by Marc Benioff
Then, little by little, other business leaders began stepping over the threshold. Yelp Inc.’s Jeremy Stoppelman thanked me for “creating aircover for the rest of us, so we can feel OK about speaking out.”
Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube and a Salesforce board member, supported me too, and Apple CEO Tim Cook published an op-ed in The Washington Post saying that “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business” and encouraged others to stand up and oppose such legislation.
Levi’s, Gap, PayPal, Twitter, Eli Lilly, and others soon joined the chorus calling on the governor to repeal the law, while mayors and governors from all over the country enacted bans on official travel to Indiana. And the indie rock band Wilco canceled an upcoming Indianapolis tour date.
A few days later, I was at the gym when my phone rang. “The governor of Indiana is on the phone for you,” said a voice on the other end.
Then the governor picked up. “Marc, what’s going on?”
After thanking Governor Pence for calling, I decided to dive in. “You’ve got to change this law, or we will bring a rolling thunder of economic consequences against the state of Indiana,” I told him.
From there, our conversation grew tense. The governor asked me what “we”—by which he meant the loose consortium of Fortune 500 companies that opposed the bill—were going to do next.
“How do we work together to solve this issue?” he asked.
I explained that our only goal was to ensure equality for all people. If Indiana simply committed itself to treating everyone the same, the opposition would vanish. It was as simple as that.
On March 31, six tumultuous days after he’d signed that discriminatory bill into law, Governor Pence held a televised press conference. “We’ve got a perception problem,” he acknowledged. Two days later, he signed a revised bill with language that made it clear business owners could not use the law as justification to discriminate based on a customer’s sexual orientation.
Although we’d clearly won, I can’t say we “celebrated” the outcome. I would have preferred that this fight had never happened, but I was proud of the way our employees had mobilized at every level. For the first time, I saw the full significance of the culture we’d built. It felt like a major fork in the road for the company and also for my role as its CEO.
Our employees had essentially tested me. They needed to know that I was willing to stand on principle, no matter the consequences, so they could feel protected and free to bring their authentic selves to work.
* * *
As it turned out, the Indiana fracas didn’t bruise our business in the least. To the contrary: In the months that followed, Salesforce continued to post record earnings and growth. If anything, we’d actually raised our profile by inserting ourselves into the center of a national conversation about American social justice and values.
At the time, my conviction frightened a lot of people. Many in business, and especially on Wall Street, preferred to think that a CEO’s responsibilities ended at the furthest edge of the corporate campus, and that all corporate leaders should limit themselves, at least publicly, to discussing matters of business.
Thankfully, that’s beginning to change. In recent years, more and more leaders have begun talking about problems greater than profit and loss. Apple CEO Tim Cook, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, and many other chief executives are leading with values and embracing social purpose as part of their business, as did Unilever’s Paul Polman and PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi during their tenures as CEO. Larry Fink, the chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm with $6 trillion under management, has been an outspoken supporter of this new philosophy; in 2018, he informed employees that each company his firm invests in must “not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”
But let me be clear: What Indiana ultimately showed me is that no one person is in charge of the moral compass of a business. The phone calls and messages from my employees proved that if the leadership won’t act, they’ll have to face the bayonets poking up from below. Gone are the days when companies can recruit and retain top talent without upholding a commitment to values.
In the coming era of business for good, everyone who taps their alarm button in the morning and heads to work can play a role. This isn’t just a matter of what the C-suite does. It’s about what happens on the shop floor or in the rows of office cubicles. Just as CEOs can’t look away when social issues clash with their values, employees can’t pretend that whatever its leadership decides to do is above their pay grade. If leadership won’t act on a company’s values, employees at every level need to hold them accountable.
In the past, having a conscience was something most people would categorize on a company’s balance sheet as “other.” But that’s no longer the case. No business will succeed in the future until it embraces the notion that values create value.
We Call Them Trailblazers
In 2016, I asked Adam Seligman and Sarah Franklin, the leaders of our developer relations team, to plan a spring event for some of our most advanced Salesforce practitioners, the folks who learn to master our software and implement it inside their own companies. Even though they don’t work for us, these practitioners are cherished members of our team. They are some of the greatest innovators and evangelists. Not just for our products, but for our culture.
For Adam and Sarah, the first task in planning an event for these practitioners and brand ambassadors was to come up with a name for it. “What do I call these people?” I asked during a meeting with senior executives.
We debated this for a while but remained deadlocked. Then Sarah spoke up. “We call them trailblazers,” she said.
The word didn’t grab me right away. I knew we had developed the Trailhead online training program, but I was more concerned with capturing the spirit of this community than I was with convenient branding. On the other hand, I wasn’t on the ground working with these people day in and day out. I didn’t understand them as fully as Sarah did.
The next day, with the name still undecided, Sarah sent me an email I’ll never forget, because it contained the best encapsulation I’ve ever read of the mindset leaders need to expect, and harness, in their teams and organizations. “They want to learn, to better the world, they aren’t afraid to explore, they crave innovation and enjoy solving problems and also giving back,” Sarah wrote. “They are people that care about culture and diversity. They are trailblazers.” I was convinced.
To my astonishment, the word “trailblazer” caught fire among our extended family of employees, customers, and partners, to the point that we quickly exhausted the supply of black hoodies we’d made with the term emblazoned on the front. I even used “Trailblazer” as the theme of my next keynote speech at Dreamforce, the annual blowout software conference we host in San Francisco.
But the trailblazer mindset isn’t confined to technology, or software. Trailblazers are people like Sarah: people with ideas and convictions, who aren’t afraid to voice them. They are people like Scott McCorkle, who ring the alarm bell when they see others being discriminated against or threatened. They are people like the untold number of employees, customers, and even competitors who supported our stance in Indiana because they could plainly see that intolerance and fear are the enemy of progress and profit. They are anyone in any field, industry, or company anywhere in the world who believes they have a role to play in building a better future.
Before the leadership challenges that encouraged me to write this book became urgent imperatives, I thought I understood Salesforce. The outsize response to that single word was the first clue that our business model, our values, and our founding focus on giving back had become a collective mindset—that liberated people from merely accepting the state of th
e world as it currently was. The determination of the people in our orbit to hike through wild, untrammeled territory without a map was changing companies, and the world around them. Trailblazers had become the focal point of our culture.
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In years to come, the principles we live by, and how we discuss them and apply them, will be the essential function of any thriving business. Not because acting as responsible corporate citizens is the right thing to do, but because consumers demand it.
I realize that this is a pretty heady concept. It’s probably not what you’d expect to learn in business school. So in the next few chapters, I’ll show you precisely how Salesforce’s values, and our community of trailblazers, have influenced its business results, how I came to understand that no matter what your company does or who your customers are, true value comes down to one thing: remembering what you stand for.
I think it’s only proper to begin with trust.
THREE
TRUST
The Number One Value
My long personal relationship with Toyota dates back to 1982, when I used the money from the videogames I’d written as a teenager to buy my first car: a black Supra.
Back then, my appreciation for the company centered on this machine’s fetching, angular lines and the seductive noises it made when I stomped on the gas pedal. In time, my fascination with Toyota only grew, although it became less visceral and more intellectual.
The source of that transition was the company’s unparalleled reputation for quality and reliability. This led to astonishing success in conquering the U.S. auto market, which it achieved by adopting a complete commitment to kaizen, a philosophy of continuous improvement. As I studied business and launched my own career, I set out to learn all I could about Toyota, and I closely watched the rise of its CEO, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of the founder. I quickly developed a deep admiration for the company, particularly Toyoda-san’s motto and all that it stood for: “There is no best, only better.”
So it was with a heavy heart that I sat down on February 5, 2010, to watch a press conference that had been hastily convened near Toyota’s headquarters in Nagoya, Japan. What transpired was unprecedented in the company’s seventy-three-year history.
Toyota had recently surpassed General Motors as the world’s largest automaker. But just as the company and its CEO should have been celebrating this long-sought achievement, they instead faced a series of disturbing safety recalls, including evidence of defective accelerator pedals. Worse, news reports suggested Toyota had been slow to act even after it understood the extent of the problems, and had attracted the scrutiny of U.S. regulators. Toyota’s hard-earned reputation for quality was eroding before the world’s eyes.
On its face, this was a standard cautionary tale for companies that pursue ambitious sales targets above all else. If I learned one thing from observing how my father ran his business, it’s that it is never a good strategy to disappoint your customers. When you make a product that your customers rely on to safely transport themselves and their families to work, school, soccer practice, and the grocery store, the absolute last thing you want to lose is their faith. Toyota had built its reputation on values, and the most important one of all was trust.
As the founder’s grandson, Toyoda-san took the recall of at least 8 million vehicles—and all of the fierce criticism it generated—personally. At the press conference, he told the gaggle of reporters that he “deeply regretted” the concerns these problems had caused people, and assured them that it was his “personal responsibility” to fix the situation. Then he bowed in apology.
I recognized the significance of this humble gesture immediately. Loss of face, symbolized by such a bow, is a powerful cultural totem in Japan—a tradition embodied by samurai and military leaders who, when defeated or facing a loss of personal honor, fell on their swords. I could tell his apology was heartfelt. I also knew it wouldn’t be enough.
Every CEO has to perform a delicate dance between two priorities: trust and growth. Intellectually, we all know that whenever growth is put before trust, a problem will eventually appear. It can happen to the best of leaders, and to the most respected of companies. Speaking before the U.S. Congress, Toyoda-san acknowledged it plainly: “We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization, and we should be sincerely mindful of that.”
When a crisis of this magnitude occurs, it’s usually a sign that the CEO has to reset the company’s values and, beyond that, make sure the message cascades down into every level of the company. If the CEO doesn’t make this shift, then he or she is unlikely to remain CEO for long. Toyoda-san never wavered in his commitment to fix this situation quickly. “My name is on every car. You have my personal commitment that Toyota will work vigorously and unceasingly to restore the trust of our customers,” he told Congress.
As I watched these proceedings, live, from my living room, the seed of an idea began to take form.
* * *
I made my first visit to Japan during my go-go years at Oracle, where I was tasked with introducing new products that I had designed expressly for the Japanese market. It was also the period in my life when I was struggling to find meaning in my work.
At the time, I was barely pushing thirty and my well-paying Silicon Valley tech job looked plenty good from the outside. To my eyes, however, the sheen had begun to wear off. I’d started to dream about pursuing a larger purpose.
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.
Part of the allure of Japan for me is how its companies have a knack for creating brilliant, efficient, and beautiful things, from mass-market products like cars and cameras to designer T-shirts, food, and fine art. It’s a country that treasures masters of innovation and design. So it should come as no great surprise that one year after we founded Salesforce, Tokyo became the location of our first office outside the United States.
In those early days, the fact that I loved going there was icing on the cake. Japan also represented a seemingly limitless market for our business. Over the years, Salesforce had picked up many prominent Japanese customers, including Canon and Japan Post. Toyota wasn’t yet a big customer of ours, but I desperately wanted them to be. I was confident that Salesforce had the right products to help the company repair its relationship with customers. I let my Japan team know that I was formulating some ideas in case we ever landed a meeting. I never imagined that opportunity would so quickly arrive.
About a year after the recall, we finally booked a meeting with Toyoda-san and his top executive team. They had been visiting the United States for the Detroit Auto Show and planned to make a stop at the Salesforce office in San Francisco before heading home. It’s an understatement to say I was excited—it’s not every day you get to meet one of your business heroes.
There was only one problem. On the date of Toyoda-san’s proposed visit, I had scheduled a family vacation in Hawaii. Disappointing my wife and kids by hopping on a plane back to California wasn’t an option, so with genuine personal regret I declined.
Incredibly, Toyoda-san agreed to fly to Hawaii. Unbeknownst to me, he had a house just a short distance from mine. Deep down, I suppose I realized that in order to convince him that we could help him win back the trust of his customers, I first need
ed to win his trust. And where better to do it than on the serene island of Hawaii, where I always felt the most peaceful and centered? Clearly this was meant to be, I thought.
For days on end, I’d been scribbling down ideas on scraps of paper only to wad them up and toss them out. I asked myself over and over, What would be most useful to a global company struggling to win back its customers’ confidence after a once-unthinkable crisis?
What Toyota needed now, I believed, was a new vision for how it connected with its customers. It needed to find a way to restore, and strengthen, these emotional bonds, to invoke that visceral thrill and sense of connection that my teenage self had felt the first time I got behind the wheel. Suddenly, something clicked.
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. What if, I now wondered, we could build a social network based on Chatter that would connect drivers to the larger Toyota community in multiple ways? What if, instead of driving off the lot never to be seen until their vehicles needed servicing, Toyota’s customers could feel the company’s helpful presence every time they turned the ignition key? The solution, I thought, was to connect Toyota drivers, dealerships, and the mothership in ways that developed greater trust between the brand and its customers.
With only forty-eight hours until the meeting was set to begin, I called Dan Darcy, who had worked with me on some of the largest and most transformative projects Salesforce had ever executed. He brought the sales team together to create a live demonstration and build a slide deck to show how this concept could work.