a start-up, but as it became a more mature company, its culture was increasingly problematic and needed to change.