My interpretation: “We focused our culture on creating a corporate safe space and hired a bunch of people more interested in safe spaces than actually growing the organization and competing, then we began to lose ground and had to reverse course and became so scared of our own employees we had to enact measures to prevent them from revolting on us when we asked them to work harder.”
I think the entire social justice tidal wave that hit tech is going to destroy many companies, these attitudes and building corporate cultures focused on entertaining then lead to profoundly uncompetitive behaviors. Imagine how hyper alert these people are to even the lightest pressure.
It works great when finance is plenty and times are good. Once the market turns, every company that chose diversity and inclusion for their culture is going to implode violently and face employee revolts.
Google is especially prone to this. Of the major tech companies, google have gone out of their way to hire as many blue haired safe spacers as humanly possible. These efforts are going to backfire when they need to get mean and lean.