Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  Copyright © 2019 by Salesforce.com, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Currency, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  currencybooks.com

  CURRENCY and its colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Benioff, Marc R., author. | Langley, Monica, author.

  Title: Trailblazer: the power of business as the greatest platform for change / Marc Benioff, Monica Langley.

  Description: 1st Edition. | New York: Currency, [2019] | Includes index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019017914 | ISBN 9781984825193 | ISBN 9781984825209 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Customer relations. | Technological innovations—Management.

  Classification: LCC HD57.7 .B45756 2019 | DDC 658.4/092—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2019017914

  International edition ISBN 9780593136089

  Ebook ISBN 9781984825209

  Book design by Andrea Lau, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Joseph Perez

  Cover image: Pari Dukovic

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Part I: Values Create Value

  A New Direction

  Chapter One: Beginnings

  Chapter Two: Values

  Chapter Three: Trust

  Chapter Four: Customer Success

  Chapter Five: Innovation

  Chapter Six: Equality

  Part II: Business Is the Greatest Platform for Change

  Shared Knowledge

  Chapter Seven: Ohana

  Chapter Eight: Giving Back Means Looking Forward

  Chapter Nine: Beginner’s Mind

  Chapter Ten: Stakeholders

  Chapter Eleven: The Activist CEO

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  PROLOGUE

  This book’s genesis took place in the summer of 1996 on a beautiful, blue-sky morning in San Francisco. The view of the bay from the window of my apartment would have been breathtaking to behold, but I didn’t care. I was lying in bed, lacking the will or the energy to get up.

  I had the greatest job I could ever have imagined at Oracle, one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world. Fresh out of college with a shaggy mane of hair and wacky collection of Hawaiian shirts, I had somehow caught the attention of the company’s visionary founder, Larry Ellison. Within four years, I had been promoted to vice president, the youngest person ever in that position. Soon I had the multi-million-dollar salary, stock, and perks to go with it.

  Yet there I was on a workday morning, frozen in place under the covers in my apartment on Telegraph Hill. I did not feel happy or fulfilled.

  I was supposedly living the American dream, but I was lost.

  Later that day, I managed to drag myself to the office, where I found Larry and told him about the malaise that had sunk in. His proposed solution was easy and direct: “Why don’t you take a sabbatical? Take three months off, go take a look around.” He added, “And pull yourself back together.”

  To be honest, I didn’t really know what the word “sabbatical” meant, but Larry was my mentor, and I trusted his advice. Later that day, I called my friend Arjun Gupta to tell him what I was going through. He had just quit his job to start a new company, and he suggested we travel to Nepal and India together. I thought the trip sounded like a good diversion. I had no idea it would change the course of my life.

  I eventually found myself in the city of Trivandrum, in southern India, near the backwaters of the Arabian Sea. We’d made our way there for one 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.

  With a chorus of Hindu chants and clouds of incense wafting over us, Arjun and I told her about business goals and how, we suspected, they were in some way connected to the existential confusion we both felt. Then Amma looked at us with her compassion and intensity, and said, “In your quest to succeed and make money, don’t forget to do something for others.”

  With these words, the idea for Salesforce began to take shape. I knew in my head that I wanted to build a company that harnessed innovative new technology, but in my heart, I also wanted it to be committed to giving back. On that day in Trivandrum, the seed was planted. Two years later I left the Oracle nest to do just that.

  When we signed the Salesforce incorporation papers in 1999, we wanted to make sure the notion of giving back was deeply ingrained in the fabric of its company culture. Of course, I hoped Salesforce would prosper by traditional measures—but I was equally determined that it would have a positive impact on the world. So, from the outset, we decided to identify the values that would serve as our bedrock. At first, they were trust, customer success, and innovation; later, we added a fourth, equality. We also decided that no matter how big the company grew, we would always set aside 1 percent of our equity, product, and employee time for charitable causes, an initiative we call the 1-1-1 philanthropic model.

  Salesforce, if you’re not familiar with us, pioneered the use of cloud computing as a way to provide essential “Customer Relationship Management” or CRM software to organizations of all sizes. As one of the first companies of our kind to allow our customers to download our products online and store their data securely in the cloud, we created a new business model that made smarter, more intuitive technology tools for large and small businesses accessible through subscriptions rather than onerous long-term contracts.

  A few short years ago, I believed the chief reason Salesforce’s market valuation had risen from $1 billion to more 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.

  This isn’t just my opinion; there’s a growing pile of evidence that markets reward businesses that do good and that companies that have a social mission tend to be more successful. In a competitive business such as tech, where luring top talent can be the difference between profit and loss, it’s often something intangible—like a diverse, inclusive, values-driven culture—that determines where the best and brightest talent decide to work.

  In the last few complicated, uncertain years, through a mix of confusion, exhaustion, and exhilaration, I’ve come to appreciate how our values truly define who we are as a company. They’re not some decorative spire perched atop our headquarters office tower in San Francisco. They’re part of the concrete and steel rebar in the basement. Time and again, they are what has kept the whole structure from keeling over.

  I wrote this book to share all that I’ve learned on my journey, taking Salesforce from a poorly funded startup operating next door to my old San Francisco apartment to one of the fastest-growing technology companies that also ranks high on annual lists of the most admired businesses and best places to work. But this book isn’t only
about my journey—or about Salesforce. It’s about how to create a culture where doing well is synonymous with doing good in order to thrive in a world where a company is only as strong as the principles it adopts. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but my hope is that whatever business you’re in, this book will inspire you to bring your values to work.

  A NEW DIRECTION

  Packed into the giant auditorium, in every seat and lining the walls, was a veritable army of global influence: leading politicians, executives, bureaucrats, academics, journalists, and policy experts. On either side of me sat my four fellow panelists, an esteemed group of technology CEOs and thought leaders. Behind us, the title of the keynote panel that was about to commence flashed on the screen in giant, intimidating type. It wasn’t a title, really—more like a loaded question: In Technology We Trust?

  As we sipped water and smoothed the creases in our jackets, our moderator, the business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin, kicked things off by declaring that the public’s eroding confidence in the judgment of technology companies was “the most pivotal and important discussion that’s taking place right now, really in industry anywhere.”

  He was right. In early 2018, the tech industry was experiencing an acute crisis of trust. Recent revelations of alarming privacy breaches at Facebook, and even possible Russian-backed voter manipulation in the 2016 presidential election, were not sitting well with a large portion of the American public. The burning question on many of the minds gathered here at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a deceptively simple one: What are we going to do about it?

  Technology is a field to which I have devoted my entire career. I’ve often marveled at how today’s advances in computing have transformed the way we live and work. During the last decade, the start of a period often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we saw extraordinary advancements in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, genetic engineering, robotics, and 5G connectivity. Massive tributaries of digital information are now flowing at a speed and scale unthinkable even a decade ago while AI and robotics are breaking down barriers between humans and machines. Everyone and everything on the planet is becoming connected, creating complex business challenges and disruptions nobody could have foreseen.

  I’ve always believed that technology holds the potential to flatten the world in wonderful ways; to foster a more open, diverse, trusting, and inclusive society while creating once-unthinkable opportunities for billions of people. Just one year from the publication of this book, it’s likely that more people on the planet will have mobile phones than have running water or electricity in their homes.

  But it had also become clear that technology is no panacea and such outcomes were far from guaranteed. New pressures and dangers had emerged, and with them came moral conundrums that none of us had ever considered. The global inequality gap had caused an erosion of trust in institutions, while complex social and economic issues including privacy, ethics, education, the future of work, and the health of the planet had begun to insert themselves, often uncomfortably, into the corporate agenda. On that snowy morning in Davos, one simple truth had become abundantly clear: These issues could no longer be dismissed as the domain of nonprofits, activists, or philanthropists. Every business, old or new, was struggling to figure out how to operate in a world where customers were beginning to hold them to higher moral and ethical standards.

  A new day was dawning, whether we were prepared for it or not.

  Meanwhile, the message I’d been hearing from my own employees, customers, and other stakeholders at Salesforce was simple: The world was changing, and the essential nature of what a business is, and how it should operate, needed to evolve. These weren’t temporary, or incremental, shifts, either. They were structural and permanent. And to meet these challenges of the future, the one essential element every company needed most was what Salesforce had adopted two decades earlier as its number one value: trust.

  In the panel’s opening minutes, Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet (parent company of Google) remarked that she believed the public hadn’t lost trust in Google; after all, she pointed out, people kept returning to its platforms daily to perform trillions of searches. It was a line of argument I’d heard from my tech colleagues many times before.

  When it was my turn to speak, I said, “Trust has to be your highest value in your company. And if it’s not, something bad is going to happen.”

  I could sense a ripple of discomfort in the room. After a short pause, I began by pointing out other moments in history when regulators had fallen asleep at the wheel. I mentioned tech in the same breath as credit-default swaps, sugar, cigarettes—harmful products that companies had been allowed to peddle to customers, unconstrained by regulations. Our industry had been given a regulatory pass for years, I continued. “When the CEOs won’t take responsibility,” I said, “then I think you have no choice but for the government to come in.”

  When I arrived home from Davos, my phone began ringing nonstop. Leaders in the technology industry kept calling, one after another, to inform me that I had betrayed them. Apparently, I had broken ranks, or crossed some sort of imaginary line. And they didn’t like it. My wife, Lynne, jokingly started calling me “the regulator.”

  Crawling out on that limb was, at the time, a scary feeling. As a lifelong champion of technology, I felt deeply conflicted about my new role as its apparent chief critic. But no amount of scorn could persuade me that growth, innovation, profit, or any other motive, was more critical to the success of a business than building and sustaining people’s trust.

  I decided to write this book because I genuinely believe we are on the brink of a Fifth Industrial Revolution, one in which trust will be earned by those companies that apply the technologies developed in the Fourth to improving the state of the world. In the future, innovation cannot advance in a positive direction unless it’s grounded in genuine and continued efforts to lift up all of humanity. Companies, and the people who lead them, can no longer afford to separate business objectives from the social issues surrounding them. They can no longer view their mission as a set of binary choices: growing vs. giving back, making a profit vs. promoting the public good, or innovating vs. making the world a better place.

  Rather, it must be and. Doing well by doing good is no longer just a competitive advantage. It’s becoming a business imperative.

  I wrote this book because I believe that every company and every individual—from new hires to those sitting in the corner office—has the potential to become a platform for change. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because in the future, success will demand it.

  On that snowy weekend in Davos in 2018, I finally realized that the tables had turned. Salesforce, the company I’d led for almost twenty years, was guiding me in a new direction.

  Lots of businesses talk about values, but in turbulent times, when they matter most, executives often forget to operationalize them. They see values as expensive luxuries that should remain nailed harmlessly to the wall when making major business decisions. If some new product or initiative does not seem to advance the company’s stated values, many CEOs seek solace by distancing themselves. They rationalize that it’s really not their business to monitor how people use the products they offer to the world.

  I’ve written about corporate responsibility in my three previous books. In Compassionate Capitalism I first wrote about how corporations can make doing good an integral part of doing well; in The Business of Changing the World I shared the stories of fellow CEOs who made philanthropy a key part of their businesses. In Behind the Cloud I chronicled the first decade of both building the business of Salesforce and integrating philanthropy into the fabric of the company.

  But now I’ve written Trailblazer with the realization of what was really happening at Salesforce. A series of leadership trials and challenges we faced—and the bumpy, sometim
es painful, occasionally inspiring, process of addressing them—ultimately changed how I understood the future of business, upending my perception of what made the company work.

  If there’s one thing that the experiences I’ve shared in these pages taught me, it’s that tough times are when values and culture matter most. And whether or not we got it right on the first try, the paths we’ve chosen at Salesforce have been the ones that best upheld our collective values. Not just sometimes, but always.

  Had it been only the company’s executive leadership guiding these decisions, the story would have unfolded differently. But we never would have weathered the challenges and reached the heights you’ll read about in these pages had it not been for the fact that just about every important decision we’ve made was inspired, if not guided, by our stakeholders—our employees, customers, partners, investors, and the communities where we live and work.

  To succeed in the future, every person in every business will need to forge new paths. Because no matter what you do or where you work, everyone can contribute to building a successful business and a better world. So if the central premise of this book can be boiled down to a single point, it’s this: A culture rooted in values creates value.

  My sincere hope is that this book will inspire you to look inside yourself, ask the right questions, and blaze your own trail. What you do next matters.

  ONE

  BEGINNINGS

  The Benioffs of San Francisco

  Here are two surprising personal tidbits about me: I graduated from college. Not only that, I majored in business.

  Among my peers in the tech sector, those résumé points are something of a novelty. Countless Silicon Valley founders and CEOs proudly confess to quitting school to pursue their dreams. It’s no secret why the story of the “dropout billionaire” is so predominant. It’s the kind of compelling personal narrative that magazine editors and Hollywood screenwriters love. It also props up the old mythology that in America, a person’s success is largely a matter of sheer determination and will. A genuine hero is someone who learns about business by building one.