CEO Initiative 2019: A Conversation With Marc Benioff About Workplace Culture

I I want to talk about I want to talk about business activism CEO activism because I've been covering business for four decades and I think something has profoundly changed in the last decade there used to be a very clear line between what business responsibilities were what government responsibilities were if you got into hot button social issues most CEOs would be under the table in a heartbeat I didn't want to talk about it didn't want to go there's not my bottom line and you were kind of at the front end of changing that when Indiana was at four years ago five years ago passed a religious liberties law that you perceived as being discriminatory you stepped out and wasn't even in San Francisco it was in Indiana why did you do it what was going on there well the route the reason why we got involved and the reason why we get involved in most things is it's driven by our employees and I think that if you're kind of get to your question of what's happened in last decade is that as Millennials have entered the workforce and companies like mine they're far more active and more involved in creating the culture before I think kind of the culture was kind of very lonely job of the HR executive or maybe even the CEO and now the workforce realizes they're actually a critical part of making that happen and so you're really seeing you know active employees and that's creating an active SEOs and you can see a lot of examples where you know we have a significant employee activism in tech companies for example that has changed the course of the history of the technology industry and how do you I think that's a really interesting point we had a presentation earlier about Millennials and one of the things we didn't get to in that presentation is because Millennials are are taking longer to get married they're less likely to be involved in organized religion they're less likely to join social clubs groups the Elks Club the Moose Club the Rotary Club whatever that the employer becomes their most important formal connection to society and they put a lot of hopes and dreams and use into you know I I think also that they're just realized they have a choice where they can work and the the the the thing is is that you know they want to be in an environment and a business that is about purpose they want to make sure that the company that they're in is actually committed to improving the state of the world that that is a critical part of the employees that were hiring today and certainly the next wave of employees imagine that two or three X so we're just getting a taste of the future and I think that why that's exciting okay is really kind of what I call you know there's there's a door that is definitely opening and you know for the last four or five years now we've been talking about the fourth Industrial Revolution and the fourth Industrial Revolution is very powerful because you can see all these information and bio technologies you've done an exhaustive amount of work on it yourself and that could be the cloud computing and artificial intelligence or autonomous vehicles on the bio technologies it could be all the next-generation immunotherapies or gene therapies I mean robotics there's a wide variety of technologies that have been unleashed but what is gonna happen and you can already start to see it is that you have these very young people very young some who haven't even entered the workforce yet getting coupled with these next-generation technologies and what they're doing is they're bringing them together to create this fifth Industrial Revolution which is all about actually saving the planet and you can see it was someone like Greta Thornburg who's this Swedish activist who we met at the World Economic Forum who at the time we didn't hadn't really even seen her become as famous as she is now I mean she was even on the cover of Time magazine and if you saw that Alan but do you have something to do with that yeah you two lovers I do not but I will I was impressed that you know somebody like that it gets has such a high profile because and and and the reason why is because she's an example of somebody who's using technology to create the world that she wants and knows how to do it and I think that you're gonna have lots of people who are merged like that end your original point it's gonna happen in our businesses too yeah so and it is it's a great moment and it's an exciting moment but you've got people who want to have a lot of opinions that may not be the right thing for the company may not be a right thing for the country I mean you had an interesting moment when your employee said hey we don't want to do work for the custom and Border Patrol it's a really wet like you're not gonna support protecting our borders so how do you how do you decide which impulses to support and which impulses to resist well I think this is a this is now CEOs are gonna have to react to these changes so what is the first thing the CEO is gonna have to do well all of a sudden you know I got labeled activist CEO okay and it wasn't me you know I'm just finishing this book right now called trailblazer it comes out in October I saw some you know right at the end of the process and you know it's really the story of this is not me it's not about me you know I didn't become this all of a sudden this activist CEO I got kind of pushed you know by my employees into it and my job as CEO is to listen deeply to my employees and my customers and to respond to them effectively mentioned like Tablo I'm doing that because it's customer driven you know like I was with the investors aren't crazy about I was well the investors they will you know see just as they've always seen you know how amazing it is over time oh well it's just spectacular I mean you know it's just a spectacular combination yeah yeah I didn't mean that was also like a year ago we wouldn't we bought meal soft but let's but let's keep moving forward so this ods concept of it's about how do you listen to see how do you listen to employees how do you listen to your customers and that might then you might be called oh I'm an activist CEO because I'm respond you know what my employees want okay but it's not true the reality is if you're not going to do that you're not going to be the CEO and we have a lot of examples actually in Silicon Valley of CEOs who are no longer CEOs because they did not listen fired by not mired by they're in boys fired by their employees and it's gotten really close on some super high profile you know CEOs we're seeing you know you see employees like storm out of the building because they're unhappy with a critical part of the culture so you're talking Google this I'm not naming any names I just want to say that you know there is a moment where you know things can tip and you have to pull back as a CEO and say Who am I what am I doing here and am i listening and now and the one other point is this which is that because of that you're gonna you're gonna be faced with these kinds of challenges by your employees you better have a repository for that that you can then process that most organizations don't and that's why we created our office of ethical use because like for example an example of a custom and Border Patrol when our employees say well should we be doing business with this organization or should we not then we can say oh well here we can actually talk to customer the this chief ethical use and let them be the arbitrator so how would that have been tell us how this works I mean you say you got a bunch of employees who came to you they said we should stop doing business with Customs and Border Patrol you said I don't agree right no I didn't say that I said I would say I would never say such a thing I think if you're a CEO and you say that you are in big trouble I don't agree I die this I that you know what I said was what I am an expert in this all of a sudden somehow this is now also something that I have to do a CEO accepted this I have to do I have to do all these other things I never have to boy this know that is you but you kind of led the way is it not the job of the CEO that's as a CEO yourself you know that's not the job of the CEO because the job of the CEO is then to create a process and a structure that lets it auto resolve and you know we'll do whatever we need to do and for example yeah so how do we hired Paula who's going to speak I think later today yeah and her job is she's a phenomenal person in this world renowned expert in this area and then she sets up an organization and those employees can go and they can be fully vetted and in some cases there will be action in some cases not is it a democracy do you take an employee vote how does she what is her process to decide whether well you're gonna have to ask her I guess that's why you have it on stage Allen but you know what is the CEO if you can't do that well one of the things in Dunn you know we're we have an amazing thing we have we have a incredible product line some that we've built organically some in organically and what a amazing in organic acquisition we bought several years ago now is Demandware which is now our commerce cloud and we sell a huge amount online like adidas you know we're selling lots of Adidas shoes and everybody wants access to this commerce cloud technology because you can just incredibly in crease the velocity of your sales and it's got artificial intelligence our sales force Einstein built into it it's next-generation it is built into our customer 360 it works with all of our other products so we have a lot of gun sellers coming to us and saying we want to sell guns and we're not opposed to selling guns then we had bump stock sellers coming to us we want to sell bump stocks then we had our employees who are in the commerce cloud see that and come to Paul and say Paulo we can't you can what not well they said should we be doing this is this ethical like how do you look and through you know our own resolution study evaluation Eck yeah in mitigation with other experts outside voices inside voices we decided we're not going to sell bump stocks that's not something that sales force is going to do and but I'm not gonna make that decision I don't think I can I think I have I think it's better for the company if this is actually a professionally because by the way it's not just that there is a list okay of things that employees want evaluated right and not only in my company I'm sure in your and every organization but if you do not make those changes then you cannot say if business is the greatest platform for change and you're gonna focus on these changes you can't focus on everything and you can't do every guy you make right they're not gonna take on every cause and whatever you do have to kind of have a North Star and it better be around a structured process to make that happen and that's why I think an office of ethical use we might be the first ones in technology to do that but we will not be the last just as we was the first 2,000 already officer you think it's just technology or they think it's much bigger than that you think this is something that has to be adopted across the board I think this is far bigger well I'm went through all the bio technologies I mean you talk about the ethical use of the bio technologies is amazing I I'm sure their questions comments he has to provoked a few of you here yes and Jim please identify yourself for mark Jim's al Kowski on the CEO of build on first I want to thank you mark and everybody at Salesforce for the incredible partnership that you built with us we've worked closely with Parker Harris and mark Hawkins and a big team and I see Paula here who were gonna talk to in a little while so what we've done together is deep service immersions 36 our merchants on in the South Bronx South Side of Chicago and deep East Oakland and together we've been building schools in Malawi Africa but Jim there's a question here I'm the question is this let's talk our know what's your moment well you talked a lot about how Millennials are setting culture and my question to you is what is the next generation of social impact for Millennials and how will you harness that at Salesforce thank you well I mean I been basically on the road non-stop for last hundred and twenty days and it's been a very powerful process and it's resulted in this acquisition it's resulted in a lot of very interesting things changes that I've made to the organization I've been all over the world and I'll tell you the number-one thing that's on my mind is Rhys killing last night even we opened our new Salesforce tower here in New York City and I met somebody who came up to me and said and i retweeted his tweet because he was a very sweet you know thing that he did said and was when I got up this morning I remembered oh yeah this was an incredible story so he comes up to me he says you know I'm not part of the fourth Industrial Revolution I was part of I don't think I was part of the third Industrial I was a baker and I knew that that is not gonna get me to where I wanted to go and I got on your platform which we call trailhead comm and I Reese killed myself and I I have a net I have this next generation of skills and now because that I am squarely in the fourth Industrial Revolution and I you know I have this incredible career and I think that there is this arc where you know we have this kind of group of people that we need to bring with us into the future and we cannot leave these people behind and that this concept of not just workforce development but coral reefs killing that is in all of these amazing technologies what we're talking about AI or blockchain or even information security and even in the areas of ethical use all of the areas of compliance of our organization we really need to all go to another level but we I really see this imperative of bringing everybody that's great in the future that's a great example because 10 15 20 years ago we thought about as a government responsibility not a business responsibility has that changed oh well I think it absolutely has changed because we know the government can't do anything so so what changed is our understanding and expectations of government well I think a great example is I was with a government executive recently talking about this and they had set up programs in Appalachia and then they were lamenting well I guess that we can't really do this because this program has failed and they had gave me the URL and all that nice and then I countered with well take a look at our program in Appalachia and here is all the this is one is working and here's why and here the J and that we can actually point to these success stories and rarely a day goes by that I don't now get rien spired that this is possible that somebody can get on trailhead comm can rescale not just for our platform but for other platforms not just for our technology put for other technologies and that this is gonna be something that's gonna this is in my world this is also an ethical issue that is you know yes everyone in this room has a job at least most of the people and that we you know are marching into the fourth Industrial and fifth Industrial Revolution together but not everybody is with us so I I talked yesterday about how this CEO initiative grew out of an event that we had at the Vatican in December of 2016 in January of 2017 we started talking about it at a dinner in Davos and as we were talking about it you raised your hand and boldly said I will be your founding spot it's not exactly a story the story is like this that's the way I remember basically I was reading Fortune magazine and it was just one kind of very bad story about the next and I was like you know there is tremendous optimism in the future but there are stories of true changemakers and we need to highlight the changemakers so that people can be inspired by the changemakers and that was the idea and I said hey Allen we need to profile what some of the doing that are happening I know that the Darr doing media are sell more magazines but it's the good stuff that you know we need to kind of anchor to so that we wouldn't model that we're doing that to my quick question for you is is what can we do as a community mm-hmm what's your advice for us you were there at the beginning yeah well I think something you know I think that the most important thing is to do something one thing find the thing inside yourself deeply listen to yourself if not to your employees if not to your customers listen to yourself go deep inside yourself and ask your self one question what is the one thing that I can do to make the world better and if everybody does just one thing that has a sense of personal and individual responsibility the world will get better but also we have to do it in our companies Salesforce has lots of examples of things you can do but everybody can everybody can do a great piece of ending advice do something write that down yeah mark thank you thank you thank you

Channel: Fortune Magazine

Views: 5,469

Keywords: Journalism Franchise, Fortune, business, wall street, finance

Id: Iu0KDfAJQac

Length: 18min 20sec (1100 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2019