Google CEO’s new memo on employee activism echoes progressive villain…

In 2020, as the country’s political temperature ran hot, CEO Brian Armstrong declared Coinbase to be a “mission-focused company” where employees had to swear off politics at work. The move triggered a ripple of resignations and also a withering backlash on social media and from the New York Times, which ran a series of articles portraying the company as racist. Now, almost four years later, Coinbase has a most unlikely imitator: left-leaning Google, where CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday wrote a blog post stating the firm is “mission first” and warning staff not to “use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” Wow.

It’s hard to overstate what a dramatic turnabout this is for Google, where activism has been part of the corporate culture since its start-up days. It’s also not surprising given that Google has been nearly consumed by internal activism, including a faction of its own employees that occupied the office of a senior executive to protest the company providing cloud services to Israel. This last incident appeared to be the final straw, leading Google to fire 28 employees and Pichai to issue his “mission first” memo.

It’s not clear if Coinbase inspired Google’s recent decisions, though the “mission” phrase and related language is very similar. In any case, Coinbase’s Armstrong praised Pichai’s moves, tweeting: “Life is so much better on the other side. Get back to pure merit and tech innovation like early Google.” His tweet follows another one from several months ago where Armstrong called attention to an episode of hyper-political correctness at Google—namely a ban on using the phrase “all-hands meeting” since it can offend people with no hands—and inviting those fed up to work for Coinbase instead.

The sight of Google’s CEO following in the steps of Coinbase on workplace policy will come as a bitter pill for some at the company, who likely share the popular view of many progressives that crypto is inherently wicked and that people like Armstrong are bad. But for now, such folks are swimming against the tide. Companies of all sorts are moving sharply to rein in activism at work, and to make the workplace feel less like a cultural studies department and more like, well, corporate America.

As for Google, activist employees are hardly the only headache Pichai is facing. Under his leadership, the company is behind in the AI game and there is a growing perception that Google’s once-excellent products—from Search to Maps to Gmail—are starting to suck. Whether or not a new “mission first” HR policy will change that is unclear, though I suspect Armstrong would say it will.

Jeff John Roberts
[email protected]
@jeffjohnroberts

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