A writer for San Francisco Magazine said this week that sources inside the company warned her that the company might monitor her rides. A Buzzfeed reporter wrote that when she attended a meeting with an Uber executive in New York, he was monitoring her arrival in one of the company’s cars. Add in an account by the author Peter Sims that his personal travel information was apparently shown on a wall at an Uber launch party, and the anecdotal evidence that the company has played fast and loose with its customers’ data is pretty compelling.

But the problem goes far beyond privacy issues for journalists or ordinary customers. The Uber public relations debacles of just the last few months spread across other areas: reports of Uber officials ordering cars from competitor Lyft in order to poach its drivers; a sexist promotion for its service in Lyon, France.

What all these incidents have in common is that they offer a portrait of a company without adults in charge. From the top executive ranks to individual operational units around the world, the mentality seems to be one in which sheer belief in the rightness of their cause overwhelms what to an outsider seems at best questionable and at worst immoral practices.

In a small start-up, it can be great to have a gung-ho mentality to develop esprit de corps. A flat management structure gives a wide range of executives relative autonomy. These are values exalted by the tech industry.

But the bigger and more economically important a company gets, the more those old-school corporate values of clear hierarchy, centralized control and respect for rules and procedures become important. Most tech entrepreneurs would find the corporate culture of an Exxon Mobil or a Walmart to be stultifying, but they are among the most successful companies on earth, depended on by millions of people a day, for a good reason.