PROLOGUE
- Salesforce values: trust, customer success, innovation, and equality.
- In a competitive business such as tech, where luring top talent can be the difference between profit and loss, it’s often something intangible — like a diverse, inclusive, values-driven culture — that determines where the best and brightest talent decide to work.
Part I: Values Create Value
A NEW DIRECTION
- Innovation cannot advance in a positive direction unless it’s grounded in genuine and continued efforts to lift up all of humanity
- A culture rooted in values creates value.
1 BEGINNINGS The Benioffs of San Francisco
- Your work, and the integrity with which you perform it, really matters.
2 VALUES What You Do Matters
3 TRUST The Number One Value
- Kaizen is a philosophy of continuous improvement.
- Relationships in business are just like those in life, in the sense that it’s all about connection, not transaction.
- No company, no matter how venerated or beloved, can afford to become complacent when it comes to trust.
- As a leader, you need to be a lot more concerned about what people aren’t saying than about what they are.
- We actually livestream our annual executive offsites so every employee in the company can watch.
- Then as now, our secret ingredient would be our customers’ confidence that we would consistently deliver on each and every one of our promises.
- The people in the trenches need to be able to trust that their team, and their leaders, will be right there on the ground, working beside them,
- At some point, every leader will find themselves taking a position that requires them to discount the judgment of all the smart people around them.
- To be effective as a leader, you need a reservoir of trust to draw from. And once you use it all up, it can take years and years to replenish.
- There’s no way to put a dollar value on values.
4 CUSTOMER SUCCESS Transformation Through Technology
- Our renewal rate became the measure of whether or not customers were getting what they needed from our software, and thus it also became our chief barometer of health.
- When they asked for faster speed in navigation, what they really needed was smarter “tasks” that could do things like triggering proactive alerts about their clients and guiding them to useful market data.
- We had to convince Home Depot to put its community — not physical stores — at the center of its culture.
- Ulrik Nehammer: “The most dangerous place to make decisions is in the office,” he said. “You need to make decisions where the customer is.”
- Success is not a matter of doing just enough to keep a customer’s business, it’s about giving customers the tools they need to succeed — both now and in the years ahead.
- When it comes to customer success, however, I
have achieved absolute clarity on four points.
- First, technology will never stop evolving. In the years to come, machine learning and artificial intelligence will probably make or break your business.
- The second point is this: We’ve never had a better set of tools to help meet every possible standard of success,
- The third point is that customer success depends on every stakeholder
- The fourth and most important point is this: The gap between what customers really want from businesses and what’s actually possible is vanishing rapidly.
- Resist the urge to make quick, marginal improvements and spend more time listening deeply to what customers really want, even if they’re not fully aware of it yet.
5 INNOVATION Artificial Intelligence and the Power of Ecosystems
- If you don’t value innovation as a foundational principle, you will never achieve it.
- if Salesforce was to become the new kind of company I wanted it to be, we would need to seek innovation everywhere.
- A company seeking to achieve true scale needs to seek innovation beyond its own four walls and tap into the entire universe of knowledge and creativity out there.
SIX EQUALITY A Good Look in the Mirror
- There’s often a strong correlation between your ability to make progress and your willingness to ask others for help.
- Our ultimate mission when it comes to equality at Salesforce sounds deceptively simple: for our offices all over the world to look like the larger populations they serve.
- You can make all the empathetic statements you want, but until you figure out how to open doors for people of color and build a welcoming environment for them, you’ll never create lasting change.
- Here’s the thing about values: You have to use words to identify them, but they won’t create true value for you unless they turn into consistent behaviors.
Part II: Business Is the Greatest Platform for Change
SHARED KNOWLEDGE
- Picking values to live by is the easy part; putting them into practice requires extraordinary attentiveness and persistence.
7 OHANA Redefining Corporate Culture
- Ohana came to mean any group of people bound by a responsibility for one another, and by their shared values.
- Like a growing child, culture needs to be continuously nurtured as the company gets bigger and ages. I consider this to be one of my most important jobs at Salesforce.
- Trust needs to be the number one priority,
- Day one employees get a Salesforce badge, backpack, and computer, and spend the morning in orientation.
- In the afternoon, we show them how serious we are by sending them off to do community service.
- A month later new employees attend Becoming Salesforce, a daylong boot camp, to learn more about our culture,
- Each new hire is assigned a ”trail guide” for guidance, support, and coaching during his or her first ninety days at Salesforce.
- The manager picks up the new employee on orientation day for a special lunch out of the office.
- We also asked every employee to add a well-being goal to their V2MOM plan, the goal-setting process we use at Salesforce (which you’ll learn more about in Chapter Nine).
- Creating a culture of psychological safety — one in which people trust one another and don’t fear speaking their minds — results in smarter risk taking and better problem solving.
8 GIVING BACK MEANS LOOKING FORWARD Investing in the Trailblazers of the Future
- Every dollar of your money and every minute of your time that you spend delivering knowledge — and the tools to attain it — to kids and teenagers is an investment in both the trailblazing innovation of the future and in the workforce of tomorrow.
- The 1-1-1 Model: Take 1 percent of equity, 1 percent of product, and 1 percent of employees’ time and put them into our own nonprofit.
- Giving back has been linked to improved productivity, employee satisfaction, and talent recruitment, according to research from Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy.
- If I could put anything on a billboard it would be ADOPT A PUBLIC SCHOOL. Or at least, donate some time and resources to one.
9 BEGINNER’S MIND From a Blank Page to the Same Page
- Multitasking has proven to be a pretty safe way to do many things badly.
- Today, it’s not enough to simply unplug and spend time thinking. We need to make time to think deeply.
- Approaching life with a beginner’s mind is a way of opening yourself to curiosity, gratitude and learning.
- By 2018, 86 percent of the Fortune 500 were Salesforce customers, as were nearly a hundred fifty thousand additional businesses of all types and sizes.
- During those unplugged weeks my consciousness shifted and I saw that I needed to put more trust in the people around me.
- Mindfulness is simply being aware of what is happening inside and around you in the present moment.
- I make sure to take small moments of my day to connect with my breathing and take a step back from whatever I’m supposed to be doing.
- The most important aspect of mindfulness isn’t just opening your mind or being present in the moment. It’s also a matter of listening deeply. Not just to yourself, but to others.
- You need to prioritize. And at a big company, you need to scale the process of setting priorities in order to get tens or hundreds of thousands of employees on the same page.
- V2MOM
- Vision: What do you want to achieve?
- Values: What’s important to me about this goal? What are the values supporting the vision?
- Methods: All the actions and the steps that everyone would need to take in order to get the job done. These methods were also ranked in order of priority, and each one included an estimate of how much it would cost us.
- Obstacles: What is preventing you from being successful?
- Measures: How will we know when we are successful?
- Four key principles for laying out this document,
in addition to starting with a blank slate each time.
- First, everything had to be ranked in order of priority.
- Second, every word mattered.
- Third, the plan had to be easily remembered.
- Fourth, it had to be easily understood.
- To foster transparency, we publish every V2MOM on our corporate social network
10 STAKEHOLDERS We Are All Connected on This Planet
- The only way a company truly thrives is if it fully integrates into society and into the greater effort to build a better world.
- The environment is a key stakeholder for every business
- 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.
- This was about how our culture — as cultures do — needed to evolve.
- What mattered was our responsibility to make sure our ethical use guidelines were clearly articulated going forward.
- 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.
11 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.
- What’s good for the homeless is what’s good for my company, my community, and my city.
- 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.
EPILOGUE
- For businesses that want to thrive in this coming era, the question is no longer: Are we doing well? The question is: Are we doing good?