Marc Benioff on how Salesforce was able to "do well and do good"
Billionaire Marc Benioff is sharing how his cloud computing company, Salesforce, was able to "do well and do good" the past 20 years. According to the co-CEO, chairman, and co-founder of the tech giant, who's out with a new book called "Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change," it is a story of shareholders and stakeholders, including the homeless in San Francisco.
"When you're running the largest company in San Francisco and I'm walking to work, I'm looking in the eyes and the hearts of those homeless. Those are my key stakeholders," Benioff said Wednesday on "CBS This Morning." "My employees are saying, 'Hey, Marc, what are you going to do about this?' That's why last year, I ran a major campaign for something called Proposition C to actually tax Salesforce so that we can pay more to provide services to the homeless in San Francisco. Because they're a key stakeholder."
Other stakeholders include the employees, local public schools and customers, he said, adding that taking both stakeholders and shareholders into account is "the new capitalism."
Benioff is considered a game changer for activism in the business world. He's helped close the gender pay gap at Salesforce. In 2015, Benioff also threatened to scale back business in Indiana after state lawmakers passed a law that he said discriminated against the LGBTQ community.
"So we said, hey, if you don't change that law, we're going to deinvest. And when we said that, hundreds of other companies followed us," Benioff recounted.
That measure was amended one week later. "Through that economic power we're able to create change," Benioff added.