Trailblazer

Author: Marc Benioff

Over the last two decades Salesforce has become the dominant player in the  enterprise space, by providing the platform for their marketing, sales, service and IT teams to connect with customers. Their founder and CEO is Marc Benioff and he is one of the few very successful entrepreneurs who have combined business success with social activism. 

He starts out by describing his first hand experience watching his running a small clothing business, “Stuart’s Apparel” and often-times was up until 11 pm at the Kitchen table, doing the books by hand. Through his father’s business he also got a sense of the importance of human relationships in making a business successful. 

There are many nice quotes in the book and I particularly liked this one. “To be effective, a leader needs to both learn from the past and project the future. But you can’t do either of those things until you carve out some time for being in the present”.

His simple definitions to create strategic alignment in Salesforce have the catchy acronymn V2MOM

• Vision - what do you want?
• Values - what’s important to you?
• Methods - how do you get it?
• Obstacles - what is preventing you from being successful?
• Measures - how do you know you have it?

From the start it is clear that Mark Benioff’s mission is improving the state of the world and not just being CEO of salesforce. In fact, he has written an entire chapter that is titled activist CEO. I must confess that there is a good deal of bragging about the great things that Salesforce and Marc Benioff have done, which doesn’t make for an entertaining read. However, there are some nice concepts like the ones about building trust, and the importance of developing a strong company culture. Specifically his idea of giving back 111 which is 1% equity 1% of product and 1% employees time seems to be a nice catchy motto for other companies to emulate.

Mark truly seems to have committed himself to alleviating the homelessness problem in San Francisco.  He was instrumental in getting proposition C passed in San Francisco. Itrequires all businesses with more than $50 million in revenue to be an additional .5% of tax on the profit.

Overall, Mark is one of those few individuals who have had both a business and social impact in our times. Read the book to appreciate his contribution and see what you can learn from him.