Case Study

Professional Behaviour

“Everyone’s Mad at Google and Sundar Pichai Has to Fix It”

The CEO is increasingly boxed in by regulators, tech critics on both the right and the left, and even his own
employees. The sparsely furnished offices of Sundar Pichai stretch across the second floor of the Googleplex
in Mountain View, California. On one side of the room, a sofa and chairs surround a coffee table bearing a
few figurines, including a wooden dinosaur, the unofficial mascot of the Chrome browser. Dominating the
other side is a massive treadmill desk, though Pichai rarely uses it. “I find it difficult to walk and type emails
at the same time,” he says. “I’m not good at multitasking.”

That’s a problem, because being chief executive of Google lately has pretty much required world-champion
grandmaster multitasking skills. Pichai has to run the world’s second-most-valuable company while
managing political attacks and cultural blow-ups that seem to arrive every week. Since he was appointed
Larry Page’s successor two years ago, he’s had to deal with a staff protest over the president’s immigration
policy, a prolonged standoff with advertisers over unseemly videos on YouTube, a record regulatory fine,
debates about gender inequality, and a growing sense around the globe that the tech giants—Google chief
among them—are too big, too powerful, and perhaps too careless with the trust that their billions of users
have invested in them.

Then, of course, there’s the matter of fake news. In the past few months, investigators have homed in on
Google, Facebook, and Twitter for the role they played in the confusion about what was and wasn’t real
during an election that may have been swayed by a foreign government. Google, like its Silicon Valley
brethren, has turned over evidence to federal investigators that Russian interlopers bought political ads on
YouTube, AdWords, and other of its services last year; representatives from each company will testify before
Congress on Nov. 1. “There’s clearly stuff which shouldn’t be happening which happened, so we should fix
it,” says Pichai, sitting in one of the chairs across from the sofa, which he calls the “psychiatrist’s couch.” He
sounds a little like he should be lying on it himself. “Anytime we make a mistake, it’s very public for the
world to see.”

AI tends to evoke strong responses from people. To alleviate public anxieties about AI being just another
way to kill jobs, Pichai recently embarked on a goodwill journey to the Rust Belt. “We understand there’s
uncertainty and even concern about the pace of technological change,” he told an audience in Pittsburgh on
Oct. 12, while announcing a digital training initiative and a $1 billion grant to non-profits that retrain
workers.

In Pichai’s office, conversation turns to the tech industry’s role in the proliferation of fake news. For
example, on the day of the mass murder in Las Vegas, as reports came in that 58 people were killed and
hundreds injured, prominent news headlines on Google and Facebook falsely pegged the killer as a
Democratic opponent of Donald Trump. Discussing the issue, Pichai deploys the vocabulary of an apologetic
CEO that’s become de rigueur in Silicon Valley since last November. He says the word “thoughtful” 13 times
and “deeply” (feeling, listening, engaging …) six times, and proclaims the need to “do better” five times.
On a Monday last January, thousands of Google employees walked out of the office for a rally sanctioned by
the company. They were protesting President Trump’s executive order banning travel from seven
predominantly Muslim countries. They were also venting the anger that had spread since the election
throughout Silicon Valley and among Google’s rank and file, which is populated by top computer scientists
and engineers from around the world.

Dressed in a purple hoodie and sunglasses, Pichai spoke to the staff, summoning his own story as an
immigrant and reassuring them that management, too, was wrestling with the implications of the ban and
how to counter it. Even though he’s now a figure of authority, he managed to harness employees’ anger
rather than become a target of it. He finished with this, as the crowd chanted his name: “We all need to
learn to reach out and communicate to people from across the country. The fight will continue.”

Unlike Alphabet’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, a partisan fixture who backed Hillary Clinton, Pichai
usually keeps his politics to himself. He frames his actions less as ideological than paternalistic, an effort to
protect his 70,000-employee flock. “I could feel the company’s pain,” he recalls. “I felt it was my calling to do
it.”

Pichai’s talk-it-out approach also faces challenges in Europe. In June the European Union levied a $2.7 billion
fine against Google in the first of three antitrust cases, forcing the company to adjust its $79 billion-a-year ad
business. The fine was expected, but Google was caught off guard by a fresh onslaught of accusations of self-
dealing in search results. (For the past few years, Google has supplied its own answers to searches for
products. People save time but click to other websites less often.) Still, Pichai seems to think he can mollify
European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager and any trustbusters that come his way. “I
generally feel like if people talked together more and engaged with each other, it leads to better outcomes,”
he says. He adds that the company is “committed to finding a solution which the European Commission is
happy with.”

Google is still appealing the EU decision, but the static across the Atlantic is another example of how Pichai is
increasingly boxed in—by regulators, right-leaning critics, left-leaning critics, and sometimes even his own
employees. In August he flew to Nigeria and Europe for Google events, then met his family for vacation in
Portugal. Shortly after landing in Portugal, he learned about The Manifesto. James Damore, an engineer in
Google’s search division, had circulated a document earlier in the summer titled “Google’s Ideological Echo
Chamber” that criticized the company’s treatment of conservative points of view and its efforts to hire more
women in engineering. On Aug. 2, a Wednesday, Damore forwarded the note to an internal email list called
“skeptics.” The next day, Google employees, aghast at his misogynistic line of argument, began tweeting
about the memo. By Saturday it was public, and Pichai was on a flight back home to address a growing crisis.

The Damore memo set up an agonizing choice that positioned two of Google’s most important values—
freedom of expression and employee harmony—against each other. Damore had a right to his opinion but
had enraged both women and men at Google. Back in the Bay Area, Pichai met with John Hennessy. A
former Stanford University president who sits on Alphabet’s board, Hennessy has become a mentor to many
Google executives after the passing last year of longtime adviser Bill Campbell. Hennessy says the episode
“blew up faster than we thought,” but that it was clear what needed to happen. “The way he wrote that
memo—basically, a lot of women at Google felt like he was saying, ‘You don’t belong here,’ ” he says.

On Aug. 7, Pichai fired Damore for violating Google’s code of conduct. “I was making the decision in the
context of Google as a workplace,” he says. “But I realized it would have impact beyond it.”

It did. Conservatives lionized Damore as a culture warrior against Big Tech and political correctness. Pichai
had to cancel a company all-hands meeting to discuss the drama after employees reported receiving online
threats. Tucker Carlson ran several segments on his Fox News show asking if Google was too big. Posters
appeared along Los Angeles sidewalks showing Steve Jobs and Apple’s famed motto, “Think Different”;
below was Pichai’s bearded face and the phrase “Not So Much.” David Brooks piled on: “Sundar Pichai
Should Resign As Google’s C.E.O.,” read the headline of his column in the New York Times.

(Taken from https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-19/everyone-s-mad-at-google-and-

sundar-pichai-has-to-fix-it.)

Discussion Question
Give examples of how Sundar Pichai demonstrates professionalism in this case study.