October 15, 2019 Good morning.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is one of the most intriguing CEOs of our times. He is bigger than life, both literally and figuratively. The company he built is a powerhouse, and routinely ranks high on Fortune lists like 100 Best Companies to Work For (#2), Future 50 (#10), World's Most Admired (#14), and 100 Fastest Growing Companies (#39). If you bought shares when Salesforce went public in 2004, you would have earned a total return of almost 3,500%.
Benioff also defines the vanguard of what's come to be called the "activist CEO"—starting with his effort against the Indiana religious liberties law in 2015, which he saw as violating gay rights, and continuing up to his more recent campaign in favor of a tax on big companies to fight homelessness in San Francisco last year. That activism is the topic of his new book, out this week, called Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change. He chatted recently with Fortune editor-in-chief Clifton Leaf to discuss it. You can read the full interview here , but a few choice excerpts:
• On capitalism: "I would say that capitalism, as we know it, is dead. And that businesses have to move to a new capitalism; a more equal, fair and sustainable way of doing business—one that values all stakeholders as well as shareholders."
• On big tech: "I think this is a critical time for our industry (technology.) If trust is not your highest value, your employees will walk out….When I called Facebook the new cigarettes, which is kind of what I said at Davos in January of 2018, a lot of people didn't know what I was saying at that point. But now they do. They understand: It's not good for you. It's addictive. They are after your kids. They need to be regulated."
• On equal pay for women: "Because this is a subconscious bias, you have to monitor and measure it on a regular basis. So this is just happening automatically when people are getting hired. But number two is, we didn't realize that when we acquired companies, we weren't just buying their innovation, we were also buying their pay scales….What business books talk about that?"
• On being a public company: "When you go public, it's a cleansing. When you start to apply things like Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC regulations, governance, quarterly board meetings, investor statements, earnings calls, it's a cleansing…and it's very healthy. And I think a lot of these companies, they stay private too long."
A review of Benioff's book is running in the November issue of Fortune magazine, but you can read an excerpt on Fortune.com this morning, here. Other news below.
Alan Murray
alan.murray@fortune.com
@alansmurray
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