Name: Marissa Mayer and Marc Benioff on changing company culture
Uploaded: 2015-11-04
Duration: 7 min 4 s
Description: The Yahoo CEO and Salesforce founder discuss major changes at their companies including equal pay and banning work from home.

I wanna turn from the customer and from the technology, to the company, to each of your companies, and talk about leadership. And ask you each to talk about how you conceive of your role as the leader. And I think Marissa, early in your tenure at Yahoo, you did some interesting and controversial things. You wanted people to come into the office more, you wanted to change the logo. And I'd like to know at a high level how you think about leadership and then how you think about, were some of these things intentional as signals of what your leadership would be or are we reading too much into them and they were just policy things you wanted to do? Well I think that I think about leadership as listening. It was interesting. I've been lucky to have a lot of great mentors over my career, and one of them is Eric Schmidt. And Eric said this thing once where he was like, good executives confuse themselves when they convince themselves that they actually do things. [ LAUGH ] He was like, when was the last time you designed a web page or wrote a line of code, or designed anything? He was like, You're job as an executive is to listen to the vision. Listen to the team and then get things out of the way so they can run at that vision as fast as can. And, so, that was really my approach especially coming into yahoo especially after such a turbulent period. Was to get in really spend time talking to people and so I went down sat in the cafeteria for like an hour or two everyday for about my first month there just listing to people I'm actually quite shy so it was a challenge for me but letting people just come up and anyone who would come and talk to me listing to them. Mark's very shy too he understands that. [ LAUGH ] And just striking up conversations and getting a lot of insights into One, where the people thought the company should go and then two, also it was getting in their way. And so there were things for example like the work from home which I hope is not my legacy but it definitely got more of an external response and even did internally. There were definitely people who said, hey You know, it feels like this is our chance. It feels like this a moment where we could really reinvent the company. And one of the issues that we had is, you know, every week we have to stop all the productive work we're doing and call this person who didn't come into the office. And actually I Had less of an issue with people who had really good working- from- home setups. A lot of times when people work from home formally, it works really well. My brother works from home. I have nothing against working from home per se. Mm- hm, mm- hm. But we did have a lot of people who were just, okay, traffic's bad today, the rain is bad, waiting for the cable guy, I'll just work from home. And I think we all know that in that setting You don't necessarily have the most productive day. And there were a lot of teams who brought it to my attention like " this is getting in the way. Can you say something to the company that says, you know, let's all try to be in the office more ." That was really a response to a request from them, from the different people who were working really hard on some of these key products. But, you were very aware. You're aware of two things by doing that. One, that is was gonna be controversial and two, that you were leading, correct? Not really. As I said, I don't that necessarily it's the right stance certainly for the industry or the world at large, but it was the right thing for Yahoo at that moment. So we weren't trying to make a broader commentary On working styles or working from home. We're just saying, look, people are more collaborative, they are more inventive when they get to come together. You know, we're really proud of the time, around that same time we released our Yahoo weather app, which took Flickr photos and put it up against weather information. So, you know if its raining in Tokyo, and you to to Tokyo, you actually see a picture of Tokyo. It was posted on Flickr Of Tokyo in the Rain. And so it's really nice but those things don't come together, unless someone from Flickr runs into someone from weather. Or like in the hallway or the cafeteria and has that conversation. And so it was the right thing for us at that moment. Mark, your, one of the key elements of your leadership style is that, and ITs do about not being shy. But you You are very clear about what your values are and what you want the values of salesforce. com to be, and I say that because they are distinct, right? They're not like other companies necessarily, they're opinionated in a very strong way, and so can you talk about, share what those are and also What gave you the thought that it was okay to do that? It's not the way all CEO's behave, right? Yeah I would say that there's basically two parts to that question. The first part, our core values in our company start with trust We heard about that yesterday. But for us, no one does business with us if they don't trust us. And trust and trust of our customer, that's number one for us. That is, it starts on a platform of trust, a culture of trust, and then it moves to customer success and growth. That becomes paramount for us, and then we have innovation. And that, those things have been critical to us, we've also become very well known that on the first day that we've started Salesforce, we took one percent of our equity, one percent of our profit, one percent of all of our employees' time, which has turned into Running 25, 000 non profits for and NGOs for free on our service. We've given away more than $ 100 million dollar in grants, we've done more than 1. 1 million hours of volunteerism in schools, in hospitals, in homeless shelters all over the world. We even have a whole group this week in Sri Lanka working with Room to Read which is an amazing NGO. Building schools, that's just status quo for us. And then where I think I got called out this year and was a difficult moment for me as a leader for sure was, we also believe very strongly in equality. We believe in equal rights for our employees, for them to have those rights That is equal pay for women, it's critical that every single one of our female employees salaries and we've adjusted it against all of our male employee salaries. We actually did three million dollars approximately Employee salary adjustments so that we can say we pay women the same that we pay men. We looked at every single salary. And we also provide equal opportunity, we provide equal access to women. Equality is our core value, we fight for that. And then That also turned into a major issue in Indiana. Because there was RFRA where all of a sudden the governor of Indiana said, well you know what? Gay rights are not something that we're gonna necessarily support here in the state. They passed legislation that got a lot of our employees quite anxious and angst cuz They don't want to be discriminated against, they came to me and then I rallied other CEOs and we saw this incredible outpouring of support from employees in this country. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

The Yahoo CEO and Salesforce founder discuss major changes at their companies including equal pay and banning work from home.