How Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is Giving Back

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, let us turn to the state of California, where Governor Newsom says two counties that are reopening early without permission are making a big mistake. The state has more than 30 — 58,000 coronavirus cases, but the rate is slowing. Back in mid-March, that wasn’t the case. And the University of California at San Francisco’s Medical Center was already running low on PPE. The chancellor turned to his billionaire friend for help. That was the entrepreneur Marc Benioff. He is the founder and chief executive of the California software giant Salesforce. So, why go to a tech company to help unblock a medical supply chain? Well, our Walter Isaacson spoke to Marc Benioff to find out.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Marc Benioff, welcome to the show. Thank you.

MARC BENIOFF, CEO, SALESFORCE: Thanks for having me, Walter.

ISAACSON: You just scored more than, what was it, 50 million pieces of protective equipment for your friends at the University of California, San Francisco, Medical Centers in the Bay Area. How did you do that?

BENIOFF: Well, you’re right, Walter. We have acquired more than 60 million pieces of PPE, the masks and gloves and gowns, and distributed it to actually almost 200 hospitals around the world. And I will tell you what happened, which was, a few months ago, we did get a phone call from the chancellor, Sam Hawgood, of UCSF, and he said he was running out of PPE really quickly, much more quickly than he expected. And he thought all hospitals were going to have this problem, and could I try to help him acquire some? And so we have been very successful in doing that.

ISAACSON: What do you think of the fact that private citizens are supposed to be helping get protective gear for our health workers?

BENIOFF: Well, I have been surprised. I never even knew what PPE was three months ago. So, I have had a full education. And what happened is, I was able to call a friend of mine, Daniel Zhang, the CEO of Alibaba, in China, and he was able to prioritize us and acquire the material. And that’s been important for so many hospitals, especially in our country, who ran low unexpectedly.

ISAACSON: What do you think of the attacks on China that are now coming out of the administration, given the fact that you have a lot of relationships and you were able to get PPE equipment from them?

BENIOFF: Well, I think this has been a really challenging situation for all of us. I mean, this is my first pandemic. I have never been through anything quite like this. So, whether it’s PPE, or PCR tests, or antibody tests, all the things that we have had to learn about, it’s a completely new world. And I really can’t put it all into frame. What I’m focused on is that we’re really in three phases. The first phase is this 90-day phase. That is this crisis that we have been in. And we’re really coming to a close on that phase, Walter. We’re moving into the second phase, which is getting back to work safely. And that’s really where my mind has been at. What are the things that we’re going to have to do to get our economy going again and getting back to work safely?

ISAACSON: So, what are you doing to help us get back to work safely?

BENIOFF: Well, what I have learned in the first phase is not just about PPE, but we have worked with so many companies around the world to deploy we call emergency versions of Salesforce, about 6,000 companies and public sector organizations. You can see it, the analytics in the state of New York or an emergency supply database here in California. And what we have been able to do is start to build technology that mitigates the risk of the virus in organizations. A great example is actually the state of Rhode Island. And they have a fantastic governor there. And what — she had the vision that she would coupled testing with tracing, and that, if you were positive as an infection, she would ask you, who have you been with, who are your friends, who are people that should know? And we built her a system, which is called a contact tracing system, that she’s able to have almost like private investigators that call people up and say, hey, can you shelter in place because you have been with someone who’s had a private — someone who has had an infection? And that point is that we can bring that type of technology to companies to help them reopen safely.

ISAACSON: How do you guard privacy when you’re doing things like contact tracing through the software?

BENIOFF: Well, when we get back to work, we’re going to find a very different work environment than the one that we left 90 days ago. We’re going to take your temperature when you come in, and we’re going to ask you to keep six feet apart and do social distancing, wear a mask. But we’re also going to ask you that, if all of a sudden, you get a positive PCR test, well, we’re going to just ask you, who have you been with? Who are the kind of people that we should notify? Well, that’s up to you to tell us that information. You can tell us what you want or tell us not what you want. But it’s in the interest of those people to keep them safe. So, this is not an automated system, like you see in some Asian countries, where they automatically figure out who you have been with. This is a manual system, where you are really disclosing that as part of your own individual liberties.

ISAACSON: It seems like it’s part of the genetic code of Salesforce.com and your entire career in software, which is figuring out how to know what contacts people have, how to manage those contacts. You do it with Salesforce. How has that helped you develop any tools to do this for all of us?

BENIOFF: Well, we have learned a lot from our offices that have been going through this for — even before the United States did. When you look at what happened in Japan and South Korea and Singapore, our offices have been closed for months. In fact, our South Korea office is just opening now. Our employees are already making sales calls in South Korea and, on May 11, our office will fully open. And so we have been able to learn from those experience what we need to do. And one of the things that we have been doing that’s been so interesting, Walter, is something called shift scheduling. That is, when we bring people back into the office, they’re actually on different teams, team one, team two, team three. And the reason why we do that is because if, all of a sudden, if somebody gets a positive infection in team one, we basically ask that team to self-quarantine, while teams two and three are able to continue to work.

ISAACSON: How do you think this is going to change the workplace environments and layouts?

BENIOFF: Well, I think you’re going to definitely have a different kind of work environment, where people are going to have to practice what we have all learned, these words social distancing. But that means that we have to kind of mitigate our risks with the virus. So, you might see it’s the Plexiglas shields between cubes. You might see only a certain number of people in the office. But there’s something else you might not have thought about. We, of course, have our Salesforce towers in New York and London and in San — here in San Francisco. Well, we have these things called elevators, Walter.

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BENIOFF: And before this happened, we might have 10 or 15 or 20 people in an elevator. Well, that’s not going to happen in the new world. You’re going to have to queue for the elevator. Technology’s going to have to tell you when you can get in the elevator, much like when you line up for a ride at Disney, because you’re probably only going to have four or five people in the elevator to maintain social distancing.

ISAACSON: You have staked out some ground with your payroll pledge and talked about having no layoffs and asking other companies to make pledges about payrolls and no layoffs. How can that really work? And do you think other companies should guarantee that there won’t be layoffs in this period?

BENIOFF: Well, you’re right. We have really done something that we can’t ask every company to do, but I have been surprised at how many companies have followed us, which is that we have taken a no — a 90-day no-layoff pledge. That is, we haven’t laid off anybody in the last 90 days during the first phase of the crisis, because we didn’t want to, you know, take — have some kind of knee-jerk reaction. We didn’t know we were going to — where we’re going to end up in 90 days. And it’s also very difficult to hire these people back once you have let them go or furloughed them. So, we have also encouraged other companies. And many, many other companies have followed us in taking this 90-day no-layoff pledge. Now, after the end of this 90 days, I’m sure that all companies are going to say, look, we’re in a new reality now. We have a lot more clarity. We can see where we are. They might want to reshape. They might want to reduce hiring. They might want to build new products. They may want to do things that they weren’t there to do 90 days ago. I’m sure every company at that point will want to reassess. But I think we have to be very careful with hiring. We have already seen that we have got 20, 30 million people out of work. We’re going to need to get those people back on the payroll. So, that’s a key part of what the government needs to do as we enter the second phase. As we get back to work safely, we also need to motivate hiring.

ISAACSON: Explain to me what Work.com does.

BENIOFF: Well, Work.com is really a platform that gives you the advice that you need to be successful at times like this. It also gives you a community of people that are going through this with you. And it gives you the apps that I have been talking about, things like contact tracing, work force triage, shift scheduling, elevator queuing, all these apps that we have had to rapidly build to help our customers get back to work safely now.

ISAACSON: What advice would you give to a medium-sized company, one of your clients, say, who wanted to get back to work, and they have 100, 200 people working in an office?

BENIOFF: Well, I think the first thing that every CEO needs to do in this environment is ask themselves, what are they going to do to be relevant and also to be successful at a time like this, not just commercially, but also philanthropically? You know, Walter, I strongly believe in stakeholder capitalism, that the business of business is not business, but the business of business is improving the state of the world, and that we need to look at not just our employees and our customers and our partners, but also our communities, especially at a time like this. Businesses can have a role for helping the world to get back together. And this is going to be critical for all businesses going forward.

ISAACSON: You talk about, in your book, say that businesses are a platform for change. How will there be a platform for change coming out of this coronavirus pandemic?

BENIOFF: Well, I think, in each of these three phases that we’re in, the first 90-day crisis phase which we’re exiting now, the second phase we’re about to get into, which is going to be this 18-month recovery stage, or the new normal, which call that phase three, businesses have to do something. They have to do something commercially. They have to do something philanthropically. The government also has to do something in each phase. And for us, in the first phase, we were all about, well, first of all, getting our employees safe. That was extremely important to us, getting them productive. And then we really looked at it and said, wow, we can offer tremendous value. And that’s why we acquired 60 million pieces of personal protective equipment using our resources and capabilities to make a difference during the spread. Now, as we enter phase two, we very much think the same way. What are the things that we’re going to do to be able to serve others? How will we help others to be successful during this phase? Yes, we’re going to be successful, we’re going to be productive. How can we now help others, both commercially and philanthropically? I think every company needs to ask that. And the government’s going to have to do that as well. You saw, in the first phase, they did tremendous stimulus packages. In the second phase, they’re going to have to do more, especially to help people get rehired and back into the work force.

ISAACSON: Give me an example of what you might be doing.

BENIOFF: Well, I think one of the most important things that we’re going to do is what we have been talking about. We have built new products. We think there’s going to be new opportunities, new things that customers are going to need to do to deploy and take advantage of. I just saw one of my customers, Honeywell. Well, they have built an N95 mask factory in the United States. That’s a great example where a company needs to do something now that they didn’t need to do just three months ago.

ISAACSON: Do you think, when companies like Honeywell are starting to build manufacturing plants for masks in the United States, it’s going to be the floor runner of a change in the global supply chain, so that more manufacturing is done close to where material is needed?

BENIOFF: Well, Walter, this has been a revelation on the supply chain, because you can even see it when we had to acquire those 60 million pieces of PPE. It was extremely difficult. And I have a lot of stories about what it took to make that happen. But one of the reasons I do have so many stories is because we had to go so far away to get that very basic material. But we need those kinds of capabilities closer to us, and the supply chain needs to be more distributed, so that we have more opportunities to acquire materials. It can’t all be centralized in one location.

ISAACSON: Over the past 30 or 40 years, there has been a shift in what we expect our corporations to do. It used to be that they was supposed to care about their community and all their stakeholders and employees and customers. But there’s been a shift, so that they focus more, almost exclusively at times, on return to shareholder, shareholder value. Do you think that’s going to have to change?

BENIOFF: Well, I do. I think that Milton Friedman, when he said, the business of — business of business is business. Well, that’s one way to look at it. I think second way to look at it is, the business of business is improve the state of the world, that companies can be these incredible platforms for change, and they can be part of the solution and improving of the world. And it does mean that companies and CEOs specifically need to not only look at their employees, and their customers, and their partners, but they do need to look at their communities. One example is just right here in San Francisco. One of the things that I have been so excited about is that Salesforce adopted our local public school system. And we did that both in San Francisco and Oakland. In fact, we have given more than $100 million to the local public schools. And it’s made a dramatic difference in the test scores and the attendance and the quality of the physical plans, and also even in the motivation of the employees that they knew that we were behind them, that our executives were mentoring in the schools, that we’re actively involved, that we care. Of course, we’re the largest employer in San Francisco. We have a responsibility to take care of our public schools. We have a responsibility to take care of our local public hospitals as well or even our homeless shelters that we have. This is part of who we are in our company. And I see a lot more of that happening in all companies.

ISAACSON: You have thrown yourself into the homelessness problem in San Francisco and elsewhere, well before the coronavirus hit. What has the coronavirus done to change your thinking and perhaps society’s thinking on how we handle not just the problem of homelessness, but especially people living on the streets?

BENIOFF: Well, the people living on the streets is an amazing phenomenon here in San Francisco, where we have about 7,000 people living on the streets. And we have really invested much more aggressively, not just in our homeless shelters, but in research programs here at UCSF, in studying the problem, in understanding what we can do to help the homeless. And the reality is that the major way to solve homelessness is by delivering more homes. We just have not built enough housing here. We don’t have enough low-cost housing. And we don’t have enough what we call extremely low-cost housing, that is, housing for the very poor. And, because of that, they end up on the streets. And we have shown that. We have proven that now with university research and mathematical models. And the more housing that we can have available, the less of a problem that we have, and we have got to look at that. When we look at other countries and how they have solved this problem, they have done it by creating these social housing programs and by giving everyone the ability to be in a home. And at the very core to our society, we have got to look at how we are going to able to provide housing to everyone.

ISAACSON: You have been talking about homelessness. You have been talking about how you supported public schools, how you got protective equipment for health care workers in our hospitals, all the things that we used to expect government did. How should we be now thinking about government? Should we be saying, you have got to get back to the business of governing again, and doing those type of things?

BENIOFF: Well, I think it’s more to look at, what is the role of business? I think government can do some things, but government cannot do everything. That’s not our system. We’re not a system that we rely on government to do everything. States have their role. The national government has its role, but business has its role too. Individuals have their role. That is the very premise that our country was built on, that we were all in it together, that we were all going to work together to make this a great country. And that means companies have to do their part. That’s really my message, Walter, which is that everybody has to do something, one thing. And especially at a time of crisis like this, you have to ask yourself a question: What am I going to do philanthropically? What am I going to do commercially? You have to do something for others. And everybody needs to make that choice. That’s what’s going to make things better now.

ISAACSON: Marc Benioff, thank you so much for joining us.

BENIOFF: Thank you, Walter. Great to see you.