SAN FRANCISCO — Whether he’s swimming with dolphins in the Pacific Ocean or drawing inspiration from rappers, Marc Benioff has broken the CEO mold while running Salesforce.com Inc. for the past decade.
Some of his antics seem calculated to make a point about the importance of daring to be unconventional, a method that has worked well for him.
Benioff, 45, wouldn’t be a billionaire and Saleforce.com wouldn’t have emerged as an even better investment than Google if he hadn’t been able to persuade so many corporate decision makers to change their ways.
Salesforce.com rents software for managing customer relationships and delivers its product exclusively over the Internet. The concept, often called “cloud computing,” is hot now, but it was considered a pie-in-the-sky notion when Benioff started Salesforce at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999.
Saleforce.com has more than 77,000 customers, nearly 5,000 employees and steadily rising revenue that’s expected to hit $1.5 billion in the company’s current fiscal year.
His most impressive accomplishment of all: A $10,000 investment in Saleforce’s June 2004 initial public offering would now be worth nearly $84,000, based on the company’s July 21 stock price of $92.16. By comparison, a $10,000 investment in Google’s August 2004 IPO would now be worth about $56,000.
Here are excerpts from a recent interview with Benioff in Hawaii.
Question: Do you get good ideas when you’re swimming with the dolphins?
Answer: I have gotten some of my best insights when I have been able to surrender myself to nature like that. I attribute Salesforce’s great performance to my ability to work in Hawaii.
I try to adopt a Zen perspective of a beginner’s mind. And I think the best way to get a beginner’s mind is to get to an environment like this where you can kind of let go.
Q: When did you know that Salesforce.com was going to be a success?
A: I still have not accepted that Salesforce.com has made it. (Former Intel Corp. CEO) Andy Grove said it pretty well, “Only the paranoid survive.” Michael Dell says it really well also. He says, “Pleased, but never satisfied.” That’s kind of how I feel, which is you have to kind of keep going and work harder.
Q: Who are some of the CEOs that have been the biggest influence on you?
A: I would say Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and John Chambers (CEO of Cisco Systems).
They are multi-decade CEOs. Each of them have at least one cycle of success and a cycle of failure behind them. They keep going no matter what. And they innovate. They have a customer-centric view.
Q: How would you describe your management philosophy?
A: Well, I think the number one thing I do is the “V2MOM” process. It stands for the vision, the values, the methods, the obstacles and the measures.
Each of one of those five things also connects to five questions. Vision, what do I want? Values, what’s most important about it? Methods, how do I get it? Obstacles, what will prevent us from having it? And measures, how will we know we have it?
Q: What kinds of things make you mad?
A: The number one thing that gets me upset is if we lose a great employee to either a competitor or to do something else. It upsets me when I don’t feel like it serves that employee or the company. That happens more often now because I am not able to maintain the tight relationship that I used to have with everyone.
Q: So what are the next big things for Salesforce.com?
A: When I started Salesforce, I asked a question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.com?” The question now really is: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Facebook?”
Where we used to have desktops and notebooks, now it’s more likely we are going to a tablet or a smart phone.
This is really where I am spending a lot of my time. It’s a fundamental transformation. It’s about the cloud, social, mobile. It’s really inspired a new generation of wildly innovative applications that are changing entire industries. I call this the Facebook Imperative. It’s all about looking at these changes and how are they going to apply to us.
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