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FORTUNE.COM // NOVEMBER 2019
LEADERSHIP
The
Benioff
Way
The billionaire
social warrior
offers a
powerful guide
for making
business better.
By Clifton Leaf
IN THE SPRING OF 2015, two senior
Salesforce executives paid a visit to
the home of their CEO, Marc Benioff, to deliver some
uncomfortable news: Women at the company, they sus-
pected, were being paid less than their male counter-
parts for the same jobs. As his colleagues spoke, Benioff
could feel the indignation and astonishment reshaping
his face. “I’ll admit, my defensiveness was welling up,”
he writes in his compelling new book, Trailblazer: The
Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change,
coauthored by former Wall Street Journal writer
Monica Langley.
The self-made tech billionaire, whose company sells
subscription software for a rather prosaic-sounding
task—customer-relations management—had al-
ready made a name for himself as a philanthropist-
provocateur. Long ago he had instituted a widely copied
program called 1-1-1 in which Salesforce donated 1%
each of its product, equity, and employee time to chari-
table causes. Benioff had personally given away millions
of dollars and tweaked the Silicon Valley elite who
didn’t. And in the case of Salesforce itself, he was sure
things couldn’t be so unfair. “Impossible,” he told his
colleagues. “That’s not right. That’s not how we operate.”
As it turns out, it was—and Salesforce spent $3 mil-
lion to bring women’s salaries up to parity. The following
year, when his team, again, discovered that pay was out
of whack, it cost another $3 million to fix. A third audit
found that the inequity persisted, largely due to acquisi-
tions Salesforce had made in the interim. (Gender pay
gaps had been built into those companies too.)
For those who have followed Benioff ’s career, the
anecdote is a familiar one. But in Trailblazer, he goes
much deeper into
what he learned and
how he learned it.
And the management
insights he draws
from this experience
and others—how bias
creeps into the day-
to-day practices of
business; how being
left out of a meeting
can rob someone of
opportunity; “how a
company’s culture can
breed inequality in
ways small and large,”
as he and Langley
write—ought to be a
required curriculum
for today’s business
leaders. Indeed, in
chapter after chapter,
Trailblazer draws the
tenets of a new corpo-
rate manifesto—one
in which serving
employees and com-
munity offers a more
direct path to growth
and innovation than
serving shareholders
alone.
There are moments
in the book where
Benioff ’s personal
pursuit of enlight-
enment may be a
distraction from the
message—I could
have done without
his brief meditation
on meditation, for
instance. But overall,
the leadership wis-
dom he delivers is one
every businessperson
should know. If only
the B-schools taught
it as well.dollars
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