When Sundar Pichai woke up November 1 to prepare for an appearance at a conference in New York, Google’s CEO, an engineer by training, had likely hoped to tout the leaps in artificial intelligence and cloud computing that Google had made in his three years as the company’s leader.  

But any hope of delivering that message disappeared quickly. That same day, Google employees from around the world had begun marching out of their offices in protests sparked by the company’s handling of sexual harassment complaints against a former executive. In all, up to 20,000 employees were estimated to have participated in the walkouts, in an extraordinary display of public dissent at one of the world’s most powerful companies.