In the late 1950s, a weapons maker called the Martin Company received a contract to build the first Pershing missile. It was to be the most sophisticated mobile weapons system on earth: 5 tons of metal and precision technology designed to deliver a nuclear warhead from up to 460 miles away. Should it ever be used, there would be no margin for error. It had to be perfect. And the US Army wanted it delivered quickly.

The task of ensuring this timely perfection fell to Philip Crosby, a quality-control manager at Martin. To break with his industry’s wartime habit of tolerating small mistakes in feverish production, Crosby came up with a philosophy he would later call Zero Defects. The idea was, basically, to instill in workers the will to prevent problems during design and manufacture rather than go back and fix them later. Crosby’s philosophy went on to become a management buzzword, especially in the aerospace and auto industries, where a faulty gasket or a weak bearing could mean a fiery catastrophe. During the Apollo program, NASA even gave out little Zero Defects trophies—each one a cute pewter spaceman standing on the moon with the letters “ZD” emblazoned on his chest.

“I’m a big believer in the Zero Defects strategy,” said Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber. It was an overcast day in January, and Khosrowshahi leaned back in a chair at Uber’s San Francisco headquarters. Khosrowshahi had been running Uber for four months at that point. He’d left a stable perch at Expedia, the travel-­booking service, to take over a company that had become synonymous with scandal and rule-breaking excess. And, having doused some of the raging fires left behind by his predecessor, Travis Kalanick, Khosrowshahi had determined that what Uber needed most was a quality-control philosophy borrowed from the middle of the last century.

This was, it must be said, a bit weird. Tech companies tend to celebrate the inverse of Zero Defects. Push out new code, experiment, screw things up, and fix them. “Move fast and break things,” as Mark Zuckerberg famously said in the early days of Facebook. And arguably, few companies have moved faster and broken more things than Uber.

In just nine years, Kalanick’s company grew from a vague notion that anyone should be able to summon a ride from their phone into a business valued at $54 billion and available in more than 600 cities on six continents. And it kept adding new services: Today Uber can facilitate a carpool to work and deliver your Dos Toros burritos so they’re still hot when they reach your table. Not satisfied with merely replacing taxis, Kalanick’s Uber began developing autonomous cars and trucks and even set up a skunkworks for flying electric cars. Along the way, the company left a trail of wreckage. It disregarded and even undermined laws and regulations; it squandered the loyalty of its drivers, who felt mistreated under its contractor system; and it became notorious for a workplace culture that exemplified the worst tendencies of the Silicon Valley bro. By the time investors moved to demand Kalanick’s resignation in June 2017, observers were calling Uber the world’s most dysfunctional startup.

But where others saw Uber’s travails as a symbol of Silicon Valley comeuppance, Khosrowshahi saw something less loaded: a sophisticated tech company that had taken on too much, too quickly, and whose systems groaned under the weight and confusion. Growth, not quality, had been its guiding principle for too long, he said.

Khosrowshahi, 48, has a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. On that day in January, he wore a long-sleeved black crewneck sweater, black pants, loafers, and brightly colored striped socks. In contrast to Kala­nick, who is an inveterate pacer, he sat very still with his ankle crossed over his knee. Khosrowshahi’s vision for Uber, as he relayed it, was to ask people to do their jobs correctly every single day. “It’s a game of inches,” he said.