In Crisis Time, a Return to Your Company's Core Values Can Pay Off: A Conversation with Marc Benioff and Aneel Bhusri

Michael Rivo: Welcome back to Blazing Trails. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. In every crisis lies opportunity. Opportunity for growth. Opportunity to learn and opportunity to insight change, and most importantly, the chance to embrace your company's core values. Today, we hear from two amazing business leaders doing just that. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce is joined by Aneel Bhusri, the co-founder and CEO of Workday, for an honest talk from leader to leader. About why returning to your company's core values and putting your employees first can help your business thrive. A quick word about work. com before we get to our interview. Reopening our communities and businesses will take careful planning, but it can be as seamless as possible with work. com. Work. com is an all-new suite of apps and resources that businesses and community leaders around the world can use to reopen, reskill employees and respond efficiently to the COVID- 19 pandemic. Reopening will be a journey, but work. com is your guide. To learn more, go to work. com. Now, your host, Marc Benioff.

Marc Benioff: Well, I'll tell you, you have been a visionary and an innovator, incredible leader of our enterprise software industry for multiple decades, way before Workday. I watched you in 2005 found Workday. I was so impressed. I remember some of our early lunches and dinners talking about your dreams and visions. I remember one really strong lunch we had with your co-founder Dave Duffield at Hillstone restaurant in San Francisco, on the Embarcadero. I'll tell you that you have far exceeded my dreams. It's incredible what you have done.

Aneel Bhusri: Thank you, Marc. I can't take credit. We've got a great team. My co-founder, as you know, is one of the great humans. Thank you for all of your support and advice along the way. You were the first person we called when we decided to start Workday, we had that really nice lunch and I remember you told me the first thing was hire more salespeople than you think you need, and you were right.

Marc Benioff: Well, I'll tell you, Aneel, it's great to have you on the show. I'm so excited. Workday's done so well. It's been incredible, but your values have really defined the company. It's really started with the right values. How do you think about that? What are the most important things to you at Workday?

Aneel Bhusri: You know, we've always been employee first. I know a lot of companies say customer's number one, but I've never seen a company that has happy customers and unhappy employees. You got to start with your employees and we lead with them. Happy customers comes next. We have fun along the way. We innovate. We try to do it with integrity and that really defines our values. We live by those values and we reward those values and if people don't fit those values, they don't stay at Workday.

Marc Benioff: Well, it's a bit of progression and I've seen you grow. I've seen you advance. You've also done a lot of philanthropy. You've also taken care of your community. You've been regarded as probably one of the best places to work in the world because of that. I've seen that each and every year. It's been awesome, actually, to see that. We've also become some great partners too. What's been your biggest surprise, when you look back over the last several years?

Aneel Bhusri: I think you never know if your value system really works until you hit a crisis. As you talked about, we've had multiple crises at the same time, and we've fallen back on our values. We fall back on taking care of employees and employees will take care of our customers and we've done it that way. I know you've done the same. I'm just really proud of our team that the values held up and they are a touchstone for us to make the right decisions, which we did early on in the pandemic. Right now we're really engaging on all the conversations around equality and justice. Yesterday I hosted a webinar with Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Place to Work Institute. He published a blog, which everybody should read, which is; Racism Is a 400- Year-Old Virus. He has some really good points for, and action items for companies to take to do a better job. We can all do a better job.

Marc Benioff: Well, I think you're right. I mean, every time we look at this, we go deeper and deeper to understand what are the things that we need to do at Salesforce? I think that it has to start with people. I don't know if you agree or not, but we have to create more allies inside our own organizations. More transparent reporting. Really look in depth in our pipelines, promotions. I know you know Tony Prophet, our chief equality officer, very well. He's an amazing executive at Salesforce. We've also combined recruiting with him, because we realized recruiting and inequality need to come together if we're going to make progress. As I mentioned, we're even looking at our product. You can see, as you know, we bought Tableau last year and they're doing tremendous work in analytics. Really taking their product and providing transparency to some of the issues that we're seeing with the police. If you go to publictableau.com, you're going to find new analytics and new visualizations that really expose what's happening, but we make these great products. We can use them to create more equality. I'm sure you think of that because you have a product that's in the middle of the HR department of every company on planet Earth. How do you look at that?

Aneel Bhusri: Well, I think very much to your point, it starts with the right mindset. Right now we're very focused on training our hiring managers to be more open-minded and embrace diversity, rather than just hire in their own image. Then we need to create better leadership paths. I think the biggest thing in talking to our black employees, and I've done that three times in the last few weeks through a series of town halls, they feel alone in many cases and they don't get the mentorship that their other colleagues get. We have to fix that. For them, taking a leadership job is risky. They don't feel like they have the support to be in a leadership role. So these are all things that are fixable, but it's got to be a major change in mindset. On the product side, we track, as you know when you're a Workday customer, thank you for that, we have all of these diversity inclusion dashboards where you can really see how you're doing. You and I have always said that if you can't measure it, you can't change it and we've got to measure it and then we can change it.

Marc Benioff: Well, I think that transparent reporting and accountability is so important to be held to management teams and all employees worldwide. I'll tell you one thing, as we've gone deeper in this crisis, we've even looked at our purchasing. We have a tremendous black executive, Craig Duffy, who runs purchasing at Salesforce. I asked him just yesterday are we buying from black businesses aggressively enough? He had something really interesting to say, which was making slight changes in our payment terms would allow us to do that at another level. I asked him are we investing in black entrepreneurs enough? I think these are some questions that are really on my mind. Are we taking actions to really address racism in all of our policies? Not just our internal policies, but even our public policies as well. I want to go deeper to really look at that. Each one of these times that we have a crisis I look at crisis as opportunity. This is a moment when it gives us the ability and the willingness to go even farther into all this. Do you see that happening at Workday as well?

Aneel Bhusri: Yes. Absolutely. There's nothing like a good crisis, right? It forces you to your core values, this conversation, that we cannot lose this opportunity around equality. We have to embrace it. We're doing several things along the way. We committed$ 10 million that our belonging group of black employees will be part of deciding where that$ 10 million goes, to which causes. We are partnering with Steph and Aisha Curry: Eat, Learn, Play locally in the Oakland area. All these things that we can do to make the world a more equal place. We've had our call to action now. I really think this is the time for companies to lead. Our government is maybe not leading in the way we'd like it to, so companies can step up and show that we have a soul, that we want to do the right thing. Marc, you're one of the best leaders I've ever seen because you care deeply about these issues and this idea that you've brought to the table, stakeholder theory. I think we all need to embrace that. We all need to think about more than our share price. We've got to think about our community, our employees, our customers in a far more complex way than we have historically. This is a moment where we can really embrace it.

Marc Benioff: I agree with you, Aneel. I think that we have to think about all of our stakeholders. This is a moment in time, certainly where our black employees, our black customers, our black community is a key stakeholder to Salesforce. We have to look at them. We have to embrace everyone. We can't just focus on only share price. I think that when I went to business school, it was always about the business of business is business. I think we're both of us are on the page the business of business is improving the state of the world, and how do we use our companies as a platform for change? I think that's really critical. I think I'd just look at public education, which you and I both have been involved in. Salesforce is very close to investing more than a hundred million dollars in our local San Francisco and Oakland public schools. I think that's so important. Especially in creating more equality. It's another thing that we can look more deeply in right now.

Aneel Bhusri: Fantastic. I'm with you. You just tell me where to go, Marc.

Marc Benioff: Well, you have been doing amazing work and like the many, you mentioned philanthropy and one of the areas that really inspired me was philanthropy for you wasn't just externally, which you've been doing so aggressively, Aneel, and also with Dave, but you've also done philanthropy internally. In the first quarter, you took care of your employees and made employee payments to make sure that they didn't suffer during the pandemic. Can you explain what you did and how your reasoning was around that?

Aneel Bhusri: Well, again, it comes back to core values. Employees are our number one core value. As we, when you and I and talked, we both saw this pandemic being much longer than I think the rest of the world was seeing it. We thought, hey, we need to make sure that our employees feel taken care of right out of the gates. We decided to give every employee in the company a two week bonus, just to get ahead of issues they might have with childcare, with maybe a spouse that's not able to work or a partner that's not able to work or lost their job or parents or whatever the issue was that they would need that extra cash. It was also good for Workday, because it allowed our employees to bring their whole selves to work and know that the company that they worked for was looking out for them. We explained it to Wall Street and Wall Street, I didn't really care what Wall Street thought about it, but they actually thought it was a good idea.

Marc Benioff: You also inspired me to look at that first quarter as well. We were going through just the most severe crisis I have ever seen. We made actions at Salesforce that we largely encapsulated into our first quarter as really following you. That we realized we needed to take actions for our employees. We needed to do take actions for the world. We ended up buying about 60 million pieces of PPE for about 300 hospitals. We've done about 11, 000 implementations of Salesforce Care, Salesforce, which we call Salesforce Care. The thing that's interesting, even the program that we're on now, which is Leah's program, Leading Through Change, well, I'll tell you that that came out of this, which was we realized we needed to create an external voice so that we could talk to millions of people. I think we've almost spoken to about a hundred million people through this program, which is kind of amazing, because I think that these words that we're speaking today are extremely important and we need to, not only speak our values, not only speak exactly how we're going to operationalize our values, but also how are we going to create actions for change? I think that that, and I've seen that in with you. I saw that in your first quarter, our quarters are very much aligned with each other. I've also seen that in your second quarter too, where you've continued to look out for others. Again, we didn't realize, in the first quarter we thought we were only dealing with a pandemic. Then, all of a sudden, we realized we're dealing with an economic crisis, now we're in a social and racial crisis, and we're in a huge global leadership crisis as well. How do you look at that?

Aneel Bhusri: Very similar to you. We're in that leadership crisis right now. Again, I think companies like ours can step up and be forces for good and forces for change. What we're trying to do at Workday is not just do the right thing internally around equality and opportunity, but because we are an HR provider, we're working with our CHRO customers across the globe to give them the tools and techniques to improve their results as well. There's not a CHRO in the country that I've talked to, that doesn't want to do the right thing. They all want to do the right thing. We just have to give them the tools and education in order to do that. Sometimes they need to convince their CEOs that they need to do the right thing. That's where I'm happy to jump on a phone and talk with anybody about the importance of diversity, the importance of giving back. I followed your 1- 1- 1 model. It's worked great for Workday. There's no reason that every company can't be that way. I think that if we lose this moment of opportunity, shame on all of us. I feel really energized right now. I think this is a time where the right conversations are happening. These conversations are uncomfortable. We have to get comfortable talking about the uncomfortable. In the past, we just kind of brushed some of these conversations under the rug, and now they're out there. I think it's really great. I think if you're able to listen to Michael Bush, his number one thing is you got to listen first. You got to listen. You got to understand and then you got to take action.

Marc Benioff: Well, I think we certainly agree with you on that at Salesforce. I'll tell you another area where I've been so impressed with you is really how you've been looking at artificial intelligence. You said that before, AI is creating a skill's gap. Companies are going to need to be prepared for massive retraining that lies ahead. How do you view re-skilling in the wake of COVID-19? How are you seeing these companies, including, I guess, a lot of our joint customers leverage technology that propel re-skilling forward?

Aneel Bhusri: Yeah. It's a great question. You talk about the 41 million people that are out of work. We want to get those people back to work. Unfortunately, many of the jobs that they have aren't going to come back, you and I both know that. I actually think that we need a public/ private partnership state by state, because most people that have lost their jobs they can't move to a different state. They have to get a job close to where their home is, where their family is. We're beginning to work with states similar to the way you have to identify the needs that the large companies and hires having in that state, the government will invest in the training programs. We're going to reskill these folks with a private/ public partnership and get these people back to work. Again, I think this has been, this skill's gap has been an issue that's been around for the last four or five years we've been talking about it. COVID- 19 has forced it to the front, and now we have a real opportunity to retrain millions and millions of people and give them skills that are, they're going to make them successful for the next decade, not for the last decade. I think it's very similar to the public/ private partnership you've been doing with contact tracing and with work. com, which has been a model of how to work with the states to get people back to work. We're doing something similar on the learning side, which is where our products fit.

Marc Benioff: You've been a partner in that. When we started this pandemic crisis, I mean, or endemic, or I don't know what we're in right now, things seem to be changing very fast. I don't really know. This is my first pandemic I've been through. We're kind of making it up as we go. One of the things we realized is we were going to need a product and a technology to help companies get back to work, to do a lot of basic things. Workforce triage, shift scheduling, even elevator queuing, help building dashboards and analytics to help companies get back to work. We're doing that this week. In New Zealand, we've reopened our offices using that platform. You're one of the first people to come forward and say, hey, let's integrate Salesforce and Workday together even more deeply. We've done that in so many things and so many areas for so many customers, but here's another great opportunity. We're building this joint product work. com. Salesforce and Workday are both in there building work. com. Tell me, what is your biggest surprise in seeing what companies need right now to reopen safely?

Aneel Bhusri: Well, I think it's a lot of what we're trying to deliver with this partnership. They're talking about A teams and B teams. They're talking about schedules, they've got to do the contact tracing. We know contact tracing works. As you've shared with me, you were thinking about this back in the SARS days, when SARS was an issue. I think the Salesforce technology and approach to work. com was brilliant. I thought, well, hey, if we can marry the employee and skills data that we have in Workday with work. com, we just make our customer's lives a lot easier, because we have to get the economy going. We have to do it in a safe way. The data sets that we bring together in this unified way are really complimentary and really powerful. We have so many joint customers. It's hard for me to think about a customer that I have, that you don't have. There's probably customers you have that we don't have, just given how much bigger Salesforce is. So many of the large customers we have are joint customers, and they're all super excited about this partnership.

Marc Benioff: Well, they are because I'll tell you, I think we all have to learn together. I think it's one of the reasons why this program is so important, because it's not just a communications program. It's not just not collaboration. It's not just about ideas. It's not just about entertainment. It's really about learning. That we're learning as we're going here. I think for a lot of us, even senior executives, employees, managers, individual contributors, pundents, doesn't matter who you are or what your role is in the industry, everybody has a key role. I think that we're in areas that are unexplored and the only way we're going to get through this is through these types of dialogues. I really appreciate that. When you look at everything, we've had, I don't know, half a dozen conversations in the last few months, we really kind of worked together to try to get through this. What has been your biggest surprise? What is the thing that you would have never thought about?

Aneel Bhusri: There's a lot of goodness out in the world. I think it's easy to be cynical, but I just watch people like you. I see so many leaders stepping up and doing the right thing, and it gives me hope that we're taking on these issues and not being silent. We're trying to do the right things for our customers. I do think that being a cloud company is both a technology advantage, also, I think it's a mindset advantage. We just see the world differently. We see it as open and connected, and I've just been impressed how good people are, but also I've been impressed how flexible people are. You have companies that have just changed on a dime. Walmart's a big customer for both of us. I do curbside pickup now. I mean, what a great innovation, curbside pickup. One by one, our customers have kind of reinvented themselves to fit this new world, and it's happened so fast. I think that's that ingenuity that we have across the globe, but I think in this country, it's a special gift.

Marc Benioff: You think it's innovation and new ideas and creativity that's going to help us get through this?

Aneel Bhusri: An open mind, and an open mind to real change. I think it does, I think innovation just plays such a huge role and I'm not sure, some companies are talking about working from home forever. I'm not sure that's the right thing. It's really hard to collaborate working from home, but it is amazing how we've all figured out how to make it work. I wouldn't have thought this would be, three months into it, that we're pretty productive at Workday. I know you're very productive at Salesforce, and a lot of our customers are able to run their businesses without anybody in the office. More challenging for a retailer or a manufacturing company. For other companies, I think the cloud has been a great, great platform for them to run their businesses. I'm blown away by the stories I hear about how people are leveraging technology to make it work right now, because it's hard.

Marc Benioff: Can you give us a specific customer example of a transformational app or idea or something that's been built that you have, could not have imagined a few months ago that now is underway with your customers?

Aneel Bhusri: Well, we have a large manufacturer who built an app on Workday to track COVID-19 patients around the globe, or COVID-19 cases. They use it to inform where to move manufacturing capacity. We have a healthcare organization that uses it to bring people out from outside their hospitals, back into the fold. So using it for tracking additional healthcare workers. We have a major retailer, Home Depot, that did a one- time payment to, I think it was over a million paychecks for hazard pay and for taking care of their employees. So, we're seeing volumes every day that look like Christmas volumes at retailers. It's been amazing how we're doing it. On the planning side, our customer's use of workforce and financial planning is up 30X in the last two months. People don't know how this world is going to play out so they just keep coming up with different plans and trying to figure out where the sensitivities are. It's really been fascinating to see how our products have gotten used. In many cases, not things I had, that I even was aware of.

Marc Benioff: Yeah. This scenario planning, that's been a major surprise for me too. That when we went through this, we have this tremendous scenario planning team at Salesforce. We've put together multiple scenarios, none of which seemed to actually have played out. I think that there was no way you could explain to me what was going to happen three months ago. I would not have believed it. If you had said to me in February, when we started to see these things emerge, that this is where we would be now in June, I would say, no. That's not going to ever happen.

Aneel Bhusri: Yeah, and I'm not sure we still know how we're going to get out of it. We just have to take it day by day. Now, with the other crises we have, it's a complicated world.

Marc Benioff: Well, it's kind of funny, Aneel, every single day I feel like I'm on a program similar to Leading Through Change, just like this, and I always get a question from the interviewer and they'll say," Well, tell us now, Mr. Benioff, what is the future of work look like for you?" I said, well, it looks a lot like the current situation. We're all in our homes. We're all digital. We're all living and working digitally. We're in the now, here we are, this is the future. We're in the future. Take a look at the technology we're using. Look at how we're communicating with people. Look at how we're communicating with each other. Look at how we're building new technology, look at how we're inspiring, look at what's happening. Yes, this is the future. It's all happening right now.

Aneel Bhusri: Yeah it is. I do wonder when we come out of all this, we'll look back and say, hey, there's a lot of sadness from all the death because of COVID- 19, there's nothing we can do to undo that. I do think we'll also have learned a lot. We'll have learned a lot about how to deal with pandemics. We'll have learned a lot about how to be resilient. We will come out a stronger country as it relates to dealing with racism. I think we're going to look back at this environment as one of the most meaningful times in our life. You go back in history. I don't think there's been a year like 2020 since 1968, where Martin Luther King was killed. Robert Kennedy was killed. You had issues all over the country. You were in Vietnam, and it was just not a great year. I'm confident we're going to have a really powerful moment by the end of this year to save 2020.

Marc Benioff: Well, I agree. That's a wonderful note to leave on, I'll tell you, Aneel. It's a positive, you're a positive person. You always have a positive outlook and you've done just a tremendous job with your company and inspired me and so many people. I just want to really thank you so much for being on Leading Through Change. You just inspired us at Salesforce, Aneel, so thank you for everything that you're doing. We're so grateful.

Aneel Bhusri: I'll throw it right back at you, Marc. Thank you for your friendship all along the way. You're just a great human and a great friend. So thank you.

Michael Rivo: That was Mark Benioff and Aneel Bhusri. From being more inclusive, to finding ways to upskill the workforce, there are actions we can all take to step up and turn our businesses into platforms for change. For insights into this topic and others, head over to salesforce. com for resources to help guide you through today's changing economic and social environments. I'm Michael Rivo from Salesforce Studios. Thanks for joining us today.