Trailblazer

by Marc Benioff

  CEOs sometimes have to make decisions knowing that there could be economic consequences—that some of their customers might walk away. But no doubt just as many—if not more—would stay, because people want to do business with companies that value the same things they do.

  I’ve long been inspired by Unilever’s recently retired CEO, Paul Polman, who made activism part of his corporate strategy while at the helm. He’s been outspoken in advocating for companies to produce healthier products, improve worker conditions, and adopt renewable energy sources. “We have to bring this world back to sanity and put the greater good ahead of self-interest,” he has said. During his ten-year tenure as CEO, Unilever’s stock more than doubled, proving again that customers are spending their money with companies who uphold the things they believe in, too.

  A 2018 article in the Harvard Business Review perhaps summed these trends up best, declaring that “CEO activism has entered the mainstream.” And according to the authors, Aaron K. Chatterji and Michael W. Toffel, this is just the opening wave of what has become the new norm.

  “The more CEOs speak up on social and political issues, the more they will be expected to do so,” they write, adding, “In the Twitter age, silence is more conspicuous—and more consequential.”

  Increasingly, companies can’t afford not to engage on the tough issues, if for no reason other than the fact that their employees demand it. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer found that 71 percent of employees surveyed said it’s critically important for their CEO to engage on challenging issues, and 76 percent of the general population said that they want CEOs to take the lead on addressing societal issues rather than waiting for governments to weigh in. Businesses that ignore these imperatives stand not only to alienate their clients and customers, but also the best and brightest talent.

  We used to think of customers, employees, and communities—local and global and everything in between—as different constituencies. But really they aren’t so different after all. They’re all a part of the larger ecosystem that our companies serve. And they’re united in demanding that we not only deliver them innovative products they want, but also that we deliver on our commitment to uphold the values they care about.

  Our Civic Duty, and Our Corporate Responsibility

  Hundreds of companies have already shown that doing well and doing good are not in opposition. That’s why, by the time Prop C came along in the fall of 2018, I no longer felt that we were rolling a rock up a steep hill alone. Turned out, I wasn’t completely right, though.

  I’ll admit, my support for the homeless was personal. At the start of the book you read about how, as a boy, I always was struck by how my grandfather, Marvin Lewis, gave $20 bills to homeless people we passed in our city walks. Grandpa also advocated for the homeless as a city supervisor. One of my favorite stories about my grandfather is about the time he attempted to show a short movie about homeless children living “just a few blocks from the city’s finest shopping district” at a San Francisco Board of Supervisors meeting. The mayor blocked him from doing so, but Grandpa never gave up the fight.

  So maybe I was simply channeling my grandfather when my wife, Lynne, and I began working to help end the plight of the homeless, especially homeless families in San Francisco. In 2011, we read a story by Jill Tucker in the San Francisco Chronicle about Rudy, a homeless fourth grader. She wrote about how Rudy, along with his younger brother and parents, would spend nights sleeping in homeless shelters, bus stop shelters, and parks. On weekdays he would take two buses to get to his elementary school, tired and hungry.

  Since then, Lynne and I had given nearly $20 million to fund housing and services for the city’s homeless population. In 2016, we contributed $10 million in matching funds to the city of San Francisco’s Heading Home Campaign to end family homelessness, and in 2018, we gave $6 million to the Bristol Hotel Housing Project to transform a hotel in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood into housing for the homeless. Salesforce.org has given nearly $6 million to help end homelessness.

  For years, I had also attempted to persuade others to join us, going hat in hand to make my case to nearly every high-net-worth individual in the city. But as I was learning, philanthropy alone won’t provide the systemic change to make a real difference to homelessness and other societal problems.

  I didn’t expect an unbridled endorsement from the tech community on Prop C, but I was still surprised that many businesses and individuals flat out refused to support the new tax. Companies including Lyft and Stripe, as well as venture capitalists like Michael Moritz and Paul Graham, donated money to the “No on Prop C” campaign. Some individuals actually called and asked me to oppose it. I listened to their business-based arguments. They would say that Prop C lacked sufficient accountability and that a corporate tax addressing one problem was the start of a slippery slope. It could lead to more taxes for a range of social issues in the future. Then there were the optics: Going out on a limb to campaign for a tax increase—corporate suicide! But I felt the crisis of homelessness was so important to address for our city that we had to be for it.

  In response, I told anyone who would listen to take a look at our fourteen-year stock chart for proof that our investors aren’t complaining about Salesforce giving back to the communities where we live and work. Quite the contrary: In 2018, even as the overall market had its worst year in a decade, our shares rose 31 percent. Since becoming a public company in 2004, we delivered a 3,300 percent return to our shareholders by June 2018. Those are sure signs that doing good aligns with doing well.

  Some companies opposed to Prop C claimed that their main concern wasn’t for their profit margins or share price—they said they were opposing the initiative for the good of the city! According to this backwards argument, the tiny one-half of 1 percent tax on their revenue above $50 million could render rents even more unaffordable and drive their companies—along with the jobs they created and the taxes they paid—out of the city. I doubted their logic, and it made no sense to me that they couldn’t see homelessness as more of an existential threat to their business and community than a relatively painless incremental tax.

  I presumed that my fellow industry leaders had watched closely as Amazon had defeated a corporate tax proposition in Seattle earlier in the year. But I was determined not to let them follow that playbook. And I was grateful that a couple of business leaders, including Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco Systems, and venture capitalist Peter Fenton, publicly supported Prop C.

  Still, Prop C was an underfunded and underdog measure on the November 6 ballot. So I rallied my troops. I presented a plan to the Salesforce executive team, whose members were quick to agree: As a company committed to living our values, Salesforce would contribute $5 million to the effort to back the campaign, and I personally donated $2 million to the cause. Employees in our government, legal, and public affairs departments also pitched in. We produced TV spots urging voters to approve the ballot measure, pointing out that individual residents wouldn’t pay a penny to fund the homeless programs—the tax would hit only big corporations like ours!

  A month before the election, Prop C was losing, according to the polls. I then launched a campaign of nonstop tweeting, media appearances, and speeches. It was exhausting, I’ll admit, but I was hell-bent on doing everything in my power to try to turn it around.

  My guiding light during the Prop C campaign was our city’s namesake and patron saint, Saint Francis of Assisi, who inspired me with these words: “Where there is darkness may we bring light…and where there is despair, may we bring hope.” And finally, “For it is in giving that we receive.”

  Ironically enough, it was the vocal opposition from a fellow tech CEO that ultimately began to turn the tide in favor of Prop C. With less than three weeks to go before the election on November 6, Jack Dorsey—the founder and CEO to two San Francisco tech darlings, Twitter and Square—responded to
one of my many tweets supporting Prop C: “I want to help fix the homeless problem in SF and California,” @jack tweeted. “I don’t believe this (Prop C) is the best way to do it.”

  My response was immediate. “Hi Jack,” I tweeted back. “Thanks for the feedback. Which homeless programs in our city are you supporting? Can you tell me what Twitter and Square & you are in for & at what financial levels? How much have you given to heading home our $37M initiative to get every homeless child off the streets?” I already knew the answer: zero.

  Then I pointed out how Jack had created $50 billion in market cap with Twitter and Square, and had raked in more than $6 billion personally, all the while taking special tax breaks for locating their offices on Market Street, one of the city’s main thoroughfares. “Exactly how much have his companies & [he] personally given back to our city, our homeless programs, public hospitals, & public schools?” I asked, rhetorically.

  Of course, the media had a field day with our “Twitter feud,” as they liked to call it, with headlines from TECH TITANS BATTLE to TECH BILLIONAIRES GO TO WAR OVER HOMELESSNESS. One might think that the coverage would have overwhelmingly supported my position, but not so. Inc. magazine wrote: “Not content with antagonizing Zuckerberg, Benioff has also taken on a slew of his fellow tech billionaires….Like the Mothra-fighting Godzilla of later films, Benioff doesn’t need to be doing what he’s doing.” And Fast Company magazine accused me of “Twitter-shaming” Jack for being antihomeless.

  On that point, I was guilty as charged. I framed it as the binary issue I believed it to be: You’re either for the homeless or you’re for yourself. I sang that chorus from the rooftops—and eventually my city listened. My feud with Jack Dorsey turned Prop C into the hottest issue on the ballot, and on November 6, Prop C passed by a strong margin—61 percent support.

  This new funding for the homeless, some $300 million a year, was earmarked to address the crisis from every angle. It will provide more than a thousand new shelter beds and four thousand additional housing units, and up to $75 million will be allocated for treating the severely mentally ill. In addition, the funding will provide assistance or subsidies to help thousands of residents avoid eviction, a measure critical to preventing San Franciscans from becoming homeless in the first place.

  Within weeks of Prop C’s passage, big tech and other local companies got the message. Many of their employees had been disappointed with their leaders’ failure to do the right thing. These companies began to realize that their employees had the same kinds of expectations as customers. And that in an employment market as tight as the tech world in San Francisco, keeping these other “customers” happy was just as important. We all know that talented tech workers will have no trouble finding a new perch if they aren’t happy in their current one, and that includes feeling like the company they work for doesn’t share their values.

  That’s why in San Francisco, Airbnb is now spending $5 million on homelessness, and Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson donated $1 million to fund homeless services in the Bay Area. In Seattle, Microsoft has launched an affordable housing institute and Amazon is giving money and space on its campus to help the homeless.

  Businesses, which have historically been wired for anti-tax positions, may finally be realizing that they now need to take the lead in putting our communities and countries first by supporting mechanisms that will generate funding to solve our most urgent problems.

  In reflecting on the Prop C battle during the months after its passage, however, I was struck by how many people had opposed it—not just CEOs who stood to absorb the tax increase, but ordinary San Franciscans who witnessed, every single day, the suffering of their fellow citizens living on the city streets and yet voted against a measure designed to fix it. That’s when I realized: It wasn’t that the Prop C opponents didn’t care about homelessness, it was just that they had different ideas about the best way to address it.

  This insight inspired Lynne and me to fund the $30 million UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, aimed at building reliable and credible science-based research to help policymakers, community leaders, and the public understand how people become homeless and identify solutions to alleviate the crisis.

  The world badly needs a North Star for truth in homelessness. Data is crucial for ensuring that we invest in programs that can make a real difference in addressing homelessness and housing. For example, data shows that providing permanent supportive housing for chronically homeless adults creates long-term housing stability in over 85 percent of the people housed and often does so with an overall reduction in government expenditure. Dr. Margot Kushel, the director of the initiative, is leading the research team that studies factors such as poverty, domestic violence, age, family size, and unemployment office visits, to design the most effective ways to prevent and end homelessness.

  By leaning on medical science, emerging research, and data, my hope is that we’ll no longer have to argue about what works best. Instead of letting our gut instinct, assumptions, and the partial truths fed to us by snake-oil salesmen and politicians inform our position, we’ll simply let the science be our guide.

  Because once we stop fighting one another and start working together, change can happen. It’s our civic duty and our corporate responsibility.

  * * *

  Businesses don’t have all the answers, of course. And neither do the people who lead them. In fact, it’s often the people sitting as far from the C-suite as you can imagine who emerge as the most impassioned voices for change. These are exactly the people we need to come along and pierce our bubble, jolt us out of our comfort zones and remind us of our responsibilities to our communities and to one another.

  Hundreds of millions of people around the world get up and go to work every day, and they shouldn’t have to leave their values at the door. Employees who feel empowered to express their views on the tough issues are not just better employees, but more fulfilled people. And when we as leaders speak out for the causes we believe in, we inspire employees to do the same. Regardless of our individual values, or the specific issues we choose to crusade for, by making action a cultural norm, we empower everyone in every workplace to be a trailblazer, an activist, and an agent of change.

  Imagine a future in which CEOs and their companies around the world applied the same focus and innovation they bring to solving their most complex business problems to solving our most complex social ones. Together, we can make that future a reality by creating cultures of activism where every individual is personally invested in making the world a better place.

  EPILOGUE

  In January 2018, in the early stages of writing this book, Salesforce Tower officially opened for business in San Francisco. At sixty-one stories, it’s the city’s highest structure and one of the tallest skyscrapers west of the Mississippi.

  I won’t lie—I was thrilled. I had spent years on this project: finding the right location on Mission Street and then tinkering with design details, from the multicolored furniture in the lobby to the artistic tiles on the walls. I knew its completion marked a significant milestone in the company’s history.

  I couldn’t have been prouder. I also knew some people would hate it.

  To many outsiders, this tower emblazoned with our name could be seen as a garish, glass-paneled obstruction of the city’s iconic skyline. They might view it as a monument to some rich guy’s runaway ego, or a symptom of his edifice complex. That’s all fair enough. I understand where the eye-rollers were coming from. Many people associate gleaming skyscrapers with the worst kind of corporate extravagance.

  I also knew that in this case, none of those criticisms were true. On a basic level, I regarded this tower as an homage to my beloved grandfather, Marvin Lewis, and his passion for inclusive progress. As you might remember from earlier in the book, he was the driving force behind BART, another San Francisco construction project conceived o
n a grand scale. To truly serve its citizens, he believed, a city must grow. And no city grows without builders, or high ambitions.

  I also wanted the tower to make a powerful statement of loyalty to my hometown. With this tower, we were planting Salesforce’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco permanently. We were sending the message that we were here to stay. We would not be fleeing the city for the conveniences, cost efficiencies, and tax advantages we could have reaped elsewhere. Big office towers hold the promise of more jobs and support scores of new businesses. We intended to make our presence meaningful and beneficial to our community.

  I understood that the new sixty-one-story skyscraper would raise our profile and subject us to heightened public scrutiny. After all, a sixty-one-story glass tower is a terrible place to hide. So in my mind, Salesforce Tower was also an expression of our commitment to transparency, and our number one value, trust.

  In the years leading up to the opening ceremony, our values had become deeply woven into the fabric of the company. I knew they were strong enough to outlast my tenure as the company’s leader, and I trusted that whoever would fill that role in the future would elevate our values even more. So why not raise a structure everyone can see?

  The only bittersweet feeling I had during the ribbon cutting stemmed from the physical absence of the two people who inspired the journey that brought me to this place: my father, Russell Benioff, who died in 2012, and my grandfather Marvin Lewis, who died in 1991. I knew they were there in spirit, but I would have given anything to see the expression on their faces as they gazed up at this building. Recalling my walks through the city as a boy with Grandpa, however, I’m pretty sure he would have approved.