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

The sparsely furnished offices of Sundar Pichai stretch across the second floor of the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. 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 blowups 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.