The View | Uber’s new CEO will face this one major challenge

Good luck to Dara Khosrowshahi who has just taken over as chief executive at the car hailing app company Uber. He will need all the luck he can muster to clean up the mess left by his predecessor Travis Kalanick who is not only still very much around but also retains a substantial shareholding.

The mess is multifaceted ranging from problems of stemming Uber’s enormous losses, getting its IPO off the ground, to sorting out a host of legal challenges to its operations in many places, including Hong Kong, and then there’s the toxic legacy of Kalanick's abusive management style with allegations of sexual harassment and a whole lot more. As Warren Buffett recently observed, when addressing the problems at Wells Fargo Bank, “there’s never just one cockroach in the kitchen when you start looking around”.

So who knows what other cockroaches Khosrowshahi will unearth and can he really be expected to successfully clean up? If this was any kind of normal boardroom succession it could be said that he is well placed to do the job.

This is the man who won many plaudits for his work at the travel website Expedia where he marshalled its listing, he is clearly tech savvy and, perhaps most importantly, is the antithesis of Kalanick in terms of his cool demeanour and diplomatic way of handling people.

But normal is not a word that sits easily with what’s happening at Uber. Indeed his selection as the dark horse candidate for the post hardly came without controversy, not least within Uber’s board where Kalanick is still a presence and is fighting to retain a management role.

There was a great deal of shareholder pressure to remove Kalanick from all involvement in management but last week he won a court battle aimed at achieving precisely this end. It failed because the court decided that private arbitration would be a more appropriate way of handling this matter.