Values Create Value: A Conversation with Jon Fee and Frank Cooper

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. Today, I'm joined by my podcast partner, Rachel Levin. Welcome to the show, Rachel.

Rachel Levin: Good to be here, Michael. I've missed you. It's been a week.

Michael Rivo: I know. It's been a week since we've been on air. It's too fun. Well, I'm-

Rachel Levin: Yeah, I know.

Michael Rivo: ...it's so fun that we haven't learned how to not talk over each other yet.

Rachel Levin: It's true, it's true.

Michael Rivo: Rachel, before you get into it, I just want to reiterate the fact that we have not met in person. It's a year, right? Is it a year?

Rachel Levin: I'm actually wondering if you're an avatar and, do you really exist?

Michael Rivo: I am the best AI voice ever. I'm not a real person. I am computer- generated.

Rachel Levin: I know, that's why you don't even need coffee in the morning. You come with this energy to our recordings. It's amazing.

Michael Rivo: Hit me up at 3 in the morning, it sounds exactly the same.

Rachel Levin: Exactly, exactly. Speaking of energy, I thought the energy in this conversation that you had with Frank Cooper, who's the CMO of BlackRock, and Jon Fee, who runs Global Marketing for Salesforce. org, was really interesting. Tell me about that. What were the highlights for you? He talked a lot about this idea of wealth and well- being, which I thought was really interesting.

Michael Rivo: Yeah, it's interesting connecting those two. Frank has had such an interesting career. The guy has done it all. He's worked as a Senior Executive for Motown and Def Jam and served as the Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo Global Beverages and Buzzfeed, and then made this move into financial services working at BlackRock and has really brought this idea of being a purpose- driven company to BlackRock and made some big changes there. Impressive, and one of the key ideas is around this idea of connecting wealth and well- being and giving more meaning than just the accumulation of money or material things and really opening up that idea. We'll hear more about that in our conversation today.

Rachel Levin: Yes, exactly. Without further ado, let's listen in on your conversation with Frank Cooper, CMO of BlackRock and Jon Fee, the CMO of Salesforce. org.

Michael Rivo: Welcome to the show, Frank and Jon.

Frank Cooper: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jon Fee: Thank you for having me.

Michael Rivo: Okay, perfect. Frank, I want to start with you. You've been instrumental in driving change at BlackRock to put forward the idea of being a purpose- driven company and putting that into action. You know, as I prepped for the interview, I was not sure what that actually means around being a purpose- driven company. Can you set that up and explain that a little for us?

Frank Cooper: Yeah. I mean, look, there's so many buzzwords floating around right now, it's easy for all of us, including myself, to get lost in it. There's conversations about mission- driven companies, purpose- driven companies, stakeholder capitalism, CSR, but it for me comes down to this. There has been a growing realization among a wide range of people that ranges from employees to members of communities to citizens to NGOs that business has to play a role in making society better. In fact, I would define business in a very simple way. It's to improve life and lives. That's what it's designed to do. Otherwise, what are we doing? This realization, though, has changed people's expectations, and so the expectation is you will contribute something positive to society. Purpose simply has been this movement from companies doing benevolence on the side, which is philanthropy, to thinking about cause marketing, which we saw a lot of in the'60s, to thinking about CSR, or corporate social responsibility, which is addressing the externalities of the company, the pulling it to the core what the company is about. At the core of the company, having its ultimate goal as doing something positive for society. That's the movement that's happening and what I'm seeing is more employees are expecting it, more communities are expecting it, and the companies that actually do it well do it in a way that it's not profits versus purpose. Their purpose is driving profits, and to put that in action, you have to take it through the entire company, from strategy to innovation to brand and marketing to your social impact work to the DEI work. It's just all flow from your purpose statement.

Michael Rivo: Great. Frank, tell me about the journey in helping lead this effort at BlackRock. I mean, this is new for financial services. This is maybe a different way to think and different from where you had been at different parts of your career. Tell me a little bit about the experience at BlackRock in moving this purpose- driven idea forward.

Frank Cooper: Sure, and look, I was very fortunate early in my own career to have someone prod me, push me into finding my own purpose. We didn't use that term at the time, but he basically said, " If you want to have a sense of fulfillment in your work, find out what you are passionate about, what you love to do. Find out what you're good at and then couple that with your career. Otherwise, the two will start to separate over time." I was just very fortunate by a lucky set of circumstances to have that interaction and then to go through that process myself. As I went through my own career at Motown and Def Jam and PepsiCo and Buzzfeed, I've always thought about it through that lens of purpose. I landed at BlackRock, and John knows this because John was there with me, and in my earliest conversations, actually, Larry Fink and I are Chairman and CEO. We started talking about purpose and I was telling him why I thought purpose was increasingly going to be the thing that would separate the great companies from those that were simply good. We riffed on that literally for hours over several weeks, but as I dug into it, the good thing about BlackRock is that it was hyperfocused on its mission and its mission was defined as giving clients a better financial future. It was truly focused on clients and that makes sense because we have a fiduciary duty to our clients. It became this process of starting to getting more people to open the aperture so that they could see that what was possible for BlackRock was actually bigger than clients and bigger than prospective clients. At the same time, we started getting pressure externally. We started to see protests. People were saying, " How do you allocate assets?" Actually affects our world. It affects human lives beyond your clients, so the combination of those two things, the external pressure, opening the aperture, but most importantly was this. It was getting people to dig back into what was actually real about BlackRock from the very beginning. We did hundreds of interviews. We interviewed the founders. We interviewed founders. We interviewed employees of all levels across all regions and all functions and getting them to tell the stories of peak moments of BlackRock. " When did you feel the best? When did you go home and tell a friend or family member about something amazing that happened?" You started to see these themes pop up, and through that process, we actually discovered our purpose, and I use that word intentionally. We discovered it because it was not then mentioned. It was finding the thing that was always true about BlackRock, but looking at it through the lens of how it contributes to society.

Jon Fee: Frank, thank you for... You just took me back memory lane. I think back to 2017 to some really, really progressive and great memories of my time at BlackRock, and similar to that... I was in the camp of, " Let's do this," because at that time in 2017, similar to what we're seeing today. Frank, you mentioned this, there's a lot of buzzwords swarming around. Corporate purpose was on the rise, sustainability was everywhere. More products in the ESG space were being created. Folks started talking about values create value, and I, too, was thinking, " It's a good thing. It means that doing good is gaining in popularity." When there's a lot of buzzwords surfacing in headlines, that means it's trending. It's becoming fashionable. It means more and more people are getting comfortable talking about something. You could feel that back in 2017. Truth be told, it was always on trend, but then and even know, it's just pushing on leaders even more and to what you said, Frank, for those leaders to rethink corporate models and business strategy. Today, you can visualize corporations, the conscience of societies around the world, the conscience of the planet, and you can visualize corporate culture like flowing together like these tributaries all uniting into a river. The confluence of these three separate entities, it's creating this new corporate narrative that's almost an imperative these days for leaders focused on purpose and actually winning the war on talent. That to me is incredibly inspiring more than any other point in my career to see corporates and conscience and culture are all coming together to create a better planet. It's pushing new heights in what we can do and you're seeing new products being created on the back of this. You're seeing corporations no longer just refreshing their values on their website, but actually actually like listening to their employees like Frank mentioned that BlackRock did to drive change from the inside out. I think we're witnessing something that's going to set us off on the right path for decades to come.

Frank Cooper: I've got to say this. Whenever you do these kinds of things, whenever you're trying to break new boundaries, you need a small group of people who align with you and understand intuitively what you're trying to do, believe in it, and become part of the movement. You don't need a whole bunch of people, but you need a small group of people that really drive that, and Jon was that early on.

Michael Rivo: It reminds me, Frank, of a story I heard you tell about jogging in the'60s and'70s. At that time, there were just a few people on the fringe who were into running, and then Nike turned jogging and exercise into a lifestyle and a huge industry. Talk to me about how that happens. How do companies create such cultural shifts?

Frank Cooper: Yeah, you know, I love the fitness movement and the example because right now it seems so intuitive. We see people running down the street and no one does a double take. It's like, " Of course, you're running down the street and I should be running right behind you because we should all be doing this." There's clothes associated with it, style, all of that, but it's true if you rewind back. It was a strange thing. People didn't think about exercising in that way and it was Nike, but it was also the government at least to give out these patches, the U. S. Presidential patch for those who would do physical ed in school. It's crazy, you would never do it today, but what struck me about it was that no one said we should have fitness literacy, like, " Let me tell you about fitness and teach you about fitness in that way." It wasn't about that. It was things like having a relatable role model. You saw people who were doing exercise that you could relate to. That was important. It was actually making it safe to try, giving you things that you could do, anybody could do. Anyone can actually put on some sneakers and jog around the block. It was allowing you to learn by doing, and so you get into it. The Nike Just Do It logo was so powerful and so on point because you could actually learn by doing, and then having a community of people that actually support you. It's the same thing. If you take that same logic, and really it's kind of the principles of self- efficacy, it's kind of the academic term around it. If you take those same principles and you apply it to complex areas like financial services, you then bring it down to a human level that actually allows people to relate to and engage in it and learn and to progress no matter where they stand. That's been my hope, and just so no one's confused, I am not in any way dissing financial literacy. I think financial literacy's a great thing. What I also know, though, is that by itself, if you just isolate it, it changes behavior by 0. 1%. It doesn't do anything, so it has to be coupled with those other things so you can bring it down to a human level and people could actually get engaged with it and take steps forward and it builds momentum and it becomes more emotional.

Michael Rivo: Right, and I think that's... I've heard you express it and this powerful idea around connecting wealth and well- being, and so much of wealth is just your money or what you can buy or your material experience. When we think about it, how connected that is to the well-being of our entire life and what that means, tell me a little bit more about that idea.

Frank Cooper: I'm one of the people who thought about it that way, who like, " Hey, you know what? I know about the fitness movement. I know about nutrition. I know about mindfulness. I know about relationships." That's what well- being is, and while it's an amazing thing in money, it's just something you collect so that you can facilitate that. I thought about that most of my life, but coming into BlackRock forced me to think more deeply about it. The realization was, " Wow, money is a source of anxiety," a stress for most people. Money is a thing that actually causes tension. Even those with lots of money, millionaires, still don't necessarily have a healthy relationship with money and it seems like there's an opportunity for us all to think about, how do we have a healthier relationship with money so that it actually feeds into our overall sense of well- being? What I've been trying to do is reignite this notion of financial well- being, not wellness, not like a checklist of things that you do to get on the financial path, but how do you have a health relationship with money across the full spectrum? How do you earn your money? We talk about that a lot and people associate that with their identity, how you spend it. Let me tell you, and I know this personally, too, people with no money are experts at spending and they can tell us a thing or two right now that would help us understand how to spend better. How do you borrow it? How do you save it? How do you invest it? How do you give it? You need to really look at that full spectrum no matter where you are in the financial services ecosystem because that is the holistic view of financial well- being. I think we all have, any of us in financial services, we have a responsibility to help others become more in tune with how to navigate across that spectrum.

Michael Rivo: Jon, I'm curious about how companies can think about well- being with their employees. Tell me a little bit more about what it means at Salesforce and with Salesforce. org how that fits in?

Jon Fee: Yeah, the secret sauce at Salesforce is the people, but more importantly how those people around the world, I mean, at least 60, 000 employees, are unified with a common corporate culture. I often like to simplify culture as the things that everyone likes to say, they like to say that. They like to say it and it's the things that everyone likes to do. One thing about the culture at Salesforce that still just absolutely inspires me today is that all of these employees around the world, part of the employee experience is to get out of your home, be safe, put the laptop down and go volunteer. Volunteerism has risen to become this thing that we all like to talk about that's unique to all of us. We all don't go volunteer at the same place and it's the thing that we all like to do. Last year, our collective efforts through the pandemic, which made it really difficult for folks to do some of the volunteering they would have done in the past, but even through that and using COVID safe guidelines, all of the employees at Salesforce who are able to volunteer 800, 000 hours. Just think about that, 800, 000 hours. That's employees saying, " I'm going to go volunteer at a school. I'm going to go help clean out a library at a school because they can't afford librarians anymore right now. I'm going to go teach an art class because I love art and I studied art. Now, I'm a systems admin, but I'm going to go give my time to that. I'm going to go and help be an advisor to this nonprofit organization and help them think about distribution and applying maybe some for profit business tactics and strategies to their nonprofit to help them scale. I'm going to go chop up onions at a local food bank." I personally, I spend a lot of time at beaches in Northern California with my kids, with Home Depot buckets and gloves and grabbers picking up trash. For all of us, that common bond of the experience of just unified volunteerism, it's gratifying. You feel like you're not talking about change, not saying things should be better. It's doing and it's actually walking the walk.

Michael Rivo: Yeah, and it reminds me, Frank, you recently wrote in The Harvard Business Review about how companies have to put in a sustained effort to being purpose- driven. It can't be a one- off and over this past year of crisis, we've seen lots of companies trying to respond, some more effectively than others. How can companies set up for success and do this in an authentic way? At Salesforce, it is a big part of who we are, but for a new company starting or companies trying to move in this direction, how do you approach that?

Frank Cooper: First, let me say I love watching what Salesforce does in this area and when Salesforce does something, it does it big. I'm from San Francisco originally and I remember the first time I came back one time and there was the Dreamforce in San Francisco. I had no idea what was happening. All I knew was that there was a takeover of Downtown San Francisco and it was big, and applying that to philanthropy and social impact has had huge consequences and I think will continue to have it, but also shows that proximity matters, that getting close to the people that you want to serve matters a lot. What we were saying, Professor Ranjay Gulati and I, he's a Harvard Business School Professor, and we wrote this article, is that we have an opportunity, businesses, to direct our philanthropic efforts in a way that is consistent with our purpose and that if companies do that, they could sustain that philanthropic action for longer periods of time, number one. Number two, everyone knows that the larger you are as a corporation, the more requests you're going to get, and so, how do you get out of the first- come, first- serve approach to philanthropy? Again, we think turning to your purpose and using that as a compass for where you should invest your social impact dollars is a way to proceed. What we have tried to do, even at BlackRock, if our purpose is to help more and more people experience financial well- being, how can we do that across a spectrum of people that we may not serve? We started an emergency savings initiative. We're supporting generations and we partnered with Robinhood on helping local NGOs led by people of color, but all of that flows from that sense of, " How do we help more and more people experience financial well- being?" I think there's an opportunity for us to do that because what you don't want is that when times get tight and people look at this as just kind of a generic sense of benevolence, and by the way, there's a role for that, too. In a humanitarian crisis, we should all respond and the corporations should respond, but the thing you want to sustain are things that flow from your sense of purpose as a company.

Jon Fee: That's right.

Michael Rivo: Mm-hmm (affirmative). There's some specificity around that is helpful.

Frank Cooper: Exactly.

Michael Rivo: Yeah. I think even at Salesforce where there are so many opportunities to volunteer and to be a part of that, it's still hard to find what it is to do. Part of what's great about the setup at Salesforce is how open it is. Jon, this is a question for you, between having it be very open- ended and having the company be more prescriptive.

Jon Fee: It's the question that you raised about it being difficult to do this, to be completely transparent. When Salesforce first started to say, " Hey, all employees, have the ability to volunteer for X number of hours a year and there's going to be the ability for employees to make a donation and there'll be some corporate matching and all of this kind of stuff so the impact is even bigger. It'll be 2X of what they're doing to a certain dollar amount." That's fine. You can say that and you can get going on that, but what we experienced here at Salesforce was it got really hard, and the reason for that is by about 2017-2018, volunteerism and employee giving, it started to become like the beating heart of our experience of the corporate culture. That data not really streamlined into a workflow to make it terribly efficient. I often say like, " God, it's funny how so much employee goodwill can end up creating a good problem." That problem that we had here at Salesforce was, " How do we scale this?" At the time we had, what, 17,000 employees? We have close to 60, 000 employees now, and so it was through that challenge that we said, " Okay, let's do what we do with obsessing over data and organizing data and finding out how to get the most out of data and visualizing that data, and let's create a product. Let's put all of our CRM knowledge around this challenge and reimagine that workflow." Through that we created a product that's now in the market and a lot of companies are using it across all different industries called Philanthropy Cloud.

Frank Cooper: Yeah, I got to say, I think that's a brilliant platform. In some respects, but this is why I didn't name it, it should be called Philanthropy Lite because when we said light, what I think it's the truth, which is, yes, you should have a collective company view of what's the most important thing that flows from your purpose, but also people want to be individuals. People want agency, the individuals, and they want communion, to be part of something bigger than themselves. That's just true of everything and I think it's true of philanthropy, but you need an infrastructure that can manage all of this and that's why I think Philanthropy Cloud has been so successful because it allows you to accommodate both things, the highly individualistic, " This is what I'm passionate about, I want to do." Give them the opportunity to do that, but still plug into the larger infrastructure of the company. I think it's absolutely brilliant.

Michael Rivo: It speaks to this idea of connecting people and machines, which, Frank, you've talked about creating these cultural moments by connecting humans and machines. Can you tell us a little more about that? Maybe from some other times in your career?

Frank Cooper: First, I should start with an omission, which is I'm obsessed with this thing, so like I've watched a major crosstalk times literally, Ex Machina. I watched that over and over, so it's kind of a slight obsession. That's part of what's driving, but in all honesty, the thing that I worry about the most is that we sometimes allow technology to lead the solution rather than start with our own sense of humanity to drive the technology. For me, I think we should constantly flip this on its head. I'm great with any elegant code. Great, nice. I'm great with any hardware that expands our capability. That's great, but what are we trying to accomplish as human beings? For me, the mantra should be human to the power of machines, that, " How can machines help us accomplish the things that we want to accomplish?" I put the ethical questions first. I put the questions of, " What outcomes do we really want for us as human being?" When you look at through that context, suddenly the fuzzies, the liberal arts people become critically important partners in the development of technologies. You need the techies, but you need the fuzzies because the two together will allow us to advance in a way that expands the potential of people, that is aware of potential of bias, that prevents a disproportionately negative impact on certain parts of the population. If you don't do it, what we are seeing is that you will not only reinforce some negative outcomes, you will actually accelerate it. I think this, for me, is one of the most important shifts that we have to make. My hope is that we see tech companies hire more liberal arts students and put them in positions of power right alongside the technically proficient and great engineers that exist in the company. We've done that certainly, and it was before my time, actually. Larry Fink and others basically say, " Hey, we need to bring more liberal arts students in because of questions that we're trying to solve are not purely technical questions. These are human questions."

Michael Rivo: This may be a little outside of your day- to- day, but where do you think we are in this? If zero is we're not thinking about the ethical considerations at all and a hundred is we are fully aligned with that, where do you think we are in this process right now?

Frank Cooper: We're in the 20s I would say at best-

Michael Rivo: Yeah.

Frank Cooper: ...at best, and here's why I say that because here's what it takes to actually fully get there. One, you need critical mass on both sides. You need the actual physical numbers there. Two, you need diversity of people.

Jon Fee: That's right.

Frank Cooper: You need black, indigenous, people of color, women, so that you have a check on potential bias. Three, you need a system that allows for this to work in practice. A lot of people think that once you get a diverse group together and then you talk about being inclusive, everything goes swimmingly well after that point. It doesn't work that way. Actually, diversity creates greater tension, and so now you need manager capability to manage that tension so that you can find common ground. Most importantly, you need people to actually understand that it's important, that it's critical, that this is the outcome we all want and that is not a sideshow, it's not an ancillary activity, it's core to it. I think we have a long way to go, but I'm an optimist. I'm encouraged by at least the conversations I'm hearing about it. I'm encouraged by the direction we're headed. Again, like Jon was saying, I don't think this will be linear, either, but the good thing about non- linear behavior, it looks really slow in the beginning, but once it kicks in, it accelerates pretty rapidly, so I'm optimistic about it.

Jon Fee: You mentioned this, it's in financial services you find a lot of left- brain thinkers. They're very analytical. They're very logical. They're very verbal, and that's just because a lot of left brains hiring left brains and on and on and on, but recognizing that the path forward, whether it's creating new products, solutions, whatever it may be, is also going to require some right- brain thinkers at the table. You need that emotional thinker at the table, that creative thinker at the table, that visual thinker at the table. I think that's something that's often missed in a lot of the discussions of the power, of diversity in the board room or wherever you're at. It's you've got to make sure you're operating with whole brain with your team, that you've got whole brain. We talk a lot about bringing whole self to work, but when you are in that problem- solving, let's take this challenge down, let's find a solution, you got to look around the room and you got to think about the brains around the table. More often than not today, when you see the things that humans are doing and your mind is being blown, SpaceX by example, that was both left brain and right brain working in harmony and saying, " Why not? What if this way? What if that way?" I think more and more advancements that'll drive industries, whether it's tech with Salesforce or financial services and asset management for BlackRock, it'll be because of those two brains coming together, both sides of the brain coming together.

Michael Rivo: Frank, when it comes to diversity, what are the touchstones that can really move things forward?

Frank Cooper: It's a great question because I spent the last three months... We're thinking about writing an article. We're talking to diverse employees across all industries now with the sole purpose of understanding what their experience was like. It's fascinating to hear the commonalities in it, but then we asked the question at the end, " Can you name a company that you think has gotten it right? Not perfect. We're not looking for perfection, but that's really from a diverse employees' perspective be like, 'Hey, they've gotten it right?'" The answer is shocking to me, actually. Universally, people are like, " You know, that's interesting. Let me get back to you on it." Then, they never get back to me on it or they say like, " I can't think of one." Here's why I think, and you're right, we've been at this a long time. Companies that are well- intentioned that have every ounce of them is saying, " I'm committed to making this change," and it still hasn't happened. I think it's because we're missing one piece of it. It's always been about diversity, trying to increase the numbers at the beginning, inclusion, trying to create a sense of belonging, but the equity piece was the piece that was missing. The equity piece is basically saying, " Get the numbers up." That's necessary. Yes, sense of belonging, I think that's an output of it, but give people what they actually need in order to unlock their true potential. That could be very different for different people and different groups. There's a great cartoon that I've seen that actually expresses this the best. There's a race going on on the other side of a fence and there are three people looking on the other side of the fence. They're each on a pedestal. All of the pedestals are the same size, but the people are different heights. Two people step on the pedestal, they can see over and they're telling everyone about the race and it's like, "It's a great race." The third person can't see over the fence, but that might be the person who could tell you the most, give you the most insight about that race, but you didn't give that person what they need in order to unlock their potential. I think this equity piece, we're at the early stages of it, is the most critical aspect of it. It's going to be diversity and equity before inclusion, and so I think that's my hope of what will be an unlock into a whole new era for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Michael Rivo: The equity piece, how does that manifest itself?

Jon Fee: I was just going to add, there's a lot of companies that are doing good work to drive change, but that gold standard my gut tells me is probably a startup that just started this year. In the coming years, that'll be the brand where we're like, " They got it right from day one and that's now the model." They didn't have to correct anything that they did 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago because that's what we're seeing all of the household brands and we all know they're in that correction mode. You got to move fast there because the world at large is losing patience for the speed at which large brands are correcting, but my gut tells me that that company that Frank wants to hear about probably was just founded this year and we'll hear about them in the future. That will become the gold standard.

Frank Cooper: I hope the future is now. You guys, if anyone hears about it, please let me know because I'm anxious to celebrate it and elevate and shine the light on it because I think you're right, Jon. That's going to guide us forward.

Jon Fee: Me, too.

Michael Rivo: That was Frank Cooper, the third CMO of BlackRock, with Jon Fee, who runs Global Marketing for Salesforce. org. Thanks for listening today. If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Michael Rivo with Salesforce Studios.