Tim Cook and Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff on Innovation, Leadership, and Creating Change

Michael Rivo: From Salesforce Studios, this is Blazing Trails.

Michael Rivo: Welcome to Blazing Trails. Where we bring you conversations with some of the world's leading thinkers who movers, inspire us and make us think. I'm Michael Rivo of Salesforce Studios. Back in 1998, Steve Jobs was trying to persuade today's guest, Tim Cook, to join Apple. Cook was on the fence about it and one CEO told him he'd be a fool to take the job, but Cook listened to his gut and now is Apple's CEO. He's a visionary leader, who is using his platform for change. Here he is on stage at Dreamforce with Salesforce CEO, Mark Benioff.

Mark Benioff: All right, good afternoon everybody. How are you all doing? Did you like the keynote? Did you like Alicia Keys? And here she is, no. But better. I don't know, actually pretty tied here. We have someone amazing. We have someone who is not just a phenomenal leader in our industry, not only somebody who has redefined what it means to be a chief executive officer, but someone who also is a leader in the world and somebody who I have learned so much from. I could not be more excited to have the Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook here. Tim please come and join us. There you are. So happy to have you.

Tim Cook: I am thrilled to be here.

Mark Benioff: Well, we're so happy to have you at Dreamforce. This is our dream that you would come here.

Tim Cook: I'm not Alicia Keys though.

Mark Benioff: Well you're close.

Tim Cook: You haven't listened to my voice.

Mark Benioff: Well, we'd like to actually. Well, we can sit down, we can stand up. What would be most comfortable for you?

Tim Cook: Whatever you want.

Mark Benioff: Why don't we have a seat and Tim I'm so happy that you're here and thrilled that you could come and be here with us today. Apple has such a place in my heart since 1984. I was given an internship there and that really kind of set my career off. I had never worked in a company before, and I'll never forget that. I'm very grateful to the company. So thank you very much.

Tim Cook: Thank you. It's so great to be here. I'm honored to be asked and thanks everyone for showing up to this session. I see a few people up top as well. Thank you so much.

Mark Benioff: So Tim, I'm going to let you open up. I think maybe we could talk about some of the things that are happening between Apple and Salesforce customers and that's so exciting.

Tim Cook: Yeah maybe I could just say a couple of things about Apple and then we can move on.

Mark Benioff: That would be great.

Tim Cook: We're pulled into the enterprise after iPhone shipped, people began to take I- phones into the enterprise and they began to say, Hey we want you to do this and that and really have the mobile operating system that's best for enterprise. And we took that challenge to heart and it became evident that there was going to be this blending of personal and business in a way that we'd never seen before. And that most of us don't want to carry two phones. I mean, some people do and by the way, I love you if you do, but most people don't. So for a decade or so, we've been working on bringing enterprise features to the operating system and I'm really proud of how far we've come there. We're now in every fortune 500 company and 10 companies are writing custom apps for their enterprise and so it's come a long way. In all honesty, it's behind the consumer revolution of apps, but I'm really proud of the trajectory and so forth and so there's great momentum. From a partnership point of view, I couldn't be happier with working with Salesforce and we've had some terrific customer wins together and maybe some of these will come on the screen here. The first one that I thought I would mention is HEB and I don't know if you know about HEB, but they're the largest private employer... yes in the Longhorn State and over a hundred thousand folks or so and incredibly innovative. We're really proud to be working with them. They're using apps everything from the photo here of checking temperature of foods and making sure they're exactly right for the customer. They've worked on customer facing apps for online delivery. Groceries changing in major way and they're really leading the charge here. And also from an employee management point of view between timekeeping, scheduling and these kinds of things. So very pervasive throughout the business and I think a good example of a company that's using it to transform their business. For too many still mobile is about browsing and email and messaging and those are all important, but arguably the way you change the business is using mobile apps. And this is only possible because of the work that Salesforce did on the SDK. Which started the beginning of our partnership, thank you very much. And with our announcements this week on Salesforce mobile coming out and Trailhead for iOS. An exclusive on iOS, as I understand which I really loved that. I think the sky is the limit here. There's another one here that I thought I would mention. This is a company that's been around for 167 years. It makes us all feel young I say, and they're Holston's and it's a mattress company and it's been passed down through the family over multi- generations and they've used it to totally change the way their selling process works. You can imagine the old system of the sales professional having to go behind the wall and something and check on the PC and check on inventory and it taking so long to configure. They really do really high quality mattresses and so their configuration time has been reduced by 90%. This is like a total rethink of how things are done and I could not be happier with it. So those are just two of the examples, but there's a ton more and the thing is, people are truly using it to transform their businesses and I know you're proud as well. I'm super proud that that Apple is involved in these and involved with Salesforce with these.

Mark Benioff: Well, Tim, I'll tell you that, I guess there's one more example, which is me and I ran my business on my phone. I have for years, I don't even own a computer anymore. I don't need one. crosstalk Well, I mean, you guys done such a good job.

Tim Cook: Thank you.

Mark Benioff: Well I have it somewhere but I couldn't even tell you where it is. I mean, I think I haven't thrown it away because it has some videos on it and things, pre- iCloud, but I don't use a computer and the phone has really become an extension of my office. Wherever I am if I have my phone, I can work and I have my apps, Salesforce as an app. Of course, I have all my other capabilities apps that we built and messaging and things, but everything I need is on my phone. It's a freeing feeling and especially with the incredible capabilities with video today too. Especially what you've done with FaceTime and Multi. Multiple people, all pairing within that. I mean, it's just incredible the productivity that you can achieve. It's just, you guys have done just a beautiful job. You should take a hand for just great engineering.

Tim Cook: Thank you. The feeling is mutual. You guys have done a fantastic job and I love the way how you're constantly taking all of the new things and quickly incorporating those. Whether it's Siri shortcuts or Handoff or anything essentially that makes your customer more productive and quickly making those available to the customers. I think the sky is the limit.

Mark Benioff: We've learned a lot of that from you, honestly. I mean, we learned the value of the innovation. We learned about the spirit of innovation and listening deeply to that spirit and the ability for Apple to innovate now for so many decades, so consistently it's incredible.

Tim Cook: So many people confuse innovation with change and they become convinced that innovation is just change but I think both of us recognize and our companies more importantly recognize that innovation is about making things better, not just merely changing. That requires a depth of thought that's well beyond just merely changing something and that's Apple's secret.

Mark Benioff: Yeah, it is Apple's secret. It's really been from the beginning. Apple has been committed to making things better and having a sophistication and every part of the engineering, including the design.

Tim Cook: It's about making the world's best products and enriching people's lives and if we can't do both of those, we pass and go to the next thing. And so with that kind of filter, if you will, it means we only work on a few things, but we try our best to do those as good as we can.

Mark Benioff: And it's incredible because the company, I mean, it must have been birthed in the seventies or what is the founding year?

Tim Cook: About 78.

Mark Benioff: About 78. So it's incredible to see that it's just a waterfall of innovation over decades. That's the beauty of the commitment that you've had to serving others, it's incredible.

Tim Cook: We've never set the objective to be first. We've always set the objective to be the best. We've never set it to make the most, but to be the best and to have the best and that North star has helped guide us through the temptations of going for market share and the other kind of things that companies can have objectives to do. We just want make the best products and we think that we can do that. We can have an okay business and invest into the next round of products.

Mark Benioff: Well, I've noticed that not only you make the best products, which is I think, clear to many people in this room. How do people here own an iPhone or an Apple product?

Tim Cook: Oh, thank you. If you own an Android, we do recycle those at the Apple store.

Mark Benioff: And this stage that we're sitting on has a tremendous history.

Tim Cook: It does.

Mark Benioff: Well, it must bring back memories and visions and inspirations.

Tim Cook: It does. I felt it coming in, in a major way, to be honest. This was the theater that lots of the Apple products were announced in and Steve unveiled many products here and I can feel him in his presence whenever I come here. So yeah, there's a lot of memories here.

Mark Benioff: Is there a special memory that came forward or that's wrong for you?

Tim Cook: Well, it's mainly of him and a lot of people when they think of Steve, they think about products and of course I think of that, but I really think of just the simple things that he did. Every day he always left the office before I did. I'm not sure why that was always the case, but he would always stop by my office before he left and exchange notes on the day and so it's the simple things like that, that the friendship that I hold. I remember him more than once rehearsing on the stage and sort of going way off script and in a way that only he could do and sort of making everybody laugh along the way and he wasn't known for that, but he did that.

Michael Rivo: We're going to take a quick break now to bring you a conversation with Salesforce is Matt Jaffe and WordPress, VIP CEO, Nick Gardner. With unparalleled power and flexibility, WordPress VIP is the leading provider of enterprise WordPress and powers digital customer experiences for companies like Facebook, Spotify, Capgemini and more. In these 10 episodes, you'll hear from their CEO, Nick Gardner on how he and his company view the future of work, digital transformation and more.

Matt Jaffe: As you mentioned, it's about keeping the audience front of mind. Audience first.

Nick Gardner: Yes. That's just so keyed up to WordPress because it's really the software that people want it. It's ubiquity comes from the fact that this was selected by the masses sort of, and really use of this and it was brought into organizations like Time. Actually not top down, like a lot of softwares brought in. It was sort of a bottom up adoption it's that consumerization of IT where it's like people are using something in their personal lives or like, this is great, why does my software at work have to be such a chore? Why is it so hard to do my job and the tools there? Can I bring some of the tools from my personal life into work and start to leverage those there? And we see that sort of bottom up adoption there where it's like, okay users are demanding better. They want better out of their software. WordPress can deliver there. And like great news they can meet all of those expectations that major organizations would need in terms of reliability, stability, performance, scalability, security, things like this or we can help show you and this will stand up to the overall demands of massive audiences, massive organizations.

Matt Jaffe: I mean, I have to tell you, I literally lived this. I was blogging a lot about soccer years and years ago. It feels like a past life and it was so easy for me to use my WordPress blog to publish whatever story I wanted and then I started working for ABC news and all of a sudden that process was a thousand times harder. It made no sense.

Nick Gardner: That was our earliest stories, really. Back in our history, if you remember All Things Digital, with Kara Swisher, that was one of the first big bets. We can take WordPress and not just use the old CMS that the company has been using and we've got a new initiative and let's do that and let's really be daring there. And from there it really has grown out to say like look, it doesn't have to be the blog. This can be a primary business use.

Matt Jaffe: This can be it.

Nick Gardner: This can be it, this can be the masthead on this. This is why if you're going to the New York post and you're reading on the post, you're in WordPress, right there. That's what's happening there and they famously will talk about how they've taken their workflow to minutes and what that's done for their overall objectives around audience and time spent on site and engagement and everything else.

Matt Jaffe: It changes everything.

Nick Gardner: It does because now your editorial team is actually spending time doing the job that they need to do and not just fighting against the software.

Matt Jaffe: Focusing on the important stuff.

Nick Gardner: Absolutely and now one of the great things about this is when you're leveraging something that's ubiquitous on the web, you're now... Sort of when the web moves it moves through WordPress. Which is really exciting because Google AMP is a great example of this. If something like AMP is coming out, accelerated mobile pages, how do you influence massive adoption across the web? Well make sure it works with WordPress and if you do that now, AMP can now work with a third of the web. And so that becomes really freeing to organizations, would be Capgemini or a new score because now they're able to say like, Oh, WordPress is just kind of keeping up with the changes on the web. I'm not having to build in the new things that are coming to the business.

Matt Jaffe: You don't have to worry about that.

Nick Gardner: Yeah It's just coming essentially for free in the platform, just to make use of it and they're focusing on the actual business needs that they're trying to drive results towards and kind of leaving the overall concern around, like how do we keep pace of technology and web trends and changes like this? Let the software itself do that.

Matt Jaffe: As it should be. Let the pros handle their area of expertise and you can focus on what you need to focus on.

Nick Gardner: That's it.

Michael Rivo: That was Nick Gardner, CEO of WordPress, VIP to find out more visit wpvip. com and now back to Tim Cook and Mark Benioff.

Mark Benioff: One of the things that's really carried Apple forward and of course we all miss Steve so much but you have this amazing partnership before he passed and then since he passed, you've been so true to him and his values and moving the company forward. Has there've been a value or something that has been especially important to you about the company?

Tim Cook: Well the thing that we needed to do at Apple was keep innovating. Keep innovating while staying true to our values. It's not simply enough to just innovate, you have to stay true to our values. And so we care deeply that we embed privacy in all of our products. Privacy is very important to us. We view it as a fundamental human right. So we've doubled down on this many times across the time. We've looked in the mirror hard because we wanted to be a steward of the earth and so we didn't want to merely do the things that you're legally required to do, but we wanted to go well beyond that. And so we challenged ourselves first to run the company on a hundred percent renewable energy and we've done that. We're really proud of that and secondly we challenged ourselves to think broader about how we could be the ripple in the pond and we began to focus on our suppliers because Apple is a huge industrial company as well. It's not known for that, but obviously we have tremendous manufacturing and so now we're out working with all of our supplier partners to bring them to a hundred percent renewable energy. And we've taken the audacious goal of only taking recycled materials for our products and to take nothing from the earth. And so this would be no mining and most people would listen to it and they would go, there is no way. But the same people told us there was no way we could ever run Apple on a hundred percent renewable energy. And so we take these point by point and try to stretch ourselves well beyond what we know currently we're able to do and I'm super proud of that because we want to leave the world better than we found it. And arguably all of us are here for a short time and we have to be good stewards of the earth while we're here and so this is very important to us. A quality is very important to us. We believe everyone should be treated with dignity and respect and so we advocate for dreamers to be extended permanently, given citizenship. Thank you. We have about 450 dreamers in Apple and I've talked to many of them firsthand and seeing their love for our country and their commitment to it firsthand. And I think they're broadly representative of the total several hundred thousand people and so we're advocating for that. And so all of these things are embedded in who we are. They're not these bolt on things, you don't bolt on privacy. You think about it in the development process of products. You can see what happens when companies wake up one day and decide they're going to do something privacy wise, you just can't do it. You have to design it in and the same way for environment, as it turns out. What kind of materials are you using? Did you do the work to use recycled materials and are you minimizing your carbon footprint by making it zero? In the goal to make it zero and so all of these things, I'm very fortunate to be at a company where we share these values and they're deeply embedded into the company and in the way we think and conduct ourselves.

Mark Benioff: Well, it sounds like not only do you share the values, but you have an especially good way of operationalizing your values. I mean, you've now articulated innovation, you articulated privacy, you articulated sustainability, you articulated quality and then you said for each one of these you're operationalizing those values.

Tim Cook: Yeah I think you have to. If you don't, it becomes a marketing thing and we don't want to market. We want to do. We want to make a difference. We generally do and so in order to make a difference, you have to operationalize it. Otherwise it becomes a slogan or a poster on the wall or something like that. I talked about environment, we first set out to deeply understand our carbon footprint and I don't mean just the footprint that you could measure internal to Apple but we looked at the carbon footprint of our users when they were using our products, because the energy efficiency is something we control. We looked at our manufacturing, despite it not being owned by Apple and we looked at the freight, the movement of the product. In addition to all the things that are happening at Apple, from data centers and so forth. And so we developed a deep understanding of what we were contributing and then begin to take each piece of it, in not just try to go buy a credit. Which is an easy way to get to a hundred percent renewable. We challenged ourselves to put new energy in the grid and so it takes more work to do this, but as it turns out, anybody can do it because in the aggregate we're doing something also that's economically good. It's taken more time to do it and a lot of deep engineering, but we didn't want to be doing something that only a rich company could do. We wanted to do something everybody could look at it and say, Oh I could do that and so we try to share that information for everyone. We don't want people copying our products that happens too often, but we do want people copying us in this way and so we try to make that very open, but we've taken every one of these like that and thought about how do we embed? How do we become the ripple in the pond? How do we make a contribution larger than ourselves? Because we're a decent size now, but if we only change ourselves, we haven't done very much. We want to put our ding on the universe and you only do that if you're creating a change, that's much broader than yourself.

Mark Benioff: Steve used to talk about how life was kind of like a China shop, where you kind of were in there and try not to bump things and knock them over but sometimes you need to. Is that what you're saying? That you're committed to improving consumer's lives, but you're also very much committed to improving the state of the world? Both of these things are important to you?

Tim Cook: Yes and they're not mutually exclusive. There's lots of false trade- offs out there. Some people think you can't have to do really great AI machine learning unless have a boatload of data and understand everybody's personal life in detail. We don't subscribe to that, we think that's a false trade off. Some people think that you can't grow and have a big business without having a carbon footprint, we reject that. And so there's a lot of these false choices as it is that are out there embedded in people's minds and we try to systematically reject all of those and turn it on its head.

Mark Benioff: Is that part of how you think when you kind of identify a value, like one of these values, you've talked about trust or privacy, sustainability, innovation, equality, then do you look inside and you're trying to find the false choice that's been assigned to them and then is that how you're innovating in the value itself?

Tim Cook: Yeah. We think different and that is still embedded in Apple very deeply. It's to not play the game as it's been defined for decades or centuries, but invent a new game because people are so smart. You can generally believe that if you do things in the same manner, you're not going to get a much better result than people have gotten for years, decades, centuries. You have to come up with a different way of viewing the problem and sometimes that is the hardest part of all of it, is to think out of box, to think different. But we try really hard to do that on all of these kinds of things because these are inherently hairball problems. If they were easy they would have been solved, but they are difficult and that's what we try to do.

Mark Benioff: You mentioned the quality also and is there a false choice that you see that people make when it comes to the qualities or narrative that needs to change there and how did that come through you?

Tim Cook: I think the false trust and equality is, if you give me more rights than I have, then you have less and this is so bizarre. I mean, wouldn't it be great if everyone woke up one day and said, from now on, I'm treating everybody with dignity and respect. There would be so many problems in the world that would go away and in every country in the world, it's not limited to one, but you think about it. I hope is important for me one day, who knows, gay marriage. This is one where one group wanted to withhold that right. And I'm not challenging the reason for that, but it's feeling like if another group has that right, that there's something less on the other side. And I think there are tens of thousands of those that are out there. That fundamentally when it really comes down to it is about dignity and respect and just basic human rights. I think DACA is a lot like that. When you really think about it, these are kids. They know no other home. Why would we even think about not allowing them to stay? And so, I don't know, I think honestly I know it's naive and it's not going to happen in the morning but I think if you could flip a switch and only do one thing, it's the basic way we treat one another that would solve so many other problems.

Mark Benioff: Well talked about so many things about Apple and the parade of values that Apple has. When you think about yourself what is your highest value? You've obviously you're very contemplative, you mindful, you spend a lot of time in your heart and you lead from your heart. What is the most important thing to you?

Tim Cook: Well, my revelation in life probably came too late, but in my up authorities where it became clear to me, you're sort of searching for your lifetime for your purpose. I'm sure some people in the audience have done this too. You're sort of on a search and you convince yourself early in life, well my purpose is deciding my major in school. So you decide your major and you graduate and guess what? You still don't know what your purpose is. And so you keep looking and you think, well, it's about getting a job. Well no, it wasn't that and maybe it becomes a promotion, maybe it becomes a marriage, maybe it becomes a child, and at some point you recognize the reason we are all here is to help somebody else that, that is the sole reason that we are here. And once you get that in your head, as it turns out, life gets so much simpler. It gets so much simpler. That's how I view it and so using that as kind of the North star, you can make a lot of decisions that can be very complex and you can kind of make them pretty simple. That you're here in the service of other people. That it's not about you and I very much deeply believe that.

Mark Benioff: Well, Tim cook, thank you for everything you do and thank you for leading our industry and being here at Dreamforce. We're so grateful to have you.

Tim Cook: Thank you all for all coming out.

Michael Rivo: That was Tim cook and Mark Benioff on stage at Dreamforce. As we wrap up today, the big thanks to WordPress VIP, for partnering with us to bring you this show. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with WordPress, VIP CEO, Nick Gardner, we'll be back with more of that conversation in our next episode. And as always, if you liked today's show, please leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Subscribe if you haven't already and spread the word. That'll do it for this week's blazing trails. Join us again next week, our guest Arianna Huffington. As the best of Dreamforce 2019 rolls on.

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