The Big Winner

June 18th, 2008 by admin

Marc Benioff, former executive from Oracle (one of the largest software companies in the world) and current CEO of Salesforce (one of the fastest growing software companies in the world) gave last year’s commencement address at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business:

Like Bill Gates and eBay’s Pierre Omidyar, Benioff believes in the power of compassionate capitalism:
“Throughout his career, Benioff has also been committed to using information technology to produce positive social change. In 2000, he launched the Salesforce.com Foundation—now a multimillion-dollar global organization—establishing the ‘1/1/1 model,’ whereby the company contributes one percent of profits, one percent of equity, and one percent of employee hours back to the communities it serves. In 2006, Benioff authored The Business of Changing the World, in which 20 great leaders reveal how businesses can go beyond writing a check and leverage the full scope of their resources to make a difference. Compassionate Capitalism, also authored by Benioff, is the first-ever best-practices guide for corporate philanthropy that illustrates the success of the integrated model.”
Source: http://www.salesforce.com/company/leadership/board-of-directors/#benioff

While the 1% may sound fairly small at first glance, it’s a substantial amount when talking about a company that earns hundreds of millions of dollars - and growing - in revenue per year.

From a strategy perspective, this interview with Benioff regarding Sun Tzu’s Art of War includes some great advice:
http://www.sonshi.com/benioff.html

Except:
Sonshi.com: Would you mind sharing with our readers a time when the book helped you to compete in business and/or helped you in your life?

Benioff: One of the most important tenants of the book focuses on strategic thinking rather than combative thinking. That advice has helped us decide to position ourselves in a way that makes people want to join our mission—rather than attack us. A perfect example of this is exemplified by our decision to open up our platform. If we had been thinking combatively, we would have been afraid about competitors learning too much about us, or we would have had concerns about them duplicating our moves. Instead, we opened up the platform, first with API, then with something called Customforce, a suite of tools behind salesforce.com that allows regular business people to easily extend their current salesforce.com applications, and then with Apex, a breakthrough development platform that lets customers create and run any type of application on demand. By inspiring people to join us and work with us creatively, we gathered an army of innovators who are dedicated to making us better.