Name: CEO Initiative 2019: A Conversation With Marc Benioff About Workplace Culture
Uploaded: 2019-06-11
Duration: 18 min 21 s
Description: Marc Benioff, Chairman and Co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses the importance of using business as a platform for change.

I wanna to talk about business activism, CEO activism. Because I've been covering business for four decades, and I think something has profoundly changed in the last decade. There used to be a very clear line between what business responsibilities were What government responsibilities were. If you've gotten to hot button social issues, most CEOs would be under the table in a heartbeat. Didn't wanna talk about it, didn't wanna go there, it's not my bottom line. And you were kind of at the front end of changing that when Indiana, was it four years ago, five years ago passed a Religious Liberties Law that you perceived as being discriminatory You stepped out and wasn't even in San Francisco it was in Indiana. Why did you do it? What was going on there? Well, the reason why we got involved and the reason why we get involved in most things is it's driven by our employees. And I think that if you're to kinda get to your question of what's happened in last decade is. That as millennial's, have entered the workforce. And companies like mine, they're far more active and more involved in creating the culture. Before I think the culture was a very lonely job of the HR executive or, Maybe even the CO. And now the workforce realizes, they're actually a critical part of making that happen. And so, you're really seeing active employees, and that's creating active COs. And you can see a lot of examples where We have significant employee activism in tech companies for example that has changed the course of the history of the technology industry. I think that's a really interesting point. We had a presentation earlier about millennials and one of the things we didn't get to in that presentation is because millennials are are taking longer to get married They are less likely to be involved in organized religion, they are less likely to join social clubs, groups, the Elves Club, the Moose Club, the Lottery Club whatever, but the employer becomes their most important formal connection to society and they put a lot of hopes and dreams and values to the employer. Well I think also that they've just realized that they have a choice where they can work. And the thing is, is that they want to be in an environment and a business that is about purpose. That they want to make sure that their company that they're in is actually committed to improving the state of the world. That that is a critical part of the employees that we're hiring day And certainly the next wave of employees, imagine that 2 or 3x. So we are just getting a taste of the future and I think that why that's exciting, okay, is really kinda what I call, there's a door that is definitely opening. And for the last four five years now we've been talking about the fourth industrial revolution. And the fourth industrial revolution is very powerful because you can see all these information and biotechnologies, you've done an exhaustive work on it yourself and that could be the cloud computing and artificial intelligence or autonomous vehicles. On the biotechnologies it could be all the next generation of amino therapies or gene therapies, I mean robotics theres a wide variety Of technologies that had been unleashed. But what is going to happen, and you can already start to see it, is that, you have these very young people, very young, some who haven't even entered the workforce yet, getting coupled with these next generation technologies. And what they're doing is, They're bringing them together to create this 5th industrial revolution which is all about actually saving the planet. And you can see it with somebody like [ UNKNOWN ] who is this Swedish activist we meet at the Wallbuck and we look for him who at the time we didn't hadn't really seen her become as famous as she is now. I mean, she was even on the cover of Time Magazine, I don't know if you saw that, Alan. But- Did you have something to do with that? You choose covers? No, I do not. But I was impressed that, you know, somebody like that has such a high profile. Because, and the reason why is, because she's an example of somebody who's using technology To create the world that you want and knows how to do it and I think that you're gonna have lots of people who emerge like that. And to your original point, it's gonna happen in our businesses too. Yeah. And it is. It's a great moment and it's an exciting moment but you got people who have a lot of opinions that May not be the right thing for the company, may not be the right thing for the country. I mean you had an interesting moment when your employees said hey we don't wanna do work for the custom and border patrol. That's right. Yeah. He said really, like you're not gonna support protecting our borders? So how do you decide which impulses to support and which impulses to resist? Well I think this is now, CEOs are gonna have to react to these changes. So waht is the first thing the CEO is gonna have to do? Well all that's said, I got labelled Activist CEO, OK. And it wasn't me, I'm just finishing this book right now called Trailblazer it comes out in October I saw some right at the end of the process and it's really the story of this is not me, it's not about me. I didn't become this all of a sudden this activist CEO, I got kind of Pushed by my employees into it and my job as CEO is to listen deeply to my employees and my customers and to respond to them effectively. You mentioned like tableau. I'm doing that because it's customer driven like I was with. The investors aren't crazy about it. I was, well, good investors, they will see just as they've always seen You know how amazing it is overtime. = Oh well it's just spectacular. I Mean you know it's just a spectacular combination. Yeah. I didn't mean to. That was also like a year ago we when we bought me all soft. But let's. But let's let's keep moving forward. So this arts concept of it's about. How do you listen to CEO, how do you listen to employees, how do you listen to your customers, and that might then, you might be called I'm an activist CEO because I'm responding to what my employers want, okay, but it's not true, the reality is if you're not gonna do that you're not gonna be the CEO, and we have a lot of examples actually in SIlicon Valley. Of COs who are no longer COs because they did not listen. [ CROSSTALK ] By their employees. Fired by their employees and it's gotten really close on some super high profile COs where you know you see employees storm out of hte building becasue they're unhappy with a critical part of the Culture. So- You're talking Google? This, I'm not naming any names. I just wanna say that, you know, there is a moment where you know, things can tip, and you have to pull back as a CEO and say, who am I, what am I doing here, and am I listening? And now, and the one other point is this Which is that because of that, you're gonna faced with these kind of challenges by your employers. You better have a repository for that that you can then process that. So most organizations don't, and that's why we created our office of ethical use. Because, for example, in the example of custom and border patrol, When our employees say well, should we be doing business with this organization or should we not? Then we can say well here we can actually talk to customers, the this chief ethical us and let them be the arbitrator. So how would that have been? Tell us how this works. I mean, you said you had a bunch of employees who came to you, they said we should stop doing business with Customs and Border Petrol, you said I don't agree. No, I didn't say that. I would never say such a thing. I think if you're a CEO and you say that, you are in big trouble. I don't agree, I this, I that. What I said was, what, I am an expert in this all of a sudden? Somehow this is now also something that I have to do as CO? But, you accepted this mantle. Not only do I have to do all these other things I now have to do this. But, that's the point. No, that is not- But, you kind of led the way [ UNKNOWN ] No, it's not the job of the CO. As a CO yourself, you know that's not the job of CO because the job of CO is then to Create a process and a structure that lets it auto resolve and we will do whatever we need to do. Ok so. And for example yes we hired a Pola who is gonna speak I think later today. Yeah. And her job is she is a phenominal person in this word renowed expert in this area. And then she sets up an organization and those employees can go and they can be fully vetted and in some cases there will be action in some cases. Is it a democracy? Do you take an employee vote? How does she What is her process? To decide whether- Well you're gonna have to ask her, I guess. [ LAUGH ] That's why you have her on stage, Alan. But, you know, as an example- What good is a CEO if you can't do that? Well one of the things we've got, we have an amazing thing. We have an incredible product line. Some that we've built organically, some inorganically, and one amazing inorganic acquisition we bought several years ago now is Demand where which is now our commerce cloud and we should sell a huge amount online like Adidas. We're selling lots of Adidas shoes and everybody wants access to this commerce cloud technology because you can just incredibly increase the velocity of your sales and it's got artificial intelligence our sales force. Einstein built into it its next generation It's built into our customer 360 it works with all of our other products. So we have a lot of gun sellers coming to us and saying we want to sell guns and we're not opposed to selling guns. Then we had bumped stock sellers coming to us we want to sell bump stocks. Then we had our employees who are in the commerce cloud. See that and come to Paul and say Paula, we can what not well, they said should we be doing this? Is this ethical? How do we look? nd through our own resolution study evaluation. And mitigation with other experts' outside voices, inside voices, we decided. We're not gonna sell bump stocks, that's not something that sales force is gonna do. But I'm not gonna make that decision, I don't think I can. I think it's better from the company if this actually a professionally, because by the way, it's not just that. There is a list Okay have things that employees want evaluated, right? And not only my company, I'm sure in your organization and every organization, but if you do not make those changes, then you cannot say if business is the greatest platform for change, and you're going to focus on these changes, you can't focus on everything and you can't do every guy made prior. Not going to take on every cause and Whatever, you do have to kind of have a north star and it better be around a structured process to make that happen. And that's why I think in office of ethical use, we might be the first ones in technology to do that, but we will not be the last. Just as we [ CROSSTALK ]. Do you think it's just technology or you think it's much bigger than that? You think this is something that has to be adopted across the board? I think this is far bigger. Well, I went through all the biotechnology [ LAUGH ] So I mean, you talked about the ethical use of the biotechnology is is amazing. I'm sure there are questions, comments, he has to have provoked a few of you here. [ LAUGH ] Yes. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] And Jim, please identify yourself for Mark. Jim Zawkosky, I'm the CEO of buildOn. First I want to thank you Mark and everybody at Salesforce for the incredible partnership that you built with us. We've worked closely with Parker Harris and Mark Hawkins in a big team and I see Paula here who we're going to talk to in a little while so what we've done together is deep service immersion 36 our merchants on in the south Bronx south side of chicago and deep east Oakland and together we've been building schools in Malawi africa But jim there's a question here I'm david the question is this [ CROSSTALK ] I know it's your moment [ LAUGH ]. No, I'll get a moment. Well you talked a lot about how millennials are setting culture. My question to you is, what is the next generation of social impact for millennials, and how will you harness that at sales force? Thank you. Well I mean I've been basically on the road nonstop for the last 120 days and it's been a very powerful process and it's resulted in this acquisition. It's resulted in a lot of very interesting things, changes that I have made to the organization I've been all over the world and I'll tell you the number one thing that's on my mind is reskilling. Last night even we opened our new Salesforce tower here in New York City, and I met somebody Somebody who came up to me and said I retweeted his tweet because it was a very sweet thing that he did. Said [ UNKNOWN ] when I got up this morning, I remembered yeah, incredible story. So he comes up to me and he says. You know, I am not part of the fourth Industrial Revolution. I don't think I was part of the third Industrial Revolution. [ LAUGH ] I was a Baker, and I knew that that is not gonna get me to where I wanted to go, and I got on your platform, which we call trailhead. com, and I reskilled myself And I have this next generation of skills, and now because of that, I am squarely in the fourth Industrial Revolution and I have this incredible career. And I think that there is this arc, where we have This group of people that we need to bring with us into the future, and we cannot leave these people behind and that this concept of not just workforce development, but core re- skilling, that is in all of these amazing technologies, what we're talking about AI or blockchain or Even information security and even in the areas of ethical use all of the areas of compliance of our organization. We really need to all go to another level but I really see this imperative of bringing everybody with us in the future. That's a great example because 10, 15, 20 years ago we thought about as a government responsibility, not a business responsibility. Has that changed I think it absolutely has changed because we know the government can't do anything. So so what changed is our understanding and expectations of government. Well I think a great example is I was with a government executive recently talking about this and they had setup programs in Appalachia and then they were lamenting. Well I guess we can't really do this because these this program has failed. And they had gave me the URL and all that. And then I countered with well, take a look at our program in [ UNKNOWN ]. And here, this one is working and here's why [ UNKNOWN ]. And that we can actually point to these success stories and. Rarely a day goes by that I don't now get re- inspired that this is possible that somebody can get on trailhead. com can re- scale, not just for our platform, but other platforms, not just for our technology but for other technologies. And that this gonna be something that's gonna, this is In my world, this is also an ethical issue. That is, yes, everyone in this room has a job, at least most of the people, and that we are marching under the fourth industrial and fifth industrial revolution together But not everybody is with us. So I talked yesterday about how this CEO initiative grew out of an event that we had at the Vatican of December of 2016. In January of 2017, we started talking about it At a dinner in Davos. And as we were talking about it, you raised your hand and boldly said I will be your founding sponsor. That is not exactly the story, the story is like this. [ LAUGH ] That's the way I remember it. Basically, I was reading Fortune Magazine, and it was just one kind of very bad story about the next. [ LAUGH ] And I was like, there is tremendous optimism in the future. But there are stories of the change makers and we need to highlight the change makers so that people can be inspired by the change makers. And that was the idea and I said hey, Allan we need to profile what somebody did thing We're doing that that are happening. I know that the dark of social media We're doing that to Or sell more magazines but it's the good stuff that we need to kinda anchor to so that we can model that going forward. We're doing that too. My quick question for you is what can we do as a community. Mm- hm. What's your advice for us? You were there at the beginning. Yeah. I mean you. Well, I think something. You know I think that the most important thing is to do something, one thing. Find the thing inside yourself, deeply listen to yourself. If not, to your employers. If not, to your customers. Listen to yourself, go deep inside yourself and ask yourself one question, what is the one thing that I can do to make the world better? And if everybody does just one thing that has a sense of person and individual responsibility, the world will get better. But also we have to do it in companies, sales force has lots of examples of things you can do. But everybody can do one thing. Great piece of ending advice, do something, write that down. Yeah Mark, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having me. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

CEO Initiative 2019: A Conversation With Marc Benioff About Workplace Culture 

A Conversation With Marc Benioff About Workplace Culture 

Leadership

Marc Benioff, Chairman and Co-CEO of Salesforce, discusses the importance of using business as a platform for change.