by Marc Benioff
What they didn’t know, however, was that CBP’s use of our software was for very specific purposes that had nothing to do with separating migrant children from their parents—like revamping its human resources capabilities and automating some of its business tasks. But that distinction hadn’t been made clear, and was easily swept aside in a heated political moment.
Because I’d been on a digital detox and slow to learn about the conflict, let alone respond, some employees had grown understandably antsy and decided to share the letter with the media. That’s why I returned from my month-long and (almost) distraction-free journey of self-exploration and family time to find a small fleet of news trucks parked outside Salesforce Tower. I knew I needed to comment publicly, but before I did, I would have to listen deeply. So I set up a call with the authors of the letter.
Naturally, I’ve always believed in the power of technology, which is completely changing the way we interact with the world and with one another. But it’s our words, not the ones and zeros of computer code, that are the most versatile and powerful tool on earth.
Most of us will use thousands of words in a typical day (I certainly do) without thinking about how quickly they can shift shape and meaning. Imagine a short sentence like “We can trust Salesforce,” or maybe “We are an ethical company.” Arranged in this order, those words convey a clear, precise message that, when spoken by one of our employees or customers or even someone I just met, could absolutely make my day.
Swap the order just slightly, however, and the same few words can convey something deeply disturbing.
This was one of those instances. A few minutes into the call, one of the authors had transposed two of the words in one of those sentences, turning them into a question that hit me like a gut punch.
“Can we trust Salesforce?”
A few minutes later, another author of the letter did the same.
“Are we an ethical company?”
In twenty years, I had never heard anybody seriously question either of those notions. Hearing this left me deeply shaken. It was one of the first times in my life that I found myself quite literally stunned into silence. It rattled me to my very core.
I’ve written about how a company like Salesforce cannot succeed when our stakeholders—our employees, our customers, our partners, and our communities—can’t succeed. But I was quickly learning, a company absolutely cannot thrive and prosper at the highest levels when you lose the trust of any of your stakeholders.
The Most Important Stakeholder, for Any Company
In the winter of 2002, three years after founding Salesforce, I received my first invitation to the World Economic Forum. There I first met the institution’s visionary leader and founder, Klaus Schwab.
Klaus is one of the most brilliant, thoughtful, and highly educated people I have ever met. He earned a master’s degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and holds doctorates in both economics and engineering. In 1972 he became one of the youngest professors on the faculty of the University of Geneva. He founded the WEF in 1971, at the age of thirty-three; under his leadership, it has grown to become one of the most influential institutions in the world. Beyond all that, this German native is renowned for his skills in mountain climbing and cross-country skiing, in addition to being a wizard on the dance floor.
Now WEF’s executive chairman, Klaus developed the concept that I consider to be one of the greatest intellectual contributions to the world of business (though when I met him in 2002, I’d never heard of it). He called it “stakeholder theory.”
The first time we spoke, he’d been standing in a hotel lobby surrounded, as usual, by a throng of people he was graciously greeting. Perhaps because I’m tall and stood out from the crowd, he eventually made his way over to introduce himself. He looked me in the eyes and said a few words that are forever seared into my brain. “ ‘Integration’ is the number one word you need to think about for your business,” he said. Then he walked off, leaving me to wonder what in the world he could have possibly meant.
Later that day, Klaus addressed a group of us who’d gathered for a WEF program called Global Leaders of Tomorrow. As young heads of companies and organizations, he urged us to expand our line of vision, certainly beyond our four walls and even beyond the communities we were serving. The world is filled with many different kinds of people whose fates are intertwined with ours in so many direct and indirect ways, and in our digital, connected world, our future is no more tied to our investors, customers, employees, and communities than to the global challenges impacting all of humanity: from the expanding divide between rich and poor to climate change to the intertwined problems of cybersecurity and privacy, and even, as I would later learn, a crisis at our nation’s borders.
I began to understand that in talking about “integration,” Klaus was urging me to look for the kinds of connections that rarely turn up in your company in-box. What Klaus was really saying is that the only way a company truly thrives is if it fully integrates into society and into the greater effort to build a better world.
Every time your company connects to another person, even tangentially, you bear some responsibility for that person’s future well-being. In some ways, this is a burden, but it’s also a golden opportunity. If that one small interaction can make a dent, large or small, in whatever need that person has, or whatever pressing issue is holding that person back, you will have created a lasting impression, which is the first step in building a trusted bond. Each of these interactions, in other words, is an investment in that relationship, and over many years, in the aggregate, those investments add up.
Looking back with the benefit of this perspective, I realize that my view of Salesforce at that time was pretty myopic. We had seventy thousand customers in 107 countries accessing our services, and we had committed ourselves to donating time, money, and products to good causes, but those were the only inputs and outputs I ever considered. I was not spending nearly enough time thinking about how Salesforce was enmeshed in the larger world. Running a company, it suddenly occurred to me, was sort of like standing behind a camera, and I needed to widen the aperture.
Our stakeholder group went far beyond just the people we interacted with directly in a business context. It included customers, employees, shareholders, and partners, yes, but it also encompassed our friends and neighbors, including communities and the local school systems that served them. And it even included the planet we all inhabit.
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I’ve always felt deeply connected to the environment. Living in San Francisco and Hawaii, I am lucky to see the ocean on a daily basis. Visiting customers in cities around the world, I’ve seen the adverse impacts of climate change. But the events of recent years infused me with an even greater sense of urgency.
I witnessed a powerful reminder of the climate crisis we face during a panel I hosted at the World Economic Forum in 2019. On my panel were musicians and philanthropists Bono and will.i.am; world-renowned anthropologist Jane Goodall; former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Christiana Figueres; and Sompo Holdings CEO Kengo Sakurada.
In the audience was Greta Thunberg, a sixteen-year-old activist from Sweden who bravely spoke “truth to power” and has inspired youth strikes to bring about awareness on climate change throughout Europe. When I asked her to say a few words, little did I know she would outshine everyone in this room full of star power the moment she shyly took the microphone from me.
Climate change is an existential crisis, Greta began, that some say “we have all created,…But that is not true—because if everyone is guilty, then no one is to blame. And someone is to blame.”
Then Greta, with her long braids, squared her small shoulders and continued: “Some people, some companies, some decision-makers in particular have known exactly what priceless values they have been sa
crificing to continue making unimaginable amounts of money, and I think many of you here today belong to that group of people.”
A stunned silence suddenly fell over the room. “The future of humankind,” she concluded, “rests firmly in your hands.”
After a long pause, there was applause, but it was of the nervous rather than robust variety. This teenage climate activist had thrown down the gauntlet to some of the world’s most powerful business leaders and they weren’t entirely sure how to react—not least because they knew deep down that she was right.
We can no longer deny the fact that the environment is a key stakeholder for every business—and for everyone who inhabits this planet, for that matter. We cannot sit by passively while climate change is causing our air to become unbreathable, our oceans to heat up and acidify, and our sea levels to rise. Extreme weather events—heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires—are becoming more frequent, and more deadly, with every passing year. If we continue to dump plastic into our rivers and oceans at the current rate, the amount of plastics in the ocean will exceed the weight of the ocean’s fish by 2050, setting off a catastrophic cascade of reactions across our ecosystem.
According to a 2018 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, humans have only about a decade to get global warming under control to avoid significant, harmful disruption. The report warned that global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would increase the risk of extreme heat, drought, flooding, and poverty for potentially billions of people.
As the legendary naturalist Sir David Attenborough put it, with a heavy heart, “The Garden of Eden is no more.”
As the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution burrow ever more deeply into our lives, we’ll face what in theory should be a spectacularly easy choice. We can either use these advances to benefit the 1 percent, who already lay claim to the vast majority of global wealth and have contributed to the harm of the planet, or we can preserve the planet for generations to come. For example, will we use AI-powered drones and satellites to expedite overfishing, and underwater robots to mine and pillage our ocean floor? Or will we use drones and satellites to monitor our oceans and stop illegal fishing, and robots to track the salinity, temperature, and oxygen levels in our seawater?
The clock on climate change is ticking. And as governments and political leaders remain locked in what seems like an endless struggle to pass and enforce policies to reverse the damage, it is imperative that companies step up.
With increasing frequency, that’s starting to happen. Nonprofits like B Team, which was co-founded by Sir Richard Branson, and the B Corporation are galvanizing business leaders to lead a shift to building a sustainable and inclusive economy that puts people and the planet first. They are helping to spread that message that companies that commit to responsible, ethical, and sustainable practices will be rewarded for it. As Unilever’s former chief Paul Polman says, “It’s not purpose ahead of profits. It’s purpose that drives better profits.” That’s because companies that treat the environment as a stakeholder are more likely to attract both talent and customers, who increasingly demand more accountability from their employers as well as from the companies with which they do business.
Allbirds is a shining example of a company committed to treating the environment as a critical stakeholder. This fast-growing shoemaking start-up popularized ethical footwear, using wool that meets stringent standards of sustainable farming and animal welfare and that requires 60 percent less energy to produce than typical synthetic materials used in shoes. And Allbirds works with the nonprofit Soles4Souls to redistribute returned shoes to people in need all around the world.
Patagonia works to minimize the environmental impact of its supply chain, outfitting its service centers, offices, and retail stores with solar panels, LED fixtures, and energy-efficient equipment; it also donates 1 percent of its sales to nonprofit environmental groups. The outdoor clothing company is now limiting corporate clients for branded logowear to those who prioritize the planet.
The e-commerce site Etsy recently announced a full transition to carbon-neutral shipping. By committing to purchase carbon offsets to cover 100 percent of the emissions generated by package delivery, this online retailer set a gold standard for its entire industry. Even the global giants have gotten the message. More than two hundred fifty companies, including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Unilever, have committed to making all plastic packaging either reusable, recyclable, or compostable by 2025.
At Salesforce we’re going beyond just supporting organizations pursuing environmental change through our 1-1-1 program. In 2013, we committed to reaching 100 percent renewable energy, and we’ve since achieved net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally and deliver a carbon-neutral “cloud” to all our customers. And I’m proud of the fact that in 2018 alone, Earthforce, our green team of more than eight thousand employee volunteers, collectively dedicated more than twenty thousand hours of volunteer time to environmental causes in their local communities.
We’re not only instilling these values into our culture, we’re also building them into our infrastructure—literally. Salesforce Tower in San Francisco features the largest onsite water recycling system in a commercial high-rise building in the United States, saving millions of gallons of water every year. For us, this is crucial, given the location of our headquarters in California, a region that is chronically afflicted by drought.
I’ve also made the environment a personal focus. In 2016, together with Douglas McCauley, an innovative marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the state’s leading ocean research center, my wife and I founded the Benioff Ocean Initiative. We developed a kind of research hospital for the oceans; anyone in the world can submit a problem involving ocean health and engage a team of biologists, engineers, economists, and social scientists to study it. And we’re funding Friends of Ocean Action, a coalition of more than fifty leaders who are fast-tracking solutions to the most pressing threats facing the ecosystems that rely on these bodies of water.
I’m also encouraged by and supporting the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, led by Daniela Fernandez, which launched an “accelerator” program that partners start-ups with new technologies and business plans focused on improving the conservation and sustainability of the ocean.
For too long, companies have ignored or brushed off the environmental impact of their actions, claiming that it would be “too costly” or “logistically impossible” to build sustainability into their culture, their practices, and their business models. But these excuses no longer hold water. If you aren’t serving the interests of your biggest stakeholder—the planet—then you aren’t serving the interests of your other stakeholders either.
As former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has said, “We are the first generation that can end poverty and the last generation that can take steps to avoid the worst impact of climate change. Future generations will judge us harshly if we fail in upholding our moral and historical responsibilities.”
He’s right, of course. But when it comes to business, I’d add one more sentence. Unless you’re selling real estate on Mars, the most important stakeholder for any company is the planet we inhabit now. That’s not some pious piece of wishful thinking. Just widen the lens and look for yourself.
When Values Collide
Needless to say, this business of saving the planet is an undertaking of epic proportions. But as massive a challenge as it is, it does have one thing going for it: The environment is a rare issue on which everyone at Salesforce is in ironclad agreement. None of our stakeholders had any problem with making the commitments we did, and I’ll admit, it’s something of a relief to be (for once) campaigning for a cause everyone believes in. Unfortunately, not every pressing issue we face lines up so neatly.
As I vacationed with my family in June 2018, the company wa
s continuing to grow at a record pace. We had been named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for the eighth year in a row by Forbes. We had recently ranked as the number one CRM provider, for the fifth consecutive year. And our shareholders were pleased—from June 2017 to June 2018, our stock price increased 58 percent.
Then came the “open letter” about our work with Customs and Border Protection.
To put this letter in context, these weren’t the only tech company employees taking such actions over the use of their products by government agencies. That spring, four thousand Google employees had written an open letter to their CEO, Sundar Pichai, to protest the company’s work with a Pentagon program using artificial intelligence on the battlefield. “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war,” the letter stated. Two months later, Google announced that it would not renew its military contract for 2019.
Employees at Microsoft that year published an open letter demanding that company executives cancel a $479 million contract with the U.S. military, stating that “we refuse to create technology for warfare and oppression” and calling for stricter ethical guidelines and oversight. Microsoft responded that it was committed to providing technology to the U.S. Defense Department and would “remain engaged as an active corporate citizen in addressing the important ethical and public policy issues related to AI and the military.”
In June, when Amazon employees sent an open letter to CEO Jeff Bezos demanding that he stop providing the company’s Rekognition face-identifying technology to law enforcement and other government agencies, he’d decided to push back. “If big tech companies are going to turn their back on the U.S. Department of Defense,” he said, “this country is going to be in trouble.”