Strategy and Change

Introduction

GOOGLE CEO SUNDAR Pichai was facing tough questions during his grueling three-and-a-half-hour congressional testimony on a December morning in 2018. He was speaking to the US House Judiciary Committee, whose members were concerned about the company's data collection practices. Some were skeptical of his answers as he struggled to provide straightforward descriptions of the technical and at times Byzantine methods by which the company processed, used, and stored the vast troves of sometimes sensitive data collected from its users.

Pichai was wrestling with a challenge familiar to executives at the time: how to capitalize on the rapid digitization of user-generated content while navigating increasing concerns from the public about who should ultimately own and control that information.

This challenge was compounded by the dramatic pace of technological and competitive change. In just 20 years, Google had gone from its humble beginnings in a dorm room on the campus of Stanford University to being one of the largest and most influential companies in a global marketplace. Despite this historic rise, Pichai knew that its fall could happen even more quickly. The same technological trends that fueled its success could be harnessed by the next startup looking to redefine the very market that Google pioneered.

When pressed that morning to explain the company's practices, Pichai emphasized their focus on giving customers control. He described a service called Google Takeout, ...