by Marc Benioff
From the start of Salesforce, our culture totems have been surprisingly basic. The main one is a commitment to getting involved in a world beyond our walls. Our people want to help communities; they want a balanced life; they want to help others grow; and they want to make our customers and company successful.
Yet from our determination to build a pioneering software business that runs in the cloud to our decision in 2018 to throw our weight behind a ballot referendum to address the pressing issue of homelessness in San Francisco, we’ve often found ourselves standing on an island.
Some people roll their eyes at us. They assume we’re just virtue-signaling, trying to call attention to ourselves. Others remark that we wouldn’t be nearly so bold if we hadn’t been posting record quarterly revenue. From the inside, however, those skeptical views do not influence the way we think.
To get big and stay that way for a long time, you don’t need an exotic collection of values, you just need good ones. And you can’t fake them. If a culture is phony, derivative, halfhearted, or misguided, it will eventually sink you. A genuine culture built on fundamentals like trust and aimed at the goal of business for good is more than enough, but only if it genuinely outweighs the traditional business motives of driving revenue, growth, and profit.
Back when we started Salesforce, few companies were preoccupied with culture. Not only were we early to the party, we’ve had a twenty-year head start to engage in a process of trial and error.
In Part I, I showed you how difficult and messy, but completely gratifying, that journey has been, but I also tried to give you a glimpse of how that culture you may have imagined at the start becomes a living, breathing, evolving organism. And how, as a leader, it’s up to you to evolve along with it. Picking values to live by is the easy part; putting them into practice requires extraordinary attentiveness and persistence.
The management authority Peter Drucker once laid out a simple rule that has always stuck with me: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Based on my experience at Salesforce, culture eats everything.
All of the business tactics we’ve deployed, every line of code we’ve written, and every marketing campaign we’ve dreamed up over the years are, in the end, ephemeral. Each one could be discarded and replaced at any moment as the world around us changes. It’s our culture’s ability to evolve with the pace of change, to live and breathe on its own, to be both familiar and dynamic, that really drives us forward. For businesses that want to have any hope of thriving in the future, culture—and the values that define it—is what will drive financial success.
Today’s world is so rife with challenging economic, social, and political issues that it’s no longer feasible for a company to turn away and conduct business as usual. The bigger you get and the more people you impact, the harder it becomes to simply let your products define you. Over time, your employees and customers, not to mention investors, partners, host communities, and other stakeholders, will want to know your philosophy for doing business. They want to know if you have a soul.
We’ve seen moments when two or more of our values have painfully and publicly come into conflict, but we’re getting used to it. Inevitably, these periods of discomfort will come. If your culture is strong, you will survive them. In fact, they may even make you stronger. To us, these situations have always proven to be oddly reassuring. They remind us who we really are.
In the old world of business, proprietary knowledge was a weapon. Sharing your deepest insights was counterproductive because it could only make your rivals stronger. CEOs responded to probing questions with practiced vagueness. I suppose I could have kept these lessons to myself, but that never occurred to me. I can’t imagine operating in an environment of trust and transparency at work while simultaneously building soundproof walls to keep the world out.
If Salesforce has taught me anything, it’s the power of creating a community that will grow itself by opening its arms to anyone and sharing our values. Everyone at our company believes they have a greater responsibility, and a voice, and the tools at their disposal to be a trailblazer.
In other words, knowledge isn’t truly powerful until it’s shared.
So as the Salesforce CAQ, I’m always going to answer your questions. I’ll tell you what I think the business of the future looks like and give you some prescriptive advice for building your own. That’s the purpose of Part II: I want to take you on a journey to see how our trailblazing culture works from the inside out.
SEVEN
OHANA
Redefining Corporate Culture
I’d always been disruptive and entrepreneurially-minded; I’m pretty convinced it’s just how I’m wired. The truth is that the instinct to launch a company, and to make excellent products, turn profits, grow and innovate, exists inside millions of us. It’s a perfectly natural human endeavor. Here’s the problem: When it comes to defining a culture, these entrepreneurial impulses can be a lousy guide. And they depend to a large extent on external forces, such as the economy, competition, and the talent pool, that you can’t fully control. If you use those priorities as a guide, you’re going to make mistakes, just as I did in the early days.
What you actually need as your guide is a set of principles defining why and how you want to build the company you have in mind. After all, a company is fundamentally made up of people, not things, joined together on a shared mission. And how you approach that mission is a direct by-product of the culture you create.
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.”
He’s right, of course. A company’s culture is not just about the people on its payroll, or the customers it works with. Its sphere of influence has to include every single person it touches, even tangentially, including people who may be far enough removed that reaching them isn’t even part of your original plan. In the end, defining that culture isn’t a matter of drawing a circle of trust around just your employees and customers, it’s about widening that circle as much as possible.
To give a few examples: Before Indiana’s legislature passed that discriminatory law, I never expected to be in a situation that would require us to take stands on social issues. Until we conducted that salary audit, I had no idea that the issue of unequal pay was something we would have to address. And it wasn’t until 2018, when some of our employees complained that our software was being used by Customs and Border Protection at a time when federal agencies were separating migrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border, that we realized that our commitment to doing good would have to extend to examining the way our products were being used. But in each case, our values showed us the way forward.
What I’ve just said might give you the idea that culture is simply a tool you can use to navigate complex issues. But it’s not that simple. Values aren’t like an algorithm you can program to tell you whether to use strategy A or B to address issue C. They require far more careful attention, and more active upkeep.
So to the extent that there is a “secret” to our culture, it’s the way in which living our values creates a true sense of belonging. By working hard to build a great company together, and focusing on giving back in our communities together, we’ve built bonds that have grown stronger over time. And the two most important building blocks have been our shared commitment to volunteerism and giving back, and our shared mission in service of our customer.
That shared sense of purpose and meaning is why Salesforce’s culture has come to embody the Hawaiian concept of Ohana. It means “family,” but it applies to an extended family including those not even related by blood. I first learned about Ohana as a child during family vacations to Hawaii, a place wh
ere I always felt happy and peaceful. As an adult, Ohana came to mean any group of people bound by a responsibility for one another, and by their shared values. That was the culture I wanted for Salesforce from the beginning—one that was inclusive of everyone and would underlie everything we do.
* * *
Like a growing child, culture needs to be continuously nurtured as the company gets bigger and ages. I consider this to be one of my most important jobs at Salesforce.
In the two decades of our existence, our culture has evolved in ways I hadn’t expected. We adopted numerous new practices to help bring our culture to life, animating it in both subtle and obvious ways as we grew from a start-up into a Fortune 500 company. We’ve had to be attentive every day in nurturing our culture, especially as we have grown so fast. I believe that vigilance about protecting and nurturing our culture is a key reason why we have been ranked on Fortune’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” for eleven consecutive years and have been consistently named among the best places to work in cities around the world.
That’s not to say this hasn’t been without growing pains—every family has moments of friction that can produce painful, heated arguments like the ones we’ve sometimes experienced at Salesforce. But I always say that trust needs to be the number one priority, and for many of us, the people whom we trust the most are our family members. Of course, we all have been disappointed by families, and I know not every family is the perfect model for the kind of culture we seek to create. But it’s the closest analogy I can imagine.
Some chief executives see the notion of treating employees like family as counterproductive to success. Take Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who has been known to describe his company’s culture and management philosophy as being like “a team, not a family.” In fact, the infamous Netflix slide deck, which has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times and is cited often by other executives, likens the company to a pro sports team with “stars” at every position—and makes clear that workers demonstrating anything less than “star” performance have no future at the company.
I can understand the logic of wanting star players performing at high levels in every position, and trading or just letting go of players who aren’t contributing as much to the team’s mission of winning championships. However, I take a different approach, more like the culture developed by Coach Steve Kerr for my beloved Golden State Warriors. Even though he helms a team, Steve believes that having good people is more important that just having good basketball players; he understands that players come and go, but the ethos on the court gets passed down from one game and one season to another. The best teams play together like a family who trust one another to have their back.
Admittedly, there’s a spiritual element to Ohana. On corporate retreats in Kona, Hawaii, our executive team can occasionally be found standing together in the warm surf, their toes buried in the hot sand, as they join hands for a traditional blessing ceremony before diving into three long days of examining the company in excruciating detail. For us, Ohana is about so much more than just ceremony and rituals. Ohana means treating our forty thousand employees, our nearly one hundred fifty thousand customers, and the millions of others whose lives we touch, the way we would treat our closest relatives.
But this culture doesn’t just exist in our offices. No matter where I am, I want to feel it. I want to feel it when I’m just wandering around the offices, when I’m meeting with customers, even when I’m thousands of miles away talking to other CEOs.
For instance, I recently met with David MacLennan, the CEO of Cargill, the nation’s largest privately held company, based in Minneapolis. When we walked out of his office, we were surprised to see a dozen people wearing TRAILBLAZER T-shirts and hoodies congregated in the hallway, waiting to ask us for a picture.
“Are these your employees?” David asked me.
“No, they are your employees,” I told him. “But they use Salesforce technology here, and so they have become part of our family.” They are Salesforce trailblazers—the pioneers, innovators, and lifelong learners who inspire us and represent our Ohana.
Ohana has also become an expression of our ethos, especially as we continue to invite more and more newcomers into our already sizable family. We’ve added eighteen thousand new employees in the last two years, with no end in sight. So we’ve had to work hard to ensure that we’re infusing our culture into everything we do. It has to guide our thinking when we consider taking stands on social issues. It has to be part of how we brainstorm new products. And it needs to inform how we work every day, including everything from the way we onboard new employees, the design of our new workspaces, and our emphasis on giving back, health, mindfulness, and well-being.
Welcome to the Family
On the first day, we welcome new employees to the family, the Ohana.
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. We do this to create a memorable experience with their new colleagues and to show our employees that our values aren’t just some abstract, aspirational notion, or worse, merely words on a corporate slide or plaque. We want to give them an idea about how our values are living values, and how giving back is the heart of our culture.
A month later new employees attend Becoming Salesforce, a daylong boot camp, to learn more about our culture, where executives share their experiences at the company, tips on how to thrive in our fast-paced environment, and an overview of our products. There’s a campground where people can get familiar with the various employee resource groups, ethics training, and, of course, Salesforce goodies like T-shirts and stickers.
Equally important, though, is having our existing employees welcome their new colleagues into the Ohana. Just as a family prepares for a new addition, Salesforce has an entire system for ensuring new employees feel at home even before they walk in the door. Each new hire is assigned a “trail guide” for guidance, support, and coaching during his or her first ninety days at Salesforce. We also organize lunches and team meetings for the first few weeks with each new employee’s co-workers. In fact, the manager picks up the new employee on orientation day for a special lunch out of the office. When you begin to cement those bonds on day one, we find, they quickly grow stronger.
“Camp B-Well”
Having experienced that major burnout at Oracle before my sabbatical, I know firsthand that the health and wellness of our Ohana must be a top priority. I also knew that it is in everyone’s interest that our employees and their families feel supported to lead healthier lives. When people are healthy, they are more engaged, more productive, and happier, and more likely to stay with the company. And they treat our customers and one another with more respect, compassion, and gratitude.
Of course, like most corporations, we subsidize fitness club memberships and offer meditation and yoga classes. But as anyone who has ever not gotten around to taking advantage of such benefits at their company knows, simply offering these programs doesn’t necessarily mean they are having an impact. So just as we use data to analyze our pay practices, we use data to determine what wellness programs to offer and evaluate their effectiveness. Our HR team regularly reviews employee well-being claims, looking for any issues that may have bubbled up.
As we passed the twenty-five-thousand-employee mark, we saw a distinct rise in behavioral health issues often linked to stress, such as depression, substance abuse, and anxiety. According to data taken from healthcare claims, which was of course anonymized and aggregated, we found that these diagnoses were rising more quickly than other health issues such as cancer and
cardiac problems. We were, after all, growing fast in a fast-growing, highly competitive market and industry—increased stress and associated behaviors were a by-product among some of our Ohana.
The data showed us we had to act. Jody Kohner and Stan Dunlap, senior HR executives, consulted with Dr. Kim Peter Norman, professor of psychiatry at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, and identified four critical approaches to address the increasing levels of stress and anxiety. The first is Nourish, providing information to help employees establish healthy eating goals. The second, Revive, is about recharging our bodies and minds with resources for sleeping well, taking time off, and unplugging. The third, Move, focuses on physical exercise and activities to maintain a healthy body. And the last approach, Thrive, provides tools for improving mental health, for managing stress and building resiliency to roll with life’s punches.
These four pillars became the foundation for a program we called Camp B-Well. Our executive chef, Bill Corbett, recorded short instructional videos that any employee could stream or download to learn how to cook healthful, nutritious meals, and we brought in the food activist and renowned Berkeley-based chef Alice Waters to talk about the benefits of eating locally and organically. We hosted renowned sleep expert Matthew Walker for a discussion on how sleep can improve health, learning, and performance.
We also asked every employee to add a well-being goal to their V2MOM plan, the goal-setting process we use at Salesforce (which you’ll learn more about in Chapter Nine). We encourage employees to draw on the support of the Ohana by posting about their goal—and their progress toward it—on their Chatter profiles. For me, it’s been so inspiring to see how many people in our Ohana became committed to prioritizing their well-being.