James Damore, who at the time was a Google employee, wrote an internal memo about diversity at Google. It did not stay internal to Google and ultimately, as they say, it went viral on the Internet. I think Google CEO Sundar Pichai should have responded to this memo in a different way than he did. Something kind of like this:
I have not yet made a decision about how to respond to James Damore's memo about diversity at Google. I am going to wait for the outrage to subside, for the various members of the Twitter mob to lay down their metaphorical pitchforks and return to their homes. I do not wish to be a participant in a modern-day Internet lynching -- and neither should you. If anything Mr. Damore has written in the memo constitutes a fireable offense (as some people have alleged), then I will, indeed take that step. However, such a drastic action does not need to take place immediately. If it is in fact justified, then delaying it a few days will cause no great harm. And this little bit of extra time will allow for hurt feelings and outrage to subside, and that will in turn allow us all to approach the issue with cooler heads and sounder judgment.
-- Imaginary Sundar Pichai
Notes and References
Pichai's actual response can be found here: https://www.blog.google/topics/diversity/note-employees-ceo-sundar-pichai/. And, of course, he also fired Damore: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/google-fires-employee-behind-controversial-diversity-memo. My contention is that even if he felt he should fire Damore, he should have waited longer, because, well, the pitchforks were still out.
There are a number of different versions of the "diversity memo" floating around on the web, some of them incomplete due to missing links. I believe that the PDF version of the memo assembled by Vice is a fairly accurate representation of the original memo. It can be found at: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3914586-Googles-Ideological-Echo-Chamber.html. This document is linked from https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evzjww/here-are-the-citations-for-the-anti-diversity-manifesto-circulating-at-google, which also provides some useful context.
I have also attached a copy of the PDF directly to this post, in case any of the links above should go stale.
As a final note, I am referring to the memo as the "diversity memo" whereas much of the reporting about it uses the term "anti-diversity" (including the Vice link above). Labeling this memo as "anti-diversity" demonstrates a truly profound lack of reading comprehension, since the author flatly states that he values diversity in the very first sentence of the memo. Conor Friedersdorf addresses this issue at length in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/the-most-common-error-in-coverage-of-the-google-memo/536181/.