Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  Apart from our ambitious proposal, we needed to create a welcoming atmosphere for our guests. With the knowledge that gift giving is highly prized in Japanese culture, I asked a local artist to paint Toyoda-san a custom surfboard, with a scene of the Pacific Ocean flanked by local Hawaiian flowers and trees. We also arranged to have flowered Hawaiian shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops delivered to the airport where our Toyota guests would be landing.

  The weather forecast had called for rain, but on the morning of the meeting I was grateful to see it hadn’t materialized. It turned out to be a gorgeous, picture-perfect, sun-drenched day. I dressed in white linen pants and a yellow shirt patterned (I couldn’t help myself) with Hawaiian flowers. Then I waited.

  When I opened my front door, Toyoda-san and I bowed as we shook hands. Incredibly, he and his entourage had come dressed in the casual attire I’d sent them. It was quite the scene: Executives who ran one of the world’s largest companies had shed their typical attire of impeccably tailored suits and freshly shined shoes and were dressed to hit the surf.

  There was instant rapport, and Toyoda-san and I quickly settled into my dining room as our teams got situated around us, taking in the view. I’ll admit, sitting in my home by the beach, with the Pacific Ocean as the backdrop, was just a little more relaxing than some conference room in a skyscraper. I felt that a layer of formality had lifted, and hoped that that would help them give our ideas a more open, thoughtful hearing.

  As we looked out at the ocean that separates our two countries, I told Toyoda-san about my love for Japan, and about my fond memories behind the wheel of my black Supra. I didn’t do this to curry favor or to stroke his ego. I think anyone who’s been in business a long time knows that relationships in business are just like those in life, in the sense that it’s all about connection, not transaction. Business is temporal, but relationships are eternal. Which means they have to be genuine, and built on common ground.

  Then I shared our idea. “Picture a car that has a trusted relationship with its owner,” I began. “One that tells its owner when a tire is low, and where the next gas station is, and when it’s time for a tune-up. But it’s much more. It can help customers forge more trusted, personalized relationships with the company, and with its network of dealers and mechanics, and even with other drivers.”

  At first, Toyoda-san seemed unsure, and understandably so. He’d spent years at the forefront of automotive technology, but he wasn’t a digital native. “I’m encountering a social network for the first time,” he admitted. “What do you call it?”

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

  Toyoda-san smiled back. “Can we take that name?” he asked.

  “Hai,” I answered affirmatively, in Japanese.

  Toyota Friend resonated deeply with my guests that day, and before they left, we had happily committed to build it with them. The concept was ahead of its time, and it took many years for the company to fully integrate technology from us and other companies to achieve the vision. But once they did, it soon became clear that the idea had been the right one—over the next few years, other major automakers copied it or came up with their own versions. Today Toyota’s five thousand stores and 280 dealership companies are using Salesforce to shift from a car-centric to a customer-centric model that engenders trust.

  Personally, the most gratifying for me is the fact that Toyoda-san and I became lifelong friends. Over the years, we got together during several of my trips to Japan, and he graciously agreed to speak at some of our Salesforce events. It wasn’t just any product or technology that created that bond. Trust brought us—and our companies—together.

  Today that crisis seems a distant memory. Toyota is once again one of the most trusted and admired brands in the world. And what led the company back was the same value that got it there in the first place.

  Warts and All

  In the fall of 2018, I flew to Detroit to attend a meeting of The Business Council, an organization that brings CEOs together to share best practices and to kick around challenging new ideas. It didn’t take long for the conversation to come around to a familiar topic: the erosion of trust across many institutions. This trend wasn’t a new revelation to the executives of the Fortune 100 companies gathered there, but it had risen to an unprecedented level of urgency.

  According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, a survey that covered twenty-eight countries and queried more than thirty thousand people, nearly 70 percent identified building trust as a CEO’s number one job, ahead of producing high-quality products and services. Nearly two-thirds said they believed that CEOs should take the lead on policy changes instead of waiting for government to act. Obviously, I agreed. (The more recent 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer found an even greater percentage of respondents, 76 percent, expect CEOs to take a stand on challenging issues as well as demonstrate their personal commitment inside and outside the company. And 75 percent said they trust their employers to do what is right, significantly more than any other institution.)

  This data was not surprising given the recent headlines. Wells Fargo had conceded that it had rewarded employees for opening accounts for customers who hadn’t requested them, and didn’t need them, and that it had billed those customers for fees on unwanted insurance and residential mortgage services. Uber had taken heat for a number of sexual assault accusations involving its drivers, and a woman engineer who formerly worked at the company had come forward with reports of sexual harassment and a toxic, dysfunctional culture that was hostile to women—the fallout from which cost founder and CEO Travis Kalanick his job. Each week seemed to bring a new revelation that Facebook had violated the trust of the 2 billion people populating its unbounded virtual universe in spectacular ways, culminating in a scandal involving Russian attempts to meddle in U.S. elections. Meanwhile top executives had tried to dismiss or diminish these problems and deflect blame.

  In Detroit, we discussed how talent is fleeing many companies because they believe those companies’ actions are in conflict, or out of alignment, both with their own values and the values the businesses attempt to project. The bottom line is that people want to work for employers who strive to create purposeful platforms for good. This isn’t some intellectual construct. When bright employees see misalignment with their values, they view it as a personal betrayal—and then they walk.

  Meanwhile, this very scenario was playing out in a loud, public fashion at Google’s offices around the world, where thousands of far-flung employees had organized a walkout to protest the company’s paying millions of dollars in exit packages to male executives accused of sexual misconduct.

  Google has always been one of the brightest lights of the technology industry. It’s well known to be a place where many of the most talented, ambitious people want to work, and where they are handsomely compensated for doing so. To me, the lesson has always been clear: No company, no matter how venerated or beloved, can afford to become complacent when it comes to trust. And that work needs to begin inside your company.

  * * *

  When we first introduced Chatter, our internal social network, some senior managers thought it was a bad idea. While it would clearly make collaboration and coordination across distance and departments simpler, some feared that it would also give employees a megaphone with which to gripe with their colleagues about problems at the company. Chatter, the naysayers reasoned, would surely backfire on us.

  They were right on the first point: People would gripe. Straight away, a number of Salesforce employees formed an internal Chatter group called Airing of Grievances, which was exactly what it sounds like. I didn’t know this subgroup existed until one of my executives came to my office one day in a cold sweat. It seemed that some of the conversations happening on Chatter were painting a not-so-flattering picture of the company. I asked him to display Chatter on the big screen in my office so
I could get a good look at what was happening.

  I don’t think my reaction was quite the one he expected. “This is great!” I exclaimed giddily.

  At that moment, I’m pretty sure he thought I had lost my mind. But I believed that as a leader, you need to be a lot more concerned about what people aren’t saying than about what they are. In fact, it’s when people stop griping that you need to worry, because that’s the first sign that problems are getting swept under the rug.

  Most of the grievances aired on Chatter were not exactly Code Orange. Like There’s a truck hogging a parking space, or The cashew bin at the snack station is empty. But there were also important insights that forced us to reexamine long-held practices.

  One of the first significant grievances had to do with the company’s onboarding process. Apparently, new hires were less than thrilled with it. The thread was flooded with complaints from new hires about laptops that hadn’t arrived, phones that weren’t connected, missing ID badges, and so on. The tipping point was when a new employee quit on her first day. A consensus emerged that our onboarding process was akin to “hazing,” and we knew we had to fix the problem immediately. For a company that had added ten thousand employees in a single two-year stretch, onboarding was mission-critical.

  So we revamped the entire process to make it less erratic and more consistent, while also increasing the amount of personalized, one-on-one attention for every individual employee. Just like that, the volume of complaints trailed off.

  At many companies, decisions are made behind the soundproof doors of boardrooms. If it goes too far, secrecy at the top can make employees feel as if the company’s most important initiatives are being directed by some mysterious puppetmaster. I don’t believe this makes anybody especially eager to implement them.

  So at Salesforce, we actually livestream our annual executive offsites so every employee in the company can watch. We also set aside time to field questions from employees. As you might imagine, this isn’t exactly bingeworthy television. Not everyone bothers to tune in. What we can’t measure is the value of people simply knowing that they can.

  The funny thing about values is that their impact is not always quantifiable—even for a company as obsessed with data as we are. When people have a good experience, they’re not even aware that in a parallel universe, it might have been a bad one. There’s no way to tabulate how much lost productivity we headed off by fixing the onboarding system, or how many bright employees we prevented from leaving. I’m not saying that having to wait an extra day for a laptop would have caused people to up and quit on the spot. However, I do believe that even a small whiff of distrust, even if it only registers in an employee’s subconscious, can lie dormant for months or even years, reemerging only when they’re presented with a flattering outside job offer.

  If there’s any data of value to be mined from all of this, it’s that transparency isn’t about what we gain, but what we avoid losing.

  Maybe I’ve taken transparency a bit too far at times. I know I sometimes embarrass people with my candor. Finding the right balance is not easy. Sometimes it can be downright frightening. But once you’ve genuinely embraced the notion of total transparency, it also becomes liberating. It starts to permeate every decision you make. It starts to lessen the destructive notion of “us” versus “them.” It overcomes and exposes hidden agendas and encourages positive, ethical behavior.

  It becomes, in short, a competitive advantage.

  Vulnerability Makes You Stronger

  Compared to Google or Facebook, or many other Fortune 500 companies, Salesforce is not a household name. We don’t have stores or engage directly with consumers. We don’t make smartphones or flat-screen TVs emblazoned with our logo. I’m sure that to many of you, our name blends in with that of a lot of newfangled tech companies.

  Even if we’re not universally known, there’s no question that we’ve worked hard to make ourselves knowable. In fact, when we were just starting out, our very existence depended on it. When we offered our cloud service to the public, we were asking customers to trust us to safeguard not only their financial data and sales leads, but also troves of sensitive data about their customers. Oh, and we were also asking that they trust us to keep all this information secure in some frighteningly obscure place we called “the cloud.” Today, everyone stores everything in the cloud without giving it a second thought, but back in 1999, that was a pretty radical sales pitch.

  Plus, we’d built our business on a subscription model that made it painfully easy to fire us, simply by deciding not to renew our software on any given month. At the first hint that we weren’t 100 percent reliable, our customers could abandon us.

  In other words, we knew from the beginning that the key to our success wouldn’t solely be the cleanly designed interface that made our products easy to use, or the brilliant code that made our products work. Then as now, our secret ingredient would be our customers’ confidence that we would consistently deliver on each and every one of our promises.

  For a tiny start-up struggling to make ends meet, though, that was easier said than done. In our early days, back when many of our systems were barely out of the beta phase, we suffered occasional system-wide glitches that either slowed down our service or knocked it completely offline. Our business was a black box, and our customers had no way of seeing what was happening behind the scenes. On any given day, logging in and trying to actually use the product was their only way of knowing whether it was working optimally, suboptimally, or not at all.

  For a business that boldly promised to lead its customers into the future with its cutting-edge technology, this lack of transparency around the status of our service was a major vulnerability—and a major source of frustration for customers. When glitches occurred, we did what most companies do in these situations. We made like an ostrich, burying our heads and saying as little about it to our customers as possible. We knew our engineers were working around the clock to fix the issue, but we didn’t think it was particularly wise to call our customers’ attention to our screw-ups. Frankly, we were also embarrassed. In retrospect I suppose it’s no wonder that one of our competitors, we later discovered, had signed up for a free Salesforce trial so it could report any service interruptions to the press.

  One day in 2005, during an offsite meeting with top management, my co-founder Parker Harris was in the middle of a presentation when one of his staffers rushed in to interrupt him with an urgent message. The expression on Parker’s face as he read the note told me everything I needed to know. My fears were confirmed when he paused, looked out at the room, and uttered the words no CEO ever wants to hear: “Our site is down.”

  It took Parker’s team ninety minutes to get things up and running, which was a pretty impressive feat given the circumstances. To our customers who were calling and emailing frantically and receiving no acceptable answers from us, however, it had seemed like an eternity. Trying to return to the day’s stated business was fruitless. We understood that this had been a wake-up call, telling us it was finally time to trade in that black box for a clear, transparent one. After all, how long could we continue to hide from all the customers clamoring for answers?

  That’s when Parker spoke up and proposed a bold solution. “Let’s tell everyone exactly what’s happening in real time,” he said.

  Straight away, many executives pushed back. “Why should we show the entire world our vulnerabilities?” they asked. At first, I agreed with them. I didn’t like the idea of creating some interface that allowed anyone with a laptop anywhere in the world to monitor our service disruptions. It seemed like corporate suicide.

  Within minutes, though, I started to see it differently. Sure, the easiest thing to do was nothing; to just sit back, clench our teeth, and wait for the issue to be resolved. The bold, counterintuitive, and quite possibly correct move was to embrace radical accountabi
lity: to let our customers see what was happening, warts and all.

  Long story short, that’s how trust.salesforce.com came into being. To this day, the site provides real-time information on our system performance, scheduled maintenance, transaction volume and speed, and any and all security issues. And over time, we’ve let our customers in on more and more of what was going on behind the scenes of the company, from sharing our proprietary plans for new product rollouts well in advance so they could plan for them, to previewing the content ahead of our annual Dreamforce conference.

  I won’t try to deny that when you put yourself out there, there’s usually some pain involved. Vulnerability is scary. But it also makes you stronger.

  Awesome, Guaranteed

  January 9, 2007, was a date that tech and gadget enthusiasts recall with the same reverence as the 1969 moon landing. It was, of course, the birthday of the iPhone.

  To the many industry insiders who watched Steve Jobs unveil this world-altering device at the Macworld convention in San Francisco, the iPhone’s significance wasn’t immediately clear. But I just knew in my gut that the future had arrived. Soon everyone in the world would be carrying these devices, which weren’t really phones but powerful miniature computers, in their purses and pockets.

  I realized that many of these people would be Salesforce customers, and these people would want the ability to run our software on these sleek devices. Parker, who attended this event with me, had the same reaction. He called the iPhone “earth-shattering.” And he was right.

  The next day, I went in to work and announced the pivot to end all pivots. From that moment forward, I told my team, we’d be redirecting our engineering resources to a new goal: turning Salesforce from a desktop company into a mobile one. Mobile functionality would have to be infused into every single product we made.