Without diminishing the impact of Susan Fowler's blog post, Uber has already been "going bankrupt" slowly for years before this point.
I has been surreal watching this unfold, but I'd hesitate to compare it to the butterfly effect - unless we're talking about many, many butterflies over a long period of time ;)
I do hope that these events have inspired companies to pay more attention to their workplace and culture - festering problems like these are easy to ignore, but reveal their consequences suddenly and severely.
The point of the butterfly effect is that every small input magnifies so much in a chaotic system over time that you won't be able to predict it correctly if you miss any detail, even one so insignificant as a single flap of a single butterfly's wings.
The moral being that a chaotic system is fundamentally unpredictable in detail, and can only be predictable in averages and aggregates. (So we can predict climate, but not weather.)
Maybe the butterfly effect analogy was a bit facetious, but I don't see David Bonderman resigning and Amit Singhal being forced out in an alternate universe where Susan Fowler does not write the blog.
"How did you go bankrupt?"
"Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly."
Without diminishing the impact of Susan Fowler's blog post, Uber has already been "going bankrupt" slowly for years before this point.
I has been surreal watching this unfold, but I'd hesitate to compare it to the butterfly effect - unless we're talking about many, many butterflies over a long period of time ;)
I do hope that these events have inspired companies to pay more attention to their workplace and culture - festering problems like these are easy to ignore, but reveal their consequences suddenly and severely.