Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  The previous year, when the White House attempted to impose a moratorium on immigration from a handful of predominantly Muslim countries, I opposed it strongly, and talked at length about the crucial role immigrants play at Salesforce and how committed we were to protecting the rights of all people who come to the United States seeking a better life. When the Trump administration announced a zero-tolerance policy on immigration and the press began reporting on family separations, I was heartsick. It was unimaginable that families who were coming to America for a better life would be subjected to this treatment. As I thought about my great-grandfather Isaac Benioff, who came to the United States as a refugee, I promptly made donations to nonprofit groups helping families at the border.

  In the United States, Americans come from many backgrounds and countries—we are truly a melting pot. Every year some of the world’s best and brightest students attend our colleges and universities, and then we send them back to their home countries after they graduate. Instead, we should staple a green card to every diploma and keep them here. Our long-term competitive differentiation strategy for the United States is summed up in one word: immigrants. Ultimately, it’s not AI, bioengineering, or any other technology that will differentiate or make a country competitive. It’s the people.

  On June 14, after reading a story about fifteen hundred migrant children who were caught illegally crossing the border and then crammed into a former Walmart, I tweeted from the book of Matthew: “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” I also wrote to White House officials to encourage them to end this horrible policy and reunite children with their families.

  On June 17, I abandoned my phone and laptop and left for my planned vacation. A few days later, when the open letter was posted on Chatter, my chief of staff, Joe Poch, alerted the management team, who, in light of my explicit instructions not to bother me unless there was a true Code Red emergency, decided to take a wait-and-see approach in my absence. A few days of quiet went by. Then the letter leaked, and pandemonium set in.

  Clearly, I had picked an inopportune time to go totally offline. When a company has an outspoken leader, there’s an expectation in both good times and bad that people are going to hear his or her voice. Now the company I founded was in turmoil, and I was MIA. People began asking: “Why is Marc silent?”

  On June 27, Joe finally made the call. “Are you watching what’s going on?” he asked.

  “How can I watch what’s going on? I’m on Easter Island!” I said. “I’m not online. I have no clue.”

  “Well, we have a problem here,” Joe said darkly.

  After he gave me a quick rundown of the facts, I asked him what he’d like me to do.

  “We really need you to tweet,” he said. “Everyone wants to hear from you.”

  Needless to say, this phone call caught me by surprise. I was confident there had been some misunderstanding; after all, I knew that the services we were providing to CBP weren’t being used to separate children at the border. I told Joe to pass that message idea along to the team and tell them to handle the situation while I was away.

  * * *

  I was under no illusion that 100 percent of Salesforce stakeholders agreed with 100 percent of my decisions about how to run the company. The open letter, though, was the first time that any group of stakeholders had so publicly objected to our business practices and questioned our adherence to our values. I never imagined we’d arrive there, but we had. We didn’t have the option of ignoring this controversy, but the way forward was difficult.

  On one hand, we had an obligation to support the employees who felt that doing business with CBP was a violation of our core value of equality and wanted us to cancel our contract. On the other hand, Salesforce wouldn’t, and couldn’t, cancel the CBP contract without cause. The agency was a customer, and we had a responsibility to them, and to our shareholders and investors. Either way, it seemed, we were bound to make some group believe we’d violated our number one value, trust. When the interests of one important set of stakeholders conflict with those of another, which should prevail?

  That was when yet another group of stakeholders began to get involved: our customers. The last paragraph in the leaked employee letter had called for the company to craft a plan for examining the use of all our products, and the extent to which they were being used for harm. Some of our customers, especially those in the public sector, worried that with such a plan in place, it would be easy for us to cave to public pressure and cancel contracts at the first hint of controversy, even when criticisms were unfounded.

  And they weren’t shy about voicing these concerns. Keith and Dave Rey, our head of public-sector business, and other sales executives were fielding calls from some customers wanting to know who would decide if their products were being used for good or for harm. What are the criteria, and who defines the parameters? Does every customer need to be perceived as totally aligned with Salesforce’s values? Can we count on you that you aren’t going to make a decision to pull your software and leave us in the lurch? This quickly became an entirely separate trust issue that our team needed to confront, and it also complicated the situation by roping in yet another of our core values: customer success.

  Along with all the other firsts, this crisis marked the first time in Salesforce history that three of our core values appeared to be in opposition. Equality, which compelled us to stand up for the human rights as children were being separated from their families; Customer Success, which drives us as a company to help our customers grow; and Trust, the bedrock notion that Salesforce is a company that honors its values and commitments.

  In the meantime, everyone was watching, and there were many conflicting opinions about what we should do. I knew that we needed to listen deeply to all of our stakeholders and be transparent in our thinking, but I was apprehensive about how this conversation might go. “Ethical and humane use” of our products wasn’t a topic we’d had to grapple with up to this point in our history.

  As more news organizations picked up the story, Salesforce issued a simple, factual statement that our CBP contract had nothing to do with family separation at the border, and that Salesforce values the equality of all. This was 100 percent true, but at the same time there was no question that by signing the CBP as a customer, we had made incidental connections with everyone that organization impacted. The next day, Keith issued a statement that Salesforce would donate $1 million to organizations helping separated families and would match employee donations to increase our impact.

  With so many eyes on me, I eventually decided to break my vow of vacation silence. “I’m opposed to separating children from their families at the border. It is immoral,” I wrote using my wife’s cellphone, and Joe posted the message to all employees on Chatter. “I have heard the Ohana’s concerns and I’m very proud of all our employees for organizing actions supportive of families at the border.”

  That last sentence was not blowing smoke. I meant it with all my heart. I was proud that some employees cared enough to speak up, and question whether Salesforce was doing the right thing. And I knew the letter signed by a small percentage of our thirty-two thousand employees at the time couldn’t be dismissed. They were doing exactly what we talk about every day, being part of a living, breathing, values-driven company. As I mentioned earlier, I set up the call with these employees as soon as I got back.

  During the video call, the authors who had rearranged those words about trust and ethics to form those unsettling questions spoke in a forceful but nuanced way about the need for ethical use of our products and how alarmed they were about Salesforce technology being used by the CBP and their concern about the inhumane treatment of people at the border. At the same time, they seemed
to want me to know that they trusted the company leadership and believed that we would ultimately do the right thing.

  After I’d listened carefully to the four of them, I played back what I was hearing. Suddenly I realized that this conversation wasn’t only about CBP. Sure, the CBP contract is what sparked it, but this was really a conversation about something much larger. This was about how our culture—as cultures do—needed to evolve. Specifically, we needed a way of ensuring that we stayed true to our core values, even when they were seemingly at odds. What these employees and the hundreds they represented really wanted was a new process and set of guidelines at the company that would evaluate our contracts now and in the future to determine whether our customers were using our technology to do harm.

  Suddenly the situation began to feel a bit more familiar, and the clash of values a little less intractable. One of our key stakeholders, our employees, had identified a problem, just as they had with equal pay and LGBTQ rights. And the solution they would eventually help come up with was a brilliant one.

  In the weeks after this video call, I spent a lot of time listening to our customers, our employees, our investors, and other stakeholders, including the nonprofits to whom we’d made donations of time, money, and products. These discussions brought me clarity about how we needed to recalibrate our process around determining ethical use of our technology in order to guard against unintended consequences.

  Around the same time, a group of about fifty people participated in a protest in front of Salesforce Tower. They carried placards with my picture, chanted my name in various unflattering contexts, and railed that I was a hypocrite for giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals while simultaneously putting children in cages at the border.

  I certainly didn’t enjoy seeing these pictures on TV, or the pounding I took on social media. If previous fights hadn’t thickened my skin, I’m not sure how I would have weathered this one. In my period of contemplation, I tried to focus on the truths I knew: that it didn’t matter whether or not Salesforce was being unfairly portrayed in this case; what mattered was our responsibility to make sure our ethical use guidelines were clearly articulated going forward.

  On July 26, I posted a statement to employees on Chatter announcing that our Office of Equality would have a new unit, called the Office of Ethical and Humane Use. It would work hand-in-hand with our Office of Ethics and Integrity, which focuses on corporate governance. We would appoint a Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer whose newly created team would work with all of our stakeholders, as well as industry groups, thought leaders, and experts, to create, promote, and implement industry standards, guidelines, and living frameworks around the ethical use of technology.

  Our first ever Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer, Paula Goldman, describes her mission as developing a strategic framework for our technology that not only drives the success of our customers, but also drives positive social change and benefits humanity.

  We all know that technology is not inherently good or bad. Much like our words, it’s just a tool; what really matters is how you use it. And in the end, ensuring that it is used ethically is a central function for any business.

  So the next time an issue arises over the use of our technology, we won’t have to rely on instinct, or the political vicissitudes of the day, or be forced to play favorites among our core values. Instead, we now have staffed an office, assembled a diverse group of expert advisers, and created a process to evaluate the use of our technology.

  I’m confident that in the future all constituencies will be heard as we weigh the ethical and humane use of our technology. But the larger point is that once again, we got through a crisis and came out stronger. And in this case, what threatened to strangle us became what saved us. It’s our values, of course.

  Despite all the internal angst, media hoopla, protests, and dialogue, I couldn’t be more grateful to our stakeholders for sounding the alarm.

  The CBP crisis was a painful reminder that even when you may think you’re doing a fantastic job of listening to all your stakeholders, an existential crisis can pop up in an instant. The lesson is pretty simple: You can’t bank trust. You can’t simply fill up the jar with so many marbles that you can afford to spill a few once in a while.

  Every day, every incident, every complex situation holds the possibility of a fatal misstep that tips the whole jar right over. At the same time, however, it’s also an opportunity to prove how committed you are to your values—and to doing right by all your stakeholders.

  The trick is to make sure the camera you’re peering through is set to “landscape” mode so it takes in the fullest possible picture.

  ELEVEN

  THE ACTIVIST CEO

  Taking a Stand Is Not Optional

  The first rule of building a smart, sustainable business is learning how to root out complacency. Most of us in leadership roles today train ourselves to obsess over distant, scattered clouds even when the sun is bright and skies are clear. We hold strategy meetings. We indulge in worst-case scenarios. We swear on a stack of class-A stock certificates that we’ll never go outside without an umbrella.

  And yet, inevitably, we do.

  One of the most perplexing things I’ve noticed about business is that there are always issues lurking on the periphery that have the potential to someday harm the company, but still, nobody in the C-suite brings them to the foreground.

  There’s usually nothing particularly subtle about these problems. They’re often things employees discuss freely, even as most executives willfully ignore them lest we find ourselves drafted to lead some time-consuming task force. We turn away. We rationalize. We soothe ourselves by proclaiming that these issues are beyond our control and outside our defined areas of responsibility. I’m not just talking about problems within the company, but in the communities surrounding it—problems like our struggling public schools and crumbling infrastructure.

  This can happen even within companies founded with the best of intentions, as those companies grow up and become more complex organisms. The people who created them get trapped—or worse, hide out—inside the bubbles they’ve built, the moment the issues coming at them begin to exceed the number of hands available to fix them. All the energy that once went into innovation and scaling up can shift to another priority: the determination to protect and sustain, to simply stay afloat rather than swim.

  When every crisis that pops up, large or small, starts to feel like an existential threat, preserving the status quo becomes the goal, and any deviation from it can trigger internecine warfare with a company.

  In the late summer of 2018, I decided it was time for me to take on one of those issues that was on the periphery for some of my peers but had begun staring me in the face. I’m referring to the chronic, rapidly worsening homelessness crisis in San Francisco that I was encountering every day.

  In a city crackling with innovation and wealth, a shocking number of people were unable to meet their most basic human needs. I’ve lived in San Francisco my entire life, and while homelessness has always been a part of the city, I had never seen it this bad. Some seventy-five hundred individuals and more than twelve hundred families, including eighteen hundred children who attend our public schools, are homeless in San Francisco. Many of them are living on the streets just a few blocks from Salesforce Tower. Families with children are surviving in cars, in tent encampments in city parks, and in overpacked homeless shelters. Many on the streets are suffering with mental illness and drug addiction. Heroin needles and human feces litter the sidewalks.

  This crisis unfortunately isn’t unique to our city—you see rampant homelessness in places like Seattle and Los Angeles. The problem is growing worse as the high cost of housing pushes more people onto the streets. In New York City, nearly 115,000 school-age children—about one in every ten students in public school
s—lived in temporary housing during the past school year, a record high.

  A study by the University of California, Berkeley, found that areas of San Francisco were more unsanitary than impoverished, developing countries. In 2018, a visiting United Nations official said she was “completely shocked” by the plight of the homeless in the city. And yet here we were, the masters of the new digital economy, zipping by in our Ubers and electric cars and thinking we were somehow blameless and, at the same time, powerless to act.

  In 2017, a few days before Dreamforce, I walked down Third Street near the Moscone Center, where we hold the event. It was filthy, strewn with trash, feces, and drug paraphernalia. It was clear evidence that we needed to take dramatic steps to address the homeless crisis. The mayor made sure that streets surrounding Dreamforce were cleaned, but I knew then that this wasn’t enough. The streets needed to be clean not just for our event, but for all residents, all the time.

  The following year, when we opened the soaring Salesforce Tower, I was very aware of, and embarrassed by, the starkness of the contrast between our perch in the clouds and the streets sixty-one stories below. Inside the Tower on our Ohana floor, employees were sipping cups of espresso made fresh by baristas, taking in the breathtaking views of the city and the musical stylings of a pianist wearing a fedora playing upbeat songs. On the sidewalks below, thousands of homeless people were sorting through trash cans, some physically and mentally sick, forced to beg amongst the multi-million-dollar condos and opulent office buildings.

  I wasn’t blind to the fact that homelessness, and the larger economic disparities driving it, could have a significant impact on the future prospects of my company—and the entire business community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In San Francisco, all of the negative by-products of the digital revolution had culminated in a lack of affordable housing— and in turn, a lack of opportunity—for so many of all but a tiny sliver of the city’s population. The result wasn’t healthy for our fellow citizens, including some of our customers and employees, and the millions of people who visit San Francisco. And yet, for all the wealth that same digital revolution had bestowed on us, none of us in the technology industry were doing nearly enough to address the glaring by-products of the wealth we had helped create.