- Business Insider met with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to discuss the new role of activist CEOs.
- Benioff helped start a movement among CEOs and is now working 'every day' to encourage business leaders to speak out and take action on a range of social issues.
- He believes that, as governments get mired in partisan divisiveness, CEOs have a new obligation to champion people other than their own shareholders.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is known to hang out with world political leaders like Barack and Michelle Obama, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, the former president of France François Hollande, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
So Business Insider asked him, from his global perspective, if he felt the world was in a politically scary place right now.
Benioff took the long view, saying, "I think that the world is always in a pendulum - things are going back and forth - and I try not to let fear become part of it. I think it just is what it is. I know that it's not what everybody wants, but it's what some people want. And there's some things that I like, there's some things that I don't like."
One thing he likes: The Trump Administration's vocal support of workforce development. A year ago, Benioff was one of a handful of business leaders from the US and Germany who met with President Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss workforce training. In that meeting Benioff advocated for equal pay.
One big thing he dislikes of this administration: targeting people based on their sexual orientation, religion, race and so on, from the rhetoric about immigrants to the ban on transgender military service, not to mention, the rise of white supremacists
"It's upsetting to see people who are not fighting for the equality of all human beings. That's something we do not like," Benioff said.
It's up the CEOs to save the world
In fact, it was that fight for gender equality that turned Benioff into "a social activist CEO", a new breed of business leader who make the business case, and push governments, on social issues.
Back in 2015, Indiana passed a controversial law that made it easier for businesses to refuse service to gay people citing religious reasons. Salesforce is a major employer in Indiana and Benioff warned then-Governor Mike Pence (who is Vice President today), that if he signed the law, Salesforce would stop its investments in the state. Pence signed it anyway and Benioff began to cancel events. Other business leaders also turned up the heat, and lawmakers were backed into a corner. They modified the law to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination.
It was a light-bulb moment for Benioff, who was hailed by Business Insider and other publications back then as a new kind of leader: a CEO activist. And he hasn't looked back.
Given the polarizing and dysfunctional state of government these days, he believes it now falls upon CEOs to save the day.
"Traditionally we've relied on our government leaders to express the values of our country and to fight for what's right. And I think now, the onus is more on CEOs. That they have to step forward and they have to take on those traditional roles," Benioff told us.
Think about that for a second: It's up to the corporate bosses of the world to push government leaders into taking action when they opt to serve their own political interests instead of serving the people.
He's not the only one saying that. Last month the cover story of the Harvard Business Review declared CEO activism has entered the mainstream. CEOs are not only being asked to weigh in on political issues, they are expected to release statements on current events within 24 hours, wrote the authors, Aaron Chatterji and Mike Toffel.
Dinners and encouragement
Although Benioff has been as vocal as ever, especially in the areas that Salesforce has particularly championed like LGBTQ rights and equal pay for women, lately, much of his action is taking place behind the scenes, he told us.
As Benioff travels, he reaches out to his CEO brethren, organizing dinners where they can discuss and encourage each other to step up, speak up and fight for the changes they want to see.
"I'm trying to encourage CEOs to be a clear voice in that conversation," he told us.
"Whenever I travel, I always have dinners where I'll bring 20 or 30 CEOs together and this is the number one topic of conversation, CEO activism. How involved can CEOs be in making the world better?," he said.
During an on-stage interview, he offered another example. "I was in Chicago last week. I had a dinner with 20 CEOs, and we talked about CEO activism. What can CEOs do to make the world a better place? It's like there's two types of CEOs: are you committed to the state of the world and committed to improving the state of the world — or not? And you have to kind of choose. And that's where we are today."
He also clarified, "These are the CEOs of the largest companies in the world that represent the vast majority of the GDP and employment base."
In some of these meetings he also tries to lead by example, inviting women leaders from the company's various women-in-tech groups to those dinners. "When I go travel all around, we always bring them [women in tech] into our dinners and lunches with the CEOs, as well. And it's super-powerful," he said.
Company policies that defy the politicians
In these dinners, Benioff tells CEOs that activism isn't just expressing an opinion on current events. It's about taking action and setting policies at their companies, even when facing public pressure from politicians not to.
He offers as an example how Delta CEO's Ed Bastian handled a brouhaha involving the National Rifle Association and the Georgia state legislature.
The brouhaha occurred when Delta ended discounts for NRA members after the shooting massacre at Parkland High School in Florida and the protests that followed, wanting to disassociate the company from "politically divisive" groups.
Certain politicians of Delta's home state of Georgia grew upset over that decision and punished the company, nixing a tax break in a tax bill the state had planned to give Delta related to jet-fuel.
Rather than reinstating the NRA discounts to get the financial reward of the tax break, Bastian stood his ground, telling employees in a memo. "Our values are not for sale."
"That's how I feel the CEO should behave," Benioff said. "He should win CEO of the year award."
Benioff points out that such a stance would have been considered extremely risky for CEOs just a few years ago, especially one like Bastian, who was hired as an operator and is not a founder CEO.
Short of the big public stance, Benioff says CEOs can and should create policies in their own companies that "treat everybody equally and pay everybody equally and promote everybody equally."
For instance, CEOs can offer paid family leave at their companies. That sounds expensive but paid family leave has been found to increase employee retention and attract talent, according to some researchers.
The role of rich white men
There's a big obvious question in looking to CEOs to become protectors of the social downtrodden. CEOs of large corporations are among the 1%, and they also tend to be overwhelmingly male, white, straight.
Benioff falls into all of these categories. So we asked him how reasonable it is to rely on privileged white-guy CEOs to become the champions of social change, even when there good business cases to be made for such change.
He acknowledged this is difficult, saying "I think it's very hard to look at the world through other people's eyes. That's just how life is."
"You are never going to be able to fully experience their life," he said," because you're never going to really know. But you can do your best to empower them."
Still, this idea that the CEO must look out for everyone: shareholders, employees, customers, partners, community, environment is new and "a huge change," for CEOs, many of whom have been trained to believe their No. 1 job is to look out for the shareholder, he said.
"I feel that I need to help lead and become a part of that movement. That's something that I'm working on every day," he said.
