What’s Trailblazer by Marc Benioff about? What type of business model prioritizes ethics over income?
Traditional capitalism is facing increasing scrutiny because of its association with socioeconomic inequality, environmental degradation, and corporate greed. In Trailblazer, Marc Benioff says his company is leading the way forward by practicing a business model that foregrounds ideals over profits and represents the future of capitalism.
Read below for a brief overview of Trailblazer.
Overview of Trailblazer
The capitalism that powered the 20th century is under increasing scrutiny because spiraling inequality, environmental destruction, and rampant corporate greed have shattered public trust. In Trailblazer (2019), Marc Benioff argues that the time has come for a conscious revolution in business—and that his company, Salesforce, is leading the way forward. By practicing principled business, a business model that prioritizes key ideals over profits, Salesforce has committed itself to making the world a better place, and Benioff believes that this way of doing business represents the future of capitalism.
Salesforce Is a Principled Business
Benioff says that Salesforce became a Fortune 500 company by practicing principled business. In this section, we’ll describe the philosophy behind the principled business model that Benioff says launched Salesforce to success.
What Is a Principled Business?
According to Benioff, the best approach to business is to place moral principles at the forefront of organizational decision-making. We’ll call this model principled business. In this model, profit isn’t the sole driving force; instead, it’s balanced with a commitment to social responsibility, environmental sustainability, and internal fairness and equity. Principled business is a form of stakeholder capitalism (an economic perspective that says your company has an ethical duty to uplift everyone it impacts, even if it only impacts them indirectly). According to Benioff, this flies in the face of the conventional wisdom popularized by economist Milton Friedman, who argued that businesses’ only duty is to make money for shareholders.
Why Benioff Believes in Principled Business
Now that you understand what a principled business is, let’s discuss the reasons Benioff advocates for the business model. In this section, we’ll explain how principled business leads to business success and solves modern global challenges.
How Principled Business Benefits Everybody
Benioff credits Salesforce’s immense financial success to its practice of principled business. To support this belief, he cites a variety of statistical evidence: For example, one survey shows that customers are more likely to approve of (and therefore buy from) companies that demonstrate social and environmental responsibility.
Additionally, Benioff says internal research shows that one reason employees are drawn to work at Salesforce is that they feel they can stand behind the company’s principles and feel good about their contributions to society. Attracting and retaining talented employees helps Salesforce accomplish its larger mission and make profits, contributing to the company’s overall health.
Principled Business Is a Solution to Modern Global Challenges
Benioff believes that humanity is on the cusp of the Fifth Industrial Revolution—an era where moral responsibility will be built into technological innovation as the industry’s underlying purpose and guiding ethos. As we transition into the Fifth Industrial Revolution, he says, principled business will become a matter of course because stakeholders will demand it. These stakeholders include conscientious customers and employees, an enlightened society that is increasingly intolerant of businesses’ bad behavior, and a global environment that demands sustainability to prevent large-scale ecological collapse. Since principled business leads to better financial outcomes, investors and stockholders will demand it, too.
Benioff also explains that the global public’s confidence in the technology sector is quickly declining because it’s neglected to adequately regulate itself, citing mass privacy breaches and technology-mediated political manipulation as examples. At a 2018 meeting of the WEF at Davos, Benioff warned tech moguls that if their companies don’t correct these problems, governments may step in and more strictly regulate their activities. Practicing principled business is an alternative that can help companies avoid that outcome.
How Salesforce Practices Principled Business
According to Benioff, to achieve the benefits we just discussed, it’s not enough for a company to simply have principles—it must also practice those principles consistently and benefit all its stakeholders. In this section, we’ll explain how Salesforce practices principled business in two ways: by prioritizing its principles ahead of all else when it comes to organizational decisions and by meeting the needs of three oft-forgotten stakeholders: employees, society, and the environment.
How Salesforce Foregrounds Its Principles
As we mentioned earlier, Salesforce prioritizes four key moral principles: service, advancement, inclusivity, and confidence. Let’s discuss how the company has translated each of these principles into action over its history.
How Salesforce Provides Service
One of Benioff’s primary motivations to start Salesforce was to serve customers’ needs. He explains that as a child, he watched his father work tirelessly to manage the clothing business he owned—so as an adult, he endeavored to make business management easier, less time-consuming, and less expensive by providing software that could do much of the legwork. He was also inspired to prioritize service by an Indian guru who told him that his business should focus on helping others.
Benioff says that Salesforce provides two major forms of service to its customers: First, it gives customers access to software that helps them more effectively manage their business and pull through tough times. For example, Benioff describes how Salesforce client Home Depot suffered after the 2007-2008 financial crisis because consumers no longer had the disposable income for home renovations and were turning to cheaper, more convenient alternatives like Amazon. To overcome these challenges, Salesforce designed software for making online sales as well as communications software for employees, which enabled them to share expert knowledge and therefore enhanced the unique value Home Depot offered to its customers.
The second way Salesforce provides service is via Dreamforce, its annual stakeholder conference. Dreamforce features entertainment, health-enhancement experiences like guided mindfulness practices, skill-building seminars and workshops, and educational discussions and speeches on the intersection of technology and social issues by notable people like Michelle Obama. Altogether, these activities contribute to attendees’ well-being and personal development, empowering them to cultivate a holistic approach to professional growth while fostering connections, insights, and inspiration that extend far beyond the realm of technology.
How Salesforce Pursues Advancement
To continue meeting customers’ ever-evolving needs, Benioff says Salesforce is dedicated to making technological and social advancements. He explains that three people influenced his decision to prioritize this principle: First, his grandfather, a lawyer and local politician responsible for the advent of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), instilled in him the importance of contributing to social causes. Second, before Benioff founded Salesforce, he worked at a company that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell challenged to donate resources to underprivileged youth. Third, Apple’s founder, Steve Jobs, told him that Salesforce needed to invent new technologies to stay relevant in a rapidly changing market.
In addition to the educational value Salesforce provides via Dreamforce, the company aims to advance global society by providing educational opportunities for a variety of people, including students, professionals, and marginalized communities. For example, its online learning platform Trailforce trains professionals for competency in emerging technologies such as AI, Vetforce provides job training to veterans, and other programs give schoolchildren access to technologies and mentors. Benioff says that by ensuring individuals have access to the resources they need to thrive in the digital age, Salesforce closes the skills gap that contributes to social inequality (and therefore to global conflict) and promotes economic development.
Benioff says Salesforce has also spearheaded several technological advancement initiatives. For example, at Steve Jobs’s behest, Salesforce created AppExchange, a platform where any developer can sell apps for business use. This effectively democratized app creation, leading to a flourishing network of novel solutions to diverse business needs and driving efficiency, agility, and competitiveness across industries.
Additionally, Benioff says Salesforce has made progress with AI applications, like its line of Einstein technologies designed to enhance and automate organizational decision-making, business administration, and customer service.
How Salesforce Practices Inclusivity
Benioff explains that while he’s always striven for inclusivity, he didn’t explicitly focus on this principle until two key incidents brought Salesforce’s underperformance in this area to his attention. The first issue was an audit that showed that women were being underpaid compared to men across the board.
Second, when Benioff tweeted that the technology industry could help end racial strife amid the protests that ensued after the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016, there was a controversy over the lack of racial diversity among Salesforce employees (only 2% were Black). Benioff says he learned from these experiences and began pouring resources into making Salesforce a more equitable company.
Benioff says that once he became aware of Salesforce’s shortcomings with regard to gender inclusivity, he took decisive action to transform the company into a more gender-egalitarian workplace. This began with the Women’s Surge program, which aimed to increase the number of women working at Salesforce and continued with efforts to standardize pay and promotion tracks for gender parity. In addition to these structural changes, Salesforce invests in education and awareness, offering workshops and training sessions to help managers and employees unlearn unconscious bias—a type of automatic, unintentional prejudice that can lead to inequitable treatment—and foster a more inclusive workplace culture.
Benioff explains that Salesforce also pursues racial, religious, and LGBT inclusivity in several ways. For example, after speaking to a Black employee who told him she felt Salesforce didn’t take inclusivity seriously enough, Benioff appointed a Chief Equality Officer to address that. Salesforce also donates resources, including employee time, to causes that train minority students in computer science competencies, and it makes an effort to hire a greater number of underrepresented minority employees through its recruitment programs. Finally, Salesforce encourages minority employees to connect with each other by creating safe, identity-based discussion groups.
How Salesforce Promotes Confidence
According to Benioff, all stakeholders must have confidence in Salesforce, its leaders and employees, and each other. He learned this primarily by witnessing other companies undergo public crises of confidence—for example, Salesforce helped Toyota recover from the controversy that ensued when it knowingly failed to address safety issues with vehicles it manufactured, and Google suffered from mass public disapproval due to executives’ inappropriate handling of sexual harassment issues. Benioff also reasons that this confidence gives Salesforce a competitive edge—the company is more likely to attract and retain customers and employees if it has their confidence.
The primary way that Salesforce inspires stakeholders’ confidence is via accountability supported by transparent communication. Benioff says this often happens in relatively small ways—for example, executives livestream some of their meetings so that all employees have access to important company information, and the company has a website customers can consult to find out about the current operational status of Salesforce products and services, including any incidents or maintenance activities that may affect their availability.
Stakeholders often demand accountability and transparent communication from Benioff about large and contentious issues, too. One major example of this came in the form of a 2018 open letter to Benioff about Salesforce’s deal with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP). Salesforce provided software to CBP for mundane purposes, like human resources management, and employees were concerned that Salesforce software was being used to facilitate the separation of migrant children from their parents, a Trump-era border policy widely deemed inhumane. The open letter called for Salesforce to re-evaluate its relationship with CBP and impose a system that would ensure Salesforce’s software could not be used nefariously in the future.
Benioff explains that this controversy was difficult to handle because stakeholders’ confidence needs seemed conflicted. While employees needed to have confidence in Salesforce’s ethics to stand behind their work, customers needed to have confidence that Salesforce wouldn’t abandon them if their values didn’t align with employees’ values. To resolve the issue, Salesforce issued a statement clarifying that its software was not being used to separate migrant families and promising to donate to organizations helping affected families. Salesforce didn’t drop CBP from its client list, but to meet employees’ demands, it instituted an Office of Ethical and Humane Use to develop a strategy ensuring responsible use of Salesforce products.
How Salesforce Meets Its Stakeholders’ Needs
Recall that principled business is a form of stakeholder capitalism, which means businesses that take this approach must meet all their stakeholders’ diverse needs. Let’s explore how Salesforce satisfies the interests of three major groups of stakeholders: employees, society, and the environment.
Fostering Employee Wellbeing
Benioff explains that Salesforce takes pains to foster employee wellbeing because vibrant employees are more engaged and productive, so they can better support the company’s principled business efforts. In his view, Salesforce employees comprise the company’s “ohana” (the Hawaiian word for family—Benioff says he feels connected to Hawaiian culture because he’s vacationed there his whole life, so he infuses Salesforce with aspects of it). Let’s discuss two measures Salesforce uses to make employees feel like family: paid volunteerism and opportunities for mindfulness.
Salesforce offers employees seven paid volunteer days per year. Employees can volunteer for any cause in whatever capacity they want; for example, many employees volunteer in an educational capacity, providing mentorship and skills training to children in underserved schools, because they find such work emotionally rewarding. Benioff says paid volunteerism improves employee engagement, helps employees form meaningful relationships with people they care about, and reinforces employees’ sense of contributing to something large and worthwhile (Salesforce’s extended family). It also benefits the company—offering this benefit helps Salesforce attract and retain talented, compassionate employees.
Salesforce also makes mindfulness an essential part of the Salesforce work experience. Benioff describes mindfulness as a Buddhist practice he learned from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh that is centered around the breath, promotes understanding without judgment or projection, and supports mental wellbeing. To demonstrate its genuine care for employees, Salesforce incorporates mindfulness into their lives by offering a space for mindfulness on every floor of each of its offices that employees can use to meditate or pray. Benioff also encourages employees to practice mindfulness before they set their yearly work goals, since beginning with a clear mind can help them set more meaningful, achievable, value-oriented objectives.
Addressing Social and Environmental Needs
As we’ve discussed, Benioff considers society and the global environment two of Salesforce’s chief stakeholders. One way Benioff says Salesforce meets societal needs is through its 1-1-1 program: In addition to promoting employee volunteerism, Salesforce Foundation donates 1% of its money and resources like computers to communities in need. It also encourages other corporations to follow suit via its Pledge 1% campaign. As for the environment, Benioff says Salesforce is improving the sustainability of its operations and donates employee time to environmental causes.
Benioff also explains that as the impactful leader of a large, successful corporation with a wealth of resources at his disposal, he feels compelled to proactively address stakeholders’ problems in his personal life. This compulsion has led him to take personal responsibility for addressing social and environmental problems—he hopes that by demonstrating the power CEOs have to steward society and the environment, he’ll set an example for other business leaders and inspire them to get involved. He’s involved in traditional philanthropy—for example, he founded the Benioff Ocean Initiative to fund marine conservation research—which is common for CEOs, but he takes his responsibility a step further by campaigning for political change.
Benioff describes two times when he campaigned for political change. First, in 2015, Indiana passed a law that could allow businesses to legally turn away LGBT customers on the basis of religious freedom. After employees expressed fear about how the law would impact their lives, Benioff announced on Twitter that Salesforce would reduce its heavy involvement in Indiana, diverting funds from the state’s economy. Benioff says that his outspokenness emboldened other CEOs to take similar stance and eventually, the economic pressure these companies exerted convinced the state to revise the law, clarifying that it couldn’t be used to justify anti-LGBT discrimination.
Benioff campaigned for political change again by advocating for San Francisco’s Proposition C, a 2018 effort to impose a tax on the city’s largest corporations to fund services for the homeless, which many business leaders lobbied against. Benioff explains that the technology sector, including Salesforce, was partially to blame for the city’s growing homelessness problem—by locating there to take advantage of tax cuts, they drove up housing costs, which exacerbated homelessness, a problem that creates mass suffering, social strife, and unsafe, unsanitary street conditions. Benioff says he generated publicity for the cause by getting into a public disagreement with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey about it, which helped the proposition pass.
