by Marc Benioff
In San Francisco, the sad truth is that the tech industry is also largely to blame for this crisis. Our many highly paid engineers and executives have driven up real estate prices astronomically; as I write this in 2019, one-bedroom apartments rent for an average of nearly $3,700 and the median home price is a record $1.6 million. All of this has all but eliminated affordable housing, resulting in hardworking middle-class people being effectively priced out of the city.
Of course, these disparities don’t start and end in San Francisco, but San Francisco does seem to be the canary in the coal mine for what’s to come if we don’t start addressing the harmful effects of rising inequality. On a global scale, the twenty-six richest people on the planet had the same net worth as the poorest half of the world’s population, around 3.8 billion people, in 2018, according to Oxfam. About half of the people on our planet subsist on less than $5.50 a day. Even in the United States, 40 percent of adults don’t have $400 available to pay for an unexpected expense. Studies by the University of California, San Francisco, have shown that children who do not have the appropriate education and healthcare opportunities by age five will remain at a disadvantage for the rest of their lives.
All of us should care about this, even if we mistakenly think it doesn’t affect us directly. Because the reality is that unbridled capitalism is not good for anybody, not even all the companies reaping extraordinary riches from it. Every person on the street means one fewer person getting an education, or entering the workforce, or contributing to the local economy and community. This gulf of inequality creates the conditions that separate and polarize us, and fuel conflict.
But just because businesses like mine are a big part of the problem doesn’t mean we can’t also be part of the solution.
For years, I’d been partnering with charitable organizations to try to provide homeless families with some of the basic needs they lacked. I’d been working closely with mayors and other city officials to improve public education and public health in San Francisco. Salesforce became the largest private funder of the San Francisco Unified School District, and the largest single-year donor to the Oakland Unified School District. But all the while, the homeless problem seemed only to worsen.
This crisis demanded an immediate and ongoing injection of funds. We were past the point of relying on charitable donations that often slow to a trickle when another worthy or trendy cause comes along. San Francisco needed a systemic change to finance a solution for the homeless problem, and government and charities couldn’t provide it. Only our city’s for-profit businesses, many of which had benefited from tax breaks for locating here, could solve this dilemma.
I’d talked endlessly to fellow founders and CEOs about homelessness, asking them how they thought this was going to end up. Did they really think San Francisco could remain the world’s technology capital if it couldn’t provide for the basic needs of its citizens? Did they really think that the voters wouldn’t get fed up and demand action? And if the people who are responsible for creating this lopsided equation won’t participate in solving it, then who will?
But many of them seemed happy to remain what Anand Giridharadas, the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, called the “unelected upper crust” leaving our public and institutions to rely on “scraps from winners” when we should instead take on the serious work of changing the system to change the world.
That fall in 2018, I saw my chance to do something that not only had the potential to make a real impact, but would also send a powerful message about the role of business in addressing social problems. With my visible position as a Fortune 500 CEO, I believed it was my responsibility not only to tackle this issue with every tool I could muster, but to do it publicly. It’s imperative to show all our employees, customers, and peers that activism is not just the purview of patron saints, philanthropists, or nonprofits. Everyone in the workplace today has both the responsibility and the ability to improve the state of the world.
Before my co-founders and I hired a single employee at Salesforce, we decided that a commitment to giving back would have to be a central tenet of our culture. In the years since, I’ve seen how powerfully the ripple effects of this decision have reverberated across the company. But now it was time to up the ante. Taking up the mantle in the fight against homelessness, I knew, would set the tone for a renewed and reinvigorated commitment to our core value of equality.
In November, the city would vote on a sweeping homeless initiative called “Proposition C: Our City, Our Home” that would increase the corporate tax on only the largest companies in San Francisco, like Salesforce, to help finance more permanent solutions to the problem. Specifically, Prop C, as it became known, would apply a 0.5 percent tax to Salesforce and the rest of the city’s biggest businesses—those that earn more than $50 million in annual revenue—to generate $300 million a year in new funds to pay for housing and services for the homeless. Individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses would pay no tax.
To me, this plan was a no-brainer. As San Francisco’s largest employer, we needed to stake out a clear position. Were we for the homeless or just for ourselves?
I decided to put my energy into getting Prop C passed. I knew that if I genuinely believed that business could be the most powerful platform for change now, not just in the future, this was a moment to prove it. I knew that as a company committed to equality for all, we had to support Prop C, and our executive team and employees agreed.
My efforts to get votes for Prop C started small. I began posting occasionally on Twitter. But as the importance of this opportunity and this moment became more clear to me, Prop C became my priority.
I spoke at get-out-the-vote rallies in Chinatown and addressed hundreds of San Franciscans in Dolores Park with Nancy Pelosi, our local U.S. congresswoman (soon reelected as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives). I hosted breakfasts and dinners with activists and advocates and became a talking head on both local and national TV news. I reviewed polling data, carried placards, tweeted campaign slogans and wore political buttons.
By the time the midterm elections approached, with the fate of Prop C hanging in the balance, I became completely locked in a fevered public battle. In my view, Prop C was a necessity for the homeless and every person in San Francisco, and also for Salesforce.
Fighting for a cause that matters to our stakeholders is just as much a CEO’s job as preparing for a quarterly analyst call. Protecting the health of our community is just as much a business priority as delivering innovative technology to our customers.
Yes, I was prepared for the onslaught of criticism I knew I’d receive. But my armor had thickened. Never mind that nearly every tech CEO and billionaire in the city was lined up against me; I never felt the slightest hesitation—in large part because I’d already learned (the hard way) in those earlier fights for social justice that our employees, customers, investors, and partners didn’t just support my wading into this issue. They were more than happy to shove me right into the thick of it.
But mostly, it was because all our fates are intermingled. What’s good for the homeless is what’s good for my company, my community, and my city.
A New Era of Corporate Social Activism
In the fall of 2015, I was invited to speak at the invitation-only technology conference put on every year by The Wall Street Journal. The press release touting the event described it as a summit of global technology leaders, policy makers, and entrepreneurs coming together to “focus on the global promises and challenges of today’s digital world.”
My appearance would involve an onstage interview conducted by one of the Wall Street Journal’s editors or reporters. I asked Gina Sheibley, who handled my PR, who would interview me. The answer: Monica Langley. “Never heard of her,” I replied, and asked Gina to get her swapped for one of the senior tech reporters. But Gina assured me she’d done her ho
mework on Monica. She was one of the paper’s top writers, who reported on CEOs, billionaires, and presidential candidates for page-one profiles. Reluctantly, I conceded.
On the morning of the conference, Monica and I met briefly, so we wouldn’t be total strangers onstage.
“Hey Marc,” she said. “I want our interview to be fun!” I was fine with that, but her next sentence stopped me cold.
“I’m going to focus first on what you just did in Indiana, fighting for LGBTQ rights,” she said. “And, by the way,” she added, “I will introduce you as an activist CEO.”
My initial reaction was confusion: Wait, I thought to myself, wasn’t this an exclusive technology conference? I was pretty sure the two hundred people in the audience had come to hear me talk about the cloud, or AI, or my vision for a digital future. Giving an onstage interview—at a tech conference no less—about our fight to overturn discriminatory laws struck me as un-CEO-like, and downright political.
Additionally, I wasn’t happy with the term “activist CEO”—not one bit. The first reason is that it sounded very different depending on whose lips it came from, and coming from most people in my circles, unfortunately, it wouldn’t be regarded as much of a compliment.
The second reason stemmed from the visceral negative reaction to the idea that what I was doing was so outside the norm, or so breaking from the CEO mold, that it required a special label. Obviously, I’d never subscribed to the notion that once you become a CEO and put on that power suit, you are required to leave certain dimensions of your personality, values, and basic humanity at the door. I, for one, had refused to do so, and I knew that the company was better for it.
If you’ve looked at the front of this book, you’ve noticed that my co-author is none other than the Monica Langley who dubbed me “activist CEO.”
So you can assume correctly if we’re writing this book together that I proceeded to go onstage with her, despite my protestations. And you can assume that yes, she asked me about our fight for LGBTQ rights in Indiana—and in Georgia, and North Carolina. A few months later, Monica wrote a page-one story for The Wall Street Journal detailing how “activist CEO” Marc Benioff had “kicked off a new era of corporate social activism.”
But over the next year, the term grew on me. Or more accurately, I grew into it. In 2017, I asked Monica to join Salesforce as an executive. She had seen through my defensive tactics to the CEO I was actually becoming.
Over time, I’ve become convinced that there are two types of CEOs: those who believe that improving the state of the world is part of their mission, and those who don’t feel they have any responsibility other than delivering results for their shareholders.
In the past, I’d say that far more chief executives fell in the latter category. Their only engagement with the political process was almost wholly self-interested; it started and ended with hiring lobbyists or funding political-action committees to influence the trajectory of policy on issues such as taxes or global trade. They clung to their fiduciary duty to shareholders as their employees, communities, and the world at large took a back seat.
I don’t condone that instinct, but I understand it completely. Back when I was in business school in the 1980s, I studied the immortal words of the economist Milton Friedman: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote in his book Capitalism and Freedom. The answer, of course, was to “increase its profits.”
In an essay for The New York Times in 1970, Friedman went so far as to argue that executives who claim that companies have “responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords” of the day are guilty of “undermining the basis of a free society.”
With all due respect, Milton Friedman was wrong. He was wrong then and he’s doubly wrong in the context of today. The business of business isn’t just about creating profits for shareholders. We’re simply too big, too global, and too immersed in people’s daily lives. Yes, our business is to increase profits, but our business is also to improve the state of the world and drive stakeholder—not just shareholder—value. And not just because serving the interest of all stakeholders is good for the soul; it’s because it’s good for business.
The statistics bear this out. In a corporate social responsibility survey of online shoppers across sixty countries, conducted by Nielsen, 66 percent said they were willing to pay extra for products and services from companies committed to driving positive social and environmental impact. The 2018 Deloitte Millennial Survey found that millennials believe business success should be measured by more than profits, citing the creation of innovative ideas, products, and services; positive impact on the environment and society; job creation, career development, and improving people’s lives; and promotion of inclusion and diversity in the workplace as the top priorities. According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, 75 percent of consumers say they won’t buy from unethical companies, and 86 percent say they’re more loyal to ethical companies.
In Fortune’s CEO Initiative 2019 survey of eleven hundred executives, managers, and employees, 87 percent agreed that the need for moral leadership in business is greater than ever. Yet only 7 percent of employees surveyed said their leaders often or always exhibited the behaviors of moral leadership. The disconnect between beliefs and action is still enormous, and there will be consequences for business whose leadership doesn’t live by values like trust and equality. In this age of instantaneous digital feedback, companies and their leaders simply can no longer turn a blind eye to the issues that matter to their employees, their customers, and the communities in which they do business.
It’s not a coincidence that in recent years more CEOs are starting to speak out on social and political issues—as a matter of survival if nothing else. And let’s face it, with government and other powerful institutions getting increasingly bogged down in political partisanship, brinkmanship, and perpetual gridlock, corporate participation is becoming more necessary. The deepening crisis of trust I discussed in Chapter Three, as well as the growing educational class divide, income inequality, and massive environmental challenges we face, make it impossible to abdicate responsibility and stay on the sidelines.
As BlackRock’s Larry Fink has written, “stakeholders are pushing companies to wade into sensitive social and political issues—especially as they see governments failing to do so effectively,” and “as divisions continue to deepen, companies must demonstrate their commitment to the countries, regions, and communities where they operate, particularly on issues central to the world’s future prosperity.”
That’s why our businesses hold the potential to be the greatest platforms for change. Consider just this one fact: 70 percent of the top one hundred revenue-generating entities in the world are not nations but corporations. I’m talking about Walmart, Apple, Samsung, and Exxon. The people who work at these kinds of companies, from the CEO on down to the newest employee, have not only a responsibility, but also the resources, the economic muscle, and the implicit permission, to be courageous on social issues and effect real change.
I witnessed this firsthand in 2017, following the Trump administration’s decision to ban citizens and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries from entry into the United States. More than 175 companies, including Salesforce, Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, called on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the ban, which would inflict “substantial harm on U.S. companies, their employees, and the entire economy” and make it “far more difficult and expensive for U.S. companies to hire some of the world’s best talent and impeding them from competing in the global marketplace.”
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court allowed a modified version of the travel ban to stand, but by making our voices heard, we helped to shift the national conversation, drawing money and attention to the issue and creating a louder chorus of opposition a
s well as substantive legal challenges to government policies.
The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and its decision to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) also motivated many CEOs and other business leaders at companies ranging from General Electric to Apple to speak out against those policies. Disney CEO Bob Iger, for example, protested the White House’s Paris decision by saying in a statement: “Protecting our planet and driving economic growth are critical to our future, and they aren’t mutually exclusive,” and then resigning from a presidential business council.
Merck CEO Ken Frazier, GM CEO Mary Barra, and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty were among several members of President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum who led the dissolution of the advisory group, following the president’s insistence that “many sides” were to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of a woman when a member of a white nationalist group ran over her with his car.
There’s no shortage of examples of businesses taking public stands on grave issues that tear at us as a society. After the tragic shooting of seventeen people at a school in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, Delta Air Lines ended the discount for members of the National Rifle Association flying to the gun group’s convention. When confronted with criticism from people still subscribing to the outdated idea that a company’s job is purely to provide return on investment for its shareholders, CEO Ed Bastian told Fortune magazine, “Our decision was not made for economic gain and our values are not for sale….I’m not trying to be a politician. I’m not looking to be a social activist. I’m looking to run the best airline on the planet. As part of that, we have a responsibility to our customers, employees, and community partners.”