Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change

by Marc Benioff

reason. A few years earlier, I’d briefly met Amma (meaning “mother”), Mata Amritanandamayi, a remarkably warm and wise woman known as “the hugging saint,” who had offered spiritual guidance and comfort to untold thousands of followers. Secretly, I hoped that her wisdom and well-known healing embrace

would help me find myself again.

“In your quest to succeed and make money, don’t forget to do something for others.”

On that day in Trivandrum, the seed was planted. Two years later I left the Oracle nest to do just that.

than $120 billion since we went public in 2004 was that we had done a commendable job of running the business. But I now know the most powerful engine of our success hasn’t been our software, our people, or our business model, but rather, the decision we made in 1999 to orient our culture around values.

Lots of businesses talk about values, but in turbulent times, when they matter most, executives often forget to operationalize them.

Not only that, I majored in business.

I’m a big believer in the enlightening, civilizing powers of higher education, full stop.

My father, Russell, owned a chain of dress shops called Stuart’s Apparel.

he was frugal throughout his life. He shopped for clothes mostly on sale racks at big-and-tall stores, and every car he bought—including the Buick—was used.

But she let me go. And that summer, when I asked if I could fly to England, alone, to research castles for my games, Mom gave me her blessing, so long as I stayed with friends of hers in Leeds and promised to call home every night.

Though it seems obvious now, it took a while for me to link the evolution of this big idea back to its source: my father’s struggles as the owner of Stuart’s Apparel. If I hadn’t seen, up close, the many hats he had to wear while running a small business, and how many countless hours were required just to keep the operation functioning, I wouldn’t have understood what the kind of services Salesforce offers would mean to people just like him.

These deliveries were made exclusively to my maternal grandfather, Marvin Lewis. The merchandise under transfer was me.

In 1954, Marvin Lewis unveiled a plan for a space-age, fifteen-mile monorail that would run through the heart of downtown. The federal bond issue he led to finance this new entity, which came to be known as Bay Area Rapid Transit, was the largest local bond ever approved in the United States. BART finally opened in 1972 to much acclaim. It was, as described by Fortune, “the finest rapid transit line in the world.” Its space-age automated cars were light, aerodynamic, and controlled entirely by computers.

Whenever I touched down in Japan, I felt a heightened sense of clarity, along with an immediate desire to reinvigorate and reinspire myself. To this day there is something about the atmosphere on those magical islands to which I’m deeply connected. So it’s no coincidence that when I decided to explore the teachings of Zen, I bought a train ticket to Kyoto.

It was there, at the Ryoan-ji temple in the northwest part of the city, that I began a lifelong journey toward developing a “beginner’s mind,” or what the Japanese call shoshin. (I’ll talk more about this later on.) I began to make annual trips, often inviting friends to join me. I relished introducing them to the Japanese way of life.

In 2010, we’d developed a product called Chatter, a social collaboration application for companies that leveraged features, such as profiles, status updates, groups, and real-time feeds, popularized by the consumer-oriented social networks.

“A car should be like a trusted friend,” I said. “So we call it Toyota Friend.”

For a company that had added ten thousand employees in a single two-year stretch, onboarding was mission-critical.

but Srini insisted. He knew that sometimes, to see a problem in a new way, you need a change

scenery. Or in this case, a lack of scenery.

In Silicon Valley, the concept of continuous iteration—focusing on making small, incremental improvements to what you’ve alre...

In May 2014, and after several grueling years of fits and false starts, our vision for a mobile version of Salesforce had been realized.

I’m not a superstitious person, but I’ve always believed in the power of signs and omens. Looking back, I realize that I’d become so singularly focused on winning over the naysayers that I nearly missed a big one.

They didn’t like our software.

“See a bear, shoot a bear.”

I’d never been a fan of this strategy. The problem was, it didn’t incentivize anyone to consider whether the customers on the other side of these transactions really needed the software they had purchased, or whether it helped them make progress on their own business goals. And it didn’t leave a whole lot of time to build trust, either.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”

The secret to Home Depot’s success was combining its physical locations

with its online services to create the community experience that customers really wanted.

“The most dangerous place to make decisions is in the office,” he said. “You need to make decisions where the customer is.”

Apple’s boardroom that day, I felt a rush of excitement coursing through my jangling nerves. In that moment, I remembered what it had felt like to be an inexperienced intern mustering up the courage to say a few words to the big boss. After several minutes, Steve charged in, predictably dressed in his standard attire of jeans and a black mock turtleneck. I hadn’t settled on precisely what I wanted to ask him, but I knew I’d better cut to the chase. He was a busy man, and was legendary for his directness, and ability to quickly zero in on what’s important.

“Marc,” he said. “If you want to be a great CEO, be mindful and project the future.”

We needed an “application ecosystem.”

But what would a Salesforce “application ecosystem” look like? Steve told me that was up to me to figure out.

One evening, over dinner in San Francisco, I was struck by an irresistibly simple idea. What if any developer from anywhere in the world could create their own application for the Salesforce platform? And what if we offered to store these apps in an online directory

So I sketched out my idea on a restaurant napkin. And the very next morning, I went to our legal team and asked them to register the domain for “AppStore.com” and buy the trademark for “App Store.”

All of my executives gasped. When I’d met with Steve Jobs in 2003, I already knew he was playing a hundred chess moves ahead of me. None of us

could believe that Steve had landed on the same name I’d originally proposed for our business software exchange. For me, it was exciting and humbling. And Steve had unwittingly given me an incredible opportunity to repay him for the prescient advice he’d given me five years earlier. After the presentation, I pulled him aside and told him we owned the domain and trademark for “App Store” and that we would be happy and honored to sign over the rights to him for free.

It became Einstein Forecasting, one of our hottest products.

A McKinsey & Company study, for example, showed that companies with more gender diversity on their executive teams were 21 percent more likely to outperform less-diverse teams in terms of profitability. In addition, companies that rank in the top quartile for the ethnic and cultural diversity of executives were 33 percent more likely to be more profitable than those that ranked lower. A survey of more

Data from a 2018 Financial Times ranking of the best global MBA programs showed that women earned, on average, 9 percent less than men before receiving their degrees and 14 percent less three years after graduation.

After the presentation, Lynne pulled me aside. “You didn’t hug the men, so why hug the woman?” she said. “That

diminished her; they are all professionals.”

Dov Seidman, one of the wisest people I know on the subject of business and morality and author of How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything, likes to say that culture is something that “grows out of the unique way people at an organization relate to one another, organize their efforts, and govern themselves.”

Day one employees get a Salesforce badge, backpack, and computer, and spend the morning in orientation. We go over who we are, what we do, and the process for logging on to the corporate systems. We talk about our values and volunteering, how the company gives each employee seven days off every year, with full pay, to volunteer with a nonprofit of their choice. In the afternoon, we show them how serious we are by sending them off to do community service.

Of course, like most corporations, we subsidize fitness club memberships and offer meditation and yoga classes.

“You should have a whole floor dedicated to silence,” they said.

They approved. From now on, in every office, everywhere in the world, we now have, or will soon have, a small mindfulness room on every floor, a

quiet zone where employees can retreat to any time they need to press Pause.