The same thing that goes on in nearly any big company?
Its not like these people are Steve Jobs like product managers giving everything they have to the product/project. Most of the time there is some UI designer which does all the design work and these people just come in as some kind of reviewers to give some general improvement comments.
Apart from that its just usual decision making, book keeping, employee appraisal management and your general bureaucracy work is what they do 99.99% of the times. Add your usual corporate politics to keep their position in the hierarchy maintained.
Thankfully for them Apple showed/shows them much of the UI direction. So they don't to really work on any paradigm changing innovation. If they can get out some thing similar looking, without big obvious mistakes they can simply come in and push their 9-5 jobs maintaining the status quo without any real problem.
He most likely moved on as he did not find it possible to climb the corporate ladder any further at Google as the current set of execs are well entrenched into their jobs and may not quit until they naturally retire.
Huh!? If anything, I think Apple's the one taking a few pages out of the Holo playbook with their new found love for flat UI design in iOS 7.
Yeah, Mattias Duarte, the man behind WebOS cards that pretty much everyone including Apple is ripping off - I am sure he likes to sit all day letting things happen on their own - like all the post Gingerbread UI changes for example. Sure.