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I imagine the last year has been a bit rough for Sundar Pichai, who is CEO of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet. He has faced intense criticism over a series of layoffs, including more than 12,000 at the beginning of last year. That criticism has only escalated -- especially in recent months, as Google has largely botched the rollout of its generative AI tools, known as Gemini.
It's not that Google is behind in its generative AI efforts -- there is no company better positioned from a technology and capability standpoint. It's that the company doesn't seem to have a guiding principle and, as a result, is giving away its considerable advantage. The company seems lost, not in its technology, but in its execution. That's a big problem for Google, which has been working on this for years. And yet, the company seems so afraid of jeopardizing its search dominance that it keeps tripping over its own feet.
The most recent Gemini saga is only one example. The layoffs are another. The very role Google Search plays in shaping the internet is yet another.
All of that is on Pichai, who has now led Google for almost nine years. On the whole, it's hard to argue that Pichai hasn't had a successful run. Google's market cap was $435 billion in August 2015 when Pichai became CEO. Today, it's $1.67 trillion. If you measure Google's success purely by the value the company has created for shareholders, Pichai's tenure has been, well, fine.
The thing is, Google is more than just the value of its stock. It is, maybe more than any other tech company, at the center of how billions of people find information. It runs the two largest websites in the world, Google Search and YouTube. It runs the world's largest email service, Gmail. It's also the world's largest advertising platform. In many ways, Google is very successful.
The contrast between Google's successes and its failures to launch largely comes down to the leadership of Pichai. I say that in part because it always comes down to the leader, but also because it seems clear that, in this case, Pichai has lost sight of the most important principle of leadership: He has lost the culture. As a result, I think it's likely he'll lose his job.
You see, the most important job of any leader is to shepherd the culture of the organization they lead. You can argue that the most important role of a leader is to set priorities or make decisions, but the reality is that neither of those things matter if your culture is broken. No one will stick around to follow your priorities or listen to your decisions if they hate working for you.
The thing is, most leaders think culture is about values and mission statements. It isn't. It's not even about building cool products. This, by the way, is why most managers are bad at building a healthy culture. More than anything else, culture is about the way people feel about working for you. It's about their relationship to their work and the people they do that work with -- especially their leaders.
At Google, that culture is broken. As Ben Thompson at Stratechery writes:
This is a company that should dominate AI, thanks to their research and their infrastructure. The biggest obstacle, though, above and beyond business model, is clearly culture. To that end, the nicest thing you can say about Google's management is to assume that they, like me and everyone else, just want to build products and not be yelled at; that, though, is not leadership.
I think Thompson is right -- Google's problem is with its culture. In that sense, the issues with Gemini are just the symptom of what is broken inside the company. Google is building exactly what you get with the culture it created. It has been on this path for years, and, on the surface, it has seemed to serve it well. Lots of people made lots of money because Google has historically been very good at making money.
If Google is going to make something different, it's going to require different priorities and a different vision, but ultimately, it's going to require a different culture. That means it's going to need a different leader.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai Forgot the Most Important Rule of Leadership. It Could Cost Him His Job
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06.03.2024
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I imagine the last year has been a bit rough for Sundar Pichai, who is CEO of both Google and its parent company, Alphabet. He has faced intense criticism over a series of layoffs, including more than 12,000 at the beginning of last year. That criticism has only escalated -- especially in recent months, as Google has largely botched the rollout of its generative AI tools, known as Gemini.
It's not that Google is behind in its generative AI efforts -- there is no company better positioned from a........
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