I don't know how Pichai can change Google's culture without Google having an existential crisis first like IBM in the 90s. I saw these intertwining problems in Google: 1. Employees want promotions at all cost. It's not due to ambition but to comparing ourselves with our peers, thanks to lax promotion policies for years. L6 used to be treated as god, but no more. Employees simply lost it when they saw people who were not necessarily effective get promoted fast. Well, maybe the process is not lax, but identifying the real gems certainly becomes disproportionally harder as the company grows. 2. Management want to expand at all cost. The only metric that matters to most managers in Google seems to be the size of their teams. The larger a team, the more "successful" a manager will likely to be. Yes, managers did get cautioned that it is the scope and impact that matters instead of team size, but in practice team size is a proxy measurement for scope and impact. 3. Maybe this is the real root cause: as Google becomes so large, it is simply impossible to gauge the impact and complexity of one's work reliably, resulting in all kinds of gaming and angst in all levels of employees. In the end, gauging impact becomes gauging the perception of impact.
In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.
In other words, people are culture. When a company grows large, the culture regresses to the mean.