Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  If you’d told me, that day, that this system-wide, all-hands undertaking would require us to completely rethink the way our engineering teams approached their work, I would have been terrified, though not completely surprised. With technology advancing at a blistering pace, what got you here, as they say, isn’t what will get you there. As Parker told the engineering team, “Let’s forget all the old versions. It’s no longer a new version of Salesforce. It’s a new vision.” What I didn’t anticipate at the time is how it would test our resolve and the culture of trust we had built over the years.

  As soon as Parker and our engineering team launched this campaign, they experienced one failure after another. To work on mobile devices, the software we’d built to run on desktop computers had to be reconfigured with an entirely new technical architecture. The problem: None of us had been trained to do this. None of us even had any deep knowledge of how to build simple software that took advantage of a touch-screen interface.

  Our first development sprint, monumental as it felt for us, produced a mobile app that our customers basically hated. They complained that it was too clunky and slow. This failure, on top of many others, had hacked away at our morale and confidence. Fortunately, we knew enough about innovation to understand that you can’t use the same approach and expect a different result. So we decided it was time to shake things up.

  In 2012 Parker began looking for a new mobile team leader, and he settled on Srini Tallapragada, who had led large engineering teams at two of our competitors, Oracle and SAP, and was universally respected across the industry. Shortly after Srini arrived, I called a special meeting of my core management team to rethink our mobile plan. As we went around the table in my office, several executives offered detailed suggestions. When Srini’s turn came, however, the newcomer had only five simple words: “It will be awesome, guaranteed.”

  Everyone laughed at his expression of bravado, including me, but the impact it had was remarkable. The room seemed suddenly re-energized. And when the mobile team got wind of what their new boss had said to the big boss, they loved the fact that Srini had stuck his neck out so boldly. They trusted him immediately.

  One of the first changes Parker and Srini made had nothing to do with writing code. They removed the entire mobile team from their modern new offices in the Landmark building across from San Francisco’s iconic Ferry Building and installed them back into the same inferior space they’d recently abandoned a few blocks away. The engineers weren’t exactly thrilled about being exiled to this desolate workspace with peeling paint and no views, amenities, or furniture, but Srini insisted. He knew that sometimes, to see a problem in a new way, you need a change of 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 already tried—is practically a religion. Until then, we’d been loyal disciples. Each time a version of our mobile app failed, we’d iterate endlessly, holding out hope that these small corrections would add up. But they never did. And now Parker and Srini wanted their team to start over.

  The team needed a morale boost. So Parker and Srini rolled out the office whiteboard on which Parker scrawled, in big, colorful letters: AWESOME, GUARANTEED. Of course, the engineers didn’t feel their work was awesome at the time. Nonetheless, every one of them took a leap of faith and signed it.

  The mobile team worked long days in their dreary war room. It was exhausting, and exhilarating at the same time. At one point, they began building a new app from scratch. In the final stages of coding, some forty engineers—including Srini—worked through the night. The team spirit they built on this project lasts to this day.

  In May 2014, and after several grueling years of fits and false starts, our vision for a mobile version of Salesforce had been realized. The Salesforce1 Mobile app set the standard for enterprise mobility, winning us scores of new customers, including companies like Philips and Stanley Black & Decker, whose employees were freed from having to be constantly tethered to their desks.

  When the new San Francisco Salesforce Tower opened in 2018, the engineers from the mobile team hung a piece of that whiteboard in the shared space on their floor. On it were the words AWESOME, GUARANTEED.

  Over the years I’ve learned that trust and transparency are two sides of the same coin. As CEO, I could lay all our company secrets—all our code, all our financial data, all our technical troubles—out for all our employees to see, but if those employees can’t count on one another, no amount of openness on the part of management will be enough. The people in the trenches need to be able to trust that their team, and their leaders, will be right there on the ground, working beside them, when the going gets tough. Guaranteed.

  The Deal That Never Was

  Trust may seem like a simple concept, but in fact it’s quite multifaceted in nature. To some extent, it’s a matter of trusting others, but at the same time, it’s also about ensuring that others can trust you. For a leader, the most difficult of all is knowing when it’s appropriate to trust your own judgment, even when no one else around agrees with you.

  As a rule, I’ve never been someone who spends a lot of time worrying what other people think of me. I suppose that explains why I’m sometimes caught on video dancing at courtside during Golden State Warriors basketball games, or showing up at work with Salesforce’s Chief Love Officer, aka my pet golden retriever. I’ve always been inclined to march to the beat of my own drum, even when others might think I’m crazy. After all, I trusted myself enough to quit a great job to start a company in a small rented apartment, even after every venture capitalist in Silicon Valley told me that my idea was worthless.

  I’d learned over time to trust my instincts and thought I had a pretty good track record in that regard. But it wasn’t until recently that I came face-to-face with a leadership quandary unlike any I had studied in business school—a high-stakes situation that forced me to ask myself the uncomfortable question: What if your instincts are wrong?

  At some point, every leader will find themselves taking a position that requires them to discount the judgment of all the smart people around them. Ultimately, it’s going to come down to a simple choice: Do you continue to go with your gut and follow what every instinct is telling you is right, even if it may cost you the trust of the people who’ve helped you get where you are?

  This was the very dilemma I found myself up against in 2016 when I became convinced that Salesforce ought to buy Twitter.

  The business case, in my head, was a strong one. I believed that acquiring the platform would give our customers a new and versatile point of public presence. It would allow them to engage with their customers one-to-one and to more efficiently market, sell, and support their products. It also seemed like a brilliant way for companies to solicit candid feedback and diverse perspectives—the seedlings of innovation—on an entirely new scale.

  Twitter, I knew, would also offer our customers access to a potential treasure trove of data from its more than 300 million users.

  And I strongly believed that by tapping into this social platform, we, too, could vastly improve our advertising, e-commerce, and other data-rich applications. Plus, Twitter was struggling, and the way I saw it, the merging of our two companies would be beneficial for us both.

  Unfortunately, however, my management team wasn’t just lukewarm about the idea; their positions on the issue ranged from highly skeptical to staunchly opposed. They didn’t understand how buying a distressed social network that was out of favor with many investors made any sense to our core business, which was selling software.

  These concerns failed to deter me. At least at first.

  Although we tried to keep our pursuit of Twitter quiet, the news eventually leaked out. The more people told me I was crazy, the more my ardor for the idea grew. I told people that Twitter was an “unpoli
shed jewel” and a precious one at that. I even settled on a rough price I was prepared to pay for the company, upwards of $20 billion.

  My team and I were still at loggerheads, and as the rumors swirled, even I began to sense that I might be sailing into the eye of a storm. Our stock price had begun to fall, and not by insignificant amounts. Apparently Wall Street didn’t have much more confidence in the idea than did my team at Salesforce.

  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.

  That fall I scheduled a meeting with the credit ratings agencies with the intent of persuading them to give us investment-grade underwriting we’d need to make the Twitter acquisition, which would have been our largest ever. The meeting was set to take place early one morning at Salesforce headquarters, and at the appointed hour, I climbed out of my car, feeling mostly ready to make one of the biggest pitches of my career.

  That’s when I failed to properly judge the gradient of a curb, tripped on it, and went down hard.

  Mark Hawkins, our chief financial officer, had been standing next to me before I tumbled. His voice was familiar, but the frantic tone was not, when I heard him yell:

  “Big man down!”

  Take it from me: It’s one thing for a CEO to take a public spill in front of his executive team. It’s another to do so on a heavily trafficked sidewalk in full view of scores of employees and just as many horrified passersby. It didn’t help that I’m six feet five inches tall, either. I’m told that the thud was tremendous.

  My colleagues rushed toward me, and bent down to see if I was conscious. I quickly pulled myself off the pavement and looked down at my jeans. My knee had landed on a metal plate, which ripped my pants wide open and sliced into my leg. I could feel blood oozing out, dripping down my shin. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the fall had split my meniscus. Keep going and ignore the pain, I told myself.

  “Guys, let’s power on,” I said out loud, as my chief of staff, Joe Poch, stared at me in disbelief.

  Despite my best efforts to hide it, I was mortified. I’m not a clumsy person, and prior to that day I’d managed to step out of a vehicle and remain upright without incident for the last fifty years. Looking back, though, I don’t think the timing was a coincidence. There was a lot going on in my head. My feet were telling me what my brain would not.

  I made a valiant pitch to the ratings agencies that day, and I knew that they’d give me the benefit of the doubt on the transaction. But my own doubt, which had been festering silently in the furthest reaches of my mind, proved too strong in the end. Two weeks later, onstage at Dreamforce, I looked out over the worried faces of my colleagues, directors, and investors, nearly all of whom were opposed to a Salesforce-Twitter union, and decided it was time to let go. It wasn’t so much about our stock price, which had continued to slip on the deal speculation, as the realization that I needed these people to trust me more than I needed to trust my own instincts. So I did something I rarely do. I apologized. And I made it clear that I had decided to walk away from the deal.

  The nice thing about stumbling, figuratively and, in this case, literally, is that it always yields insight. What the Twitter incident taught me is that there are many different strains of trust, and sometimes those strains will collide. The true measure of a leader, no matter what business you’re in, is whether you can navigate those collisions and come out stronger.

  Whether you’re starting a business, managing a team, or running an entire company, trusting your instincts can be essential in bringing a vision or idea to life. I now understand that trusting yourself is only half the story. To be effective as a leader, you need a reservoir of trust to draw from. And once you use it all up, it can take years and years to replenish.

  It’s possible that Salesforce lost untold billions in potential value by walking away from the Twitter deal. It’s also possible that the acquisition would have destroyed the company. We will never know.

  What’s not included in any calculation is the value of the trust we retained.

  * * *

  At one of the regular dinners with entrepreneurs that I host at my house in San Francisco, I once had a long talk with a young start-up CEO. I asked him to identify his company’s highest value. “Innovation,” he replied, in a tone that implied the answer was obvious.

  When I asked why he hadn’t answered “Trust,” he looked at me strangely and explained: “I just don’t believe it. I believe that the best idea wins, and that’s the key to Silicon Valley success.”

  Maybe that’s how it was, once, I replied, “but it’s not how it is going to be going forward.” Yes, innovation is important. But when you start valuing innovation over trust, then you’re really in hot water; you’ll be the frog luxuriating in warm water and unable to react when it comes to a boil.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s no way to put a dollar value on values. And yes, there will be times when prioritizing values, especially trust, will come at the expense of profits. In the short term, that is. But the money your company makes in any given quarter will never be more valuable than the trust you stand to lose over time.

  If you ask most successful CEOs, especially founders, to name the major milestones that really made their companies great, they usually settle on a story that revolves around a breakthrough product or idea. It might be a revolutionary clean-energy technology, a wildly popular accounting software program, or some small tweak to a search engine’s algorithm that left the competition gasping—or anything in between.

  It’s not surprising that these tangible things are the ones most of us default to. Every new innovation or product has a “before and after,” and the difference is something you can quantify. Check out these sales numbers, this customer retention rate, and these earnings! Amazing!

  I wish I could tell you that I’m above getting excited about something so superficial as an eye-popping percentage increase or a hyped-up product rollout. But I’ve bragged many times about Salesforce’s products and profits. When we figured out how to provide all of our customers with the ability to customize applications, I could have happily whipped out a chart that showed our revenue jumping 25 percent over the next fiscal year and explaining why such a gain was astounding for a company our size. It was just the kind of graphic-friendly home run we CEOs love patting ourselves on the back for.

  I sincerely believe, however, that the real story of Salesforce’s success is best explained by the moments when trust prevailed over stubbornness or ego—the moments when transparency triumphed over fear of embarrassment, or even the potential loss of millions of dollars in revenue.

  A great product that your company builds can be like a mighty oak. It can provide everyone who planted it with a pleasing patch of shade to camp under for years. Values like trust may not make for dramatic earnings charts and they may never become the tallest trees. They are more like hundreds of small acorns you bury in the ground in the hope that they’ll become saplings. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that if you nurture them, those saplings eventually grow up together. There’s not a single tree on earth that’s sturdier than a forest.

  FOUR

  CUSTOMER SUCCESS

  Transformation Through Technology

  When I learned that my personal financial adviser at Merrill Lynch was on the line, and that he’d described the call as “urgent,” I figured that meant one of two things, neither of which was the least bit good. Either the stock market was taking a nosedive or one of my investments had flatlined.

  Actually, the news was even worse than that. It was about Salesforce.

  As it turned out, my adviser wasn’t calling about my portfolio, but rather to warn me that my company was on the verge of
losing his company’s business. In 2013, Merrill Lynch wasn’t just any Salesforce client. It was our single biggest.

  Six years earlier, when Merrill decided to install Salesforce software for its twenty-two thousand client advisers, it was the first truly massive business to sign with us. At the time, I’d declared this a major coup and the surest sign yet that Salesforce was poised for growth. I’d reasoned that if this leading financial services firm trusted us to manage all their highly secure, technically sophisticated systems and transactions—in the cloud, no less!—there was nothing we couldn’t do.

  Now we apparently had a problem. My adviser had just stepped out of a company-wide meeting during which John Hogarty, Merrill’s COO, had told thousands of advisers that the company ought to kick Salesforce to the curb—prompting the whole room to erupt in applause. “No one likes your product here,” my adviser explained, unnecessarily. “You need to get involved and fix this quickly.”

  To make matters worse, the Merrill Lynch Mutiny of 2013 (as I’ve come to think of it) wasn’t the result of some outside circumstances that none of us could control. The company hadn’t been seduced by a competitor, or slashed its IT budget. The explanation was brutally simple: They didn’t like our software.

  The problem was this: Merrill’s advisers, who were the guardians of its bedrock business, valued speed and functionality above all else. Salesforce software took too long, they thought, and the interfaces we’d built for them weren’t intuitive or easy enough to use. Simple tasks required too many small steps, siphoning off priceless minutes from their workdays. Even something like retrieving a contact from their address books, for instance, required three clicks, each with a six-second wait time. The more I learned about the nature of their frustrations, the worse it sounded. I wasn’t the least bit surprised that Merrill was livid and that we were on the verge of getting fired.