Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  At a recent executive offsite, we’d concluded a difficult day of reviewing numbers and setting agendas to improve our performance. Some executives admitted to me afterward that all the tough questioning had taken a toll. I couldn’t blame them; that night, even I couldn’t fall asleep with all these thoughts rattling around in my head.

  But the next morning, with the clarity of a rested mind, I realized that I hadn’t listened deeply enough to my team. I had been so focused on the numbers that I hadn’t addressed the need to relieve the tension, reduce the noise, and get back to our beginner’s mind. I hadn’t been listening with my heart.

  First thing that next morning, I strode into the offsite and announced, “I’m going to do mindfulness with you for ten minutes.” My team of forty quickly shoved their coffee, eggs, and turkey bacon aside and got comfortable.

  “A lot happened in this room yesterday,” I said. “We can take all of that into our heart, and then let it go and breathe…”

  “Let’s all forgive ourselves for any mistakes that we’ve made along this journey and forgive others,” I added. “In the spirit of yesterday’s presentation, may we all have the ability to speak our truth and say what we really feel and believe. And if someone needs to speak their truth to you, you’re able to deeply listen. You’re able to hear it in your heart.”

  Then I asked my colleagues to slowly bring their minds back into the present moment and the reality we faced—a thicket of numbers and nettlesome operational details.

  Now, it’s not often that I turn management meetings into mindfulness seminars. I’m aware that not everyone is comfortable with meditation, and I respect that view. But I can say this: At that particular meeting, the energy in the room meaningfully shifted. We all began to listen deeply.

  The Power of an Open Mind and a Blank Sheet of Paper

  I may have given you the impression that cultivating a beginner’s mind and practicing mindfulness are mainly a way of summoning seismic, breakthrough ideas. That’s true, but being in the present moment, paying attention to where you are and what’s going on, can help us deal with those smaller, less monumental issues that dominate the bulk of our time. Whether it’s a brilliant product vision that will revolutionize an industry, an idea for reorganizing your team, or tweaking a plan for growing your customer base, the devil, as they say, is in the details.

  This is the flip side of beginner’s mind—turning your ideas into a reality. To make it a reality, you have to convince others to align with your vision and plot a course forward. You need to prioritize. And at a big company, you need to scale the process of setting priorities in order to get tens or hundreds of thousands of employees on the same page.

  How exactly to do this was a problem that I’d been grappling with since the 1990s. When I returned to my job at Oracle after my first life-altering sabbatical, I was committed to growing, both personally and professionally, but the company didn’t have any executive training or professional development programs. So I decided to do what millions of Americans do: I started attending seminars and taking instruction from video and yes, even audiotapes. My mentors were people whom I’d never met, like Deepak Chopra, whom I found hugely inspiring and who forced me to think about what’s truly important to me, and my values. I must have listened to hundreds of hours of self-improvement lectures on cassettes in my car in those days.

  During this period I stumbled into a strange melting pot of ideas. Over time, the concept of cultivating a devotion to beginner’s mind and various other personal development philosophies started mashing together. It turned out to be a fortuitous combination.

  At Oracle, I had just been promoted to run direct marketing and was struggling to determine what, exactly, I wanted to do in this new position—let alone what was expected of me. I had a budget, and a mandate to spend far less than I was taking in. But how I got there was almost irrelevant. There was no long-term or short-term plan. I needed a framework that was more suited to how I wanted to lead and be measured. So I began tinkering with one that would provide what I had been missing: a clear and simple way to identify our objectives, map out how we would move toward them, and, no less important, assess how well we had achieved them.

  So I cleared my mind, pulled out a blank sheet of paper, and formulated a few simple questions. What is the vision for what I want to achieve? That’s the first question that must be asked, because if you aren’t crystal clear on where you want to go, good luck trying to get there.

  The next question followed logically: What’s important to me about this goal? What are the values supporting the vision?

  After making a list of values, I proceeded to rank them in order of importance. It turned into a kind of binary exercise that forced me to choose between pairs of competing priorities. As I quickly learned, if everything is a priority, nothing is. I asked myself: What’s more important? Is it a short time to market, or hiring more people? Is it innovation, or hitting the numbers?

  It wasn’t easy, but in the end I finally had clarity about how to prioritize the investment of time and money.

  Once I’d identified the vision and values, I needed to establish the methods for implementing them. So the third part of the framework outlined all the actions and the steps that everyone would need to take in order to get the job done. These methods were also ranked in order of priority, and each one included an estimate of how much it would cost us.

  The fourth part identified the obstacles we might have to overcome to achieve the vision. What challenges, problems, and issues were standing between us and achieving success? Which obstacles are the most critical to resolve, and how are we going to go about resolving them?

  Finally, I tackled the problem of coming up with the appropriate measures: How will we know when we are successful? In my mind, a subjective yes-or-no judgment wouldn’t cut it. We needed data and metrics to determine what success would look like.

  This framework resulted in a process I called V2MOM, which stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. The V2MOM boils down to these five questions, which create a framework for alignment and leadership:

  Vision—what do you want?

  Values—what’s important to you?

  Methods—how do you get it?

  Obstacles—what is preventing you from being successful?

  Measures—how do you know you have it?

  The five parts of the V2MOM gave us a detailed map of where we were going as well as a compass to direct us there. It became a major part of the Salesforce story, and a big factor in our success. Each and every time, the V2MOM process would start with a blank slate—we don’t want the past to dictate our future.

  Starting with a beginner’s mind we could declutter our minds, dispose of outdated assumptions, eliminate distractions, and allow ourselves to focus on the what, why, and how of whatever we set out to do. Moreover, memorializing it on paper would make it far easier to get everyone in alignment. We needed to all be in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, and looking out for the same rocks and shoals that could sink our boat to have any chance of arriving safely in port with our cargo.

  I also came up with four key principles for laying out this document, in addition to starting with a blank slate each time. First, everything had to be ranked in order of priority. Second, every word mattered. Third, the plan had to be easily remembered, and fourth, it had to be easily understood.

  Three years later, after I left Oracle and was gearing up to start Salesforce, you can probably guess what was one of the first things I did. Together with my co-founders, I pulled out the largest sheet of paper at hand—an American Express envelope—and, on the back, scrawled out the new company’s vision and values. This was the start of what became our first V2MOM, essentially our first business plan.

  That first V2MOM was the start of a long journey, and looking back I
can laugh at our hubris and occasional cluelessness, but we managed to achieve what we laid out on that American Express envelope.

  The V2MOM became the perfect framework for engaging our beginner’s mind approach to business planning. Articulating our vision kept us grounded in reality, while writing down our values kept us in touch with our guiding principles. Naming our obstacles forced us to honestly confront what was holding us back, and quantifying what success looked like kept us honest—to ourselves and to one another.

  The V2MOM would prove to be our most important management tool, guiding every decision at Salesforce and setting one uniform course for the entire company as we went from four hundred people to the forty thousand we have today. At its core, the V2MOM is a powerful exercise in alignment, allowing teams and companies to create a shared understanding of top-level priorities while providing employees with clarity and visibility into how their work contributes to the company’s overall success. In my view, the V2MOM is also something more.

  The beauty of the V2MOM is in its simplicity, and the fact that it works for every phase in the life cycle of an organization. We’ve found that the exact same structure that helped us outline our business plan as a scrappy start-up is just as effective for outlining our annual goals as a public company. I’ve also found that whenever we’ve run into an intractable problem, it’s because we didn’t write it down and get our mind around it within the V2MOM process.

  Today, at Salesforce, we’ve expanded the scope of the V2MOM to both individuals and teams across the company: Each year, every single department and every single employee drafts their own. As a result, this practical exercise in raising our corporate consciousness courses through the entire organization from top to bottom. There are forty thousand V2MOMs—one written by every single employee, cascading up and down the entire organization!

  And to foster transparency, we publish every V2MOM on our corporate social network Chatter instead of hiding them in a vault. And this open-book approach helps break down departmental divisions and harness the collective energy of the entire company. Anyone can look up any employee’s V2MOM to see how each plans to contribute to our company’s future. We even built an app that allows every employee to track their progress on each item in their V2MOM.

  Suffice it to say, we take the V2MOM pretty seriously. Starting in August, I begin drafting the top-level document for the coming fiscal year with Jim Cavalieri, who was the sixth person we hired at Salesforce. Then for several months we pore over every single word with my executive team before we present it to the larger senior management group at our annual fiscal-year kickoff event in February. That’s when we open up each section for feedback; we want to know how we can make the document even better. This can create some family tension as we debate priorities, action items, and other elements, but it always results in more awareness and alignment across every group.

  I’ve also found that this process can help navigate a relationship. After the board agreed to make Keith co-CEO, we crafted a V2MOM to flesh out our new roles. Working together to identify our vision and values as a team helped us see how our skill sets could complement each other. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that apart from the business of running Salesforce, we made trust with each other our top value.

  I’m not sure how many of our employees have made the connection between the V2MOM process and the notion of mindfulness. But over the years, it’s become clear to me that the true power in this exercise is maintaining a beginner’s mind throughout the process.

  But here’s the thing about the V2MOM: Unlike the Lean Methodology, the Agile Method, or any number of other management trends that have caught fire in Silicon Valley, the V2MOM isn’t designed first and foremost for tech companies. In fact, there is nothing tech-specific about it at all. It’s a way to operationalize the vision and values of any kind of company or project.

  Our chief strategy officer, Alex Dayon, for example, creates V2MOMs with customers across a variety of industries—sometimes even before they sign up to buy Salesforce technology. For example, Alex once worked with Lars Ulrich, founder and drummer of the band Metallica, to craft a V2MOM focused on helping the band to take social media engagement to the next level, further develop the brand based on its music, and be the “most socially connected band in the world.”

  And then there was the time he helped Stella McCartney come up with her own plan when she bought back her label from French luxury group Kering. During that critical period after regaining full control of her label, the V2MOM helped this forward-thinking designer focus on her vision for people to “look good, feel good and do good” and to make decisions driven by the value she places not only on her business P&L but also on environmental P&L. Watch for sustainable clothes from Stella McCartney one day!

  Of all the things that make our culture what it is, few things get to the heart of the matter faster than the V2MOM. In fact, whenever a young entrepreneur asks me for advice, the first thing I do is pull out a blank piece of paper.

  Last year, for example, I shared a plane ride with Bastian Lehmann, the CEO of Postmates, an on-demand delivery service that promised to deliver practically anything in under an hour. As an investor, I’d been sharing advice with Bastian for a few years. His start-up had created a sensation, and I found him to be extremely smart and driven.

  On this plane trip, however, I could sense he was a little out of sorts. “I think you’ve lost a little bit of that loving feeling,” I told him.

  Bastian acknowledged he was feeling “a little down” over a looming restructuring and other changes in his business.

  I asked him the basic questions: “What do you really want?” and “Where do you want to be?” As he began to elaborate with drawn-out answers, I cut him off. The antidote to his doldrums was obvious: He needed to get clear on the vision and values for his rapidly growing business. So, as you might expect, I got out a blank piece of paper.

  By the time we landed in San Francisco, Bastian had identified the top four values for Postmates. And that night, he told me, he went home and filled out his Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. Getting back to those basics helped Postmates weather those changes that had worried Bastian, and the company has since strengthened its position as the industry leader in on-demand delivery and filed to launch an IPO.

  Whatever happened to that first V2MOM my co-founders and I crafted in those early days of Salesforce? Something told my co-founder Parker Harris to hang on to that American Express envelope. He framed it and gave it to me on the day of our IPO, June 23, 2004.

  Whether you’re starting a business, working to create alignment within your team or organization, or tackling a personal challenge or goal, one principle holds true: Start with a beginner’s mind and a blank sheet of paper.

  TEN

  STAKEHOLDERS

  We Are All Connected on This Planet

  While I was vacationing in remote Pacific islands with my family in the summer of 2018, fully unplugged for the longest stretch in years, one of the most unimaginable things that could have gone wrong in my absence, did.

  All of a sudden, without warning, Salesforce became enmeshed in a heated, complex, and potentially damaging crisis. And the fact that I was off the grid would only make the fire burn hotter.

  We had just set foot on the sand in Easter Island when my wife’s phone lit up with the SOS from San Francisco. While I’d been halfway around the globe, untethered from—and blissfully ignorant of—what was going on at home (and for that matter, anywhere in the world), I learned that the Trump administration’s immigration policy, which had already exploded into an intense and deeply emotional national debate, was impacting Salesforce in a way that I’d never considered.

  These tensions had been escalating for some time, as the administration announced policy after policy that seemed designed to wrap a hermetic seal around our borders
and keep immigrants out of the country. I was very vocal in expressing concerns to the administration, as was the company, about the appalling human tragedy unfolding at the U.S.-Mexico border. When reports had emerged that federal agents had been separating migrant children from their families at U.S. detainment facilities, millions of Americans were rightly up in arms. When The New York Times broke the story in April 2018 that more than seven hundred children, including more than a hundred children under the age of four, had been taken from their parents, it was like a bucket of lighter fluid poured on an already raging fire.

  Now my team back home was sending up a flare to let me know about the existence of an open letter, written to me by four Salesforce employees and signed by 867 others, protesting what they saw as an egregious violation of the company’s four founding values.

  They’d discovered that the U.S. Department of Customs and Border Protection was one of our customers.

  In March of that year, we had issued a press release noting that CBP had selected Salesforce to help them modernize some of its business processes. By providing the agency with access to our enterprise software, the authors of the letter believed, we were aiding and abetting the Trump administration’s immigration policy at the border. They felt that doing business with CBP ran afoul of everything the company stood for, and if we allowed this to continue, it would negate the fundamental reason they’d chosen to come and work at Salesforce in the first place.

  Specifically, the letter asked me to “re-examine” our contract with CBP, “given the inhumane separation of children from their parents currently taking place at the border.”

  “Many of us choose to work at Salesforce because of Salesforce’s reputation as a company that stands up against injustice,” the authors wrote. “We want our work at Salesforce to have a positive impact on our friends and neighbors, not to make us complicit in the inhumane treatment of vulnerable people.” Then came the kicker: “We believe that our core value of Equality is at stake.”