Its funny, I've been a rhapsodic waxer about AppExchange and have been a fan and a critic of salesforce.com forever. I think they are brilliant, disrupters in a good way, sometimes goofy, overhyped by themselves though that's mitigated by everyone in the CRM industry among others, hyping themselves beyond the visible horizon. But one thing I haven't really mentioned much except maybe on occasion is something that is perhaps among the most vital things for a company in an era where the customer is now the focus and business itself is taking a beating for every little thing they do bad - way too many of them are little things that shouldn't be even mentioned much less turned into an attack.
I admit it, I fall into it myself - business bashing is kind of fun - until you realize that if you have something of an impact, someone or something could get hurt and then judicious behavior has to accompany what seemed to be nothing more than a bout of good old "did you hear about....nyah, nyah" and not much else
Salesforce.com comes under particular scrutiny being a disrupter and market leader and having a edgy vibrant, pushy, brilliant guy running its show - and that's Marc Benioff.
I've known Marc for several years now - actually since 2001 when he saw a criticism I had made of salesforce.com at that time. He sent me an email and said, "I love convincing skeptics. Can I take a crack at it with you?" (I still have that email somewhere). My response was "hey, man, take your best shot."
And damn if he didn't take his best shot. There were blips along the way - a bunch actually - a few more than blips - and they don't remain above my criticism from time to time for something I might think is a bonehead move. But I am a convinced skeptic in many areas. While I think AppExchange is a brilliant idea and a harbinger of a very important future and because I just saw Mobile AppExchange which is related to the Sendia acquisition and think now that this move by salesforce.com to acquire Sendia was very, very smart, given the promise of MobileAppExchange (more on that in the blog entry on the RIM Wireless Enterprise Symposium tomorrow), that's not what I'm convinced of.
The Good Citizens of salesforce.com
About a week ago, I read an press release in Yahoo FInance entitled "Salesforce.com Named Among Top Ten '100 Best Corporate Citizens'". It seems that Business Ethics magazine which does an annual comprehensive look at the companies that take their corporate responsibiity to the planet and its populace - having a Gaia old time, so to speak - identified salesforce.com as the 7th best company when it came to good corporate citizenship. Business Ethics conducts a unique and serious study with a clearcut well designed methodology that encompasses eight primary "stakeholder factors" including:
- shareholders
- community
- governance
- diversity
- employees
- environment
- human rights
- product
What they measure are social and shareholder scores using an assessment methodology called Socrates designed by KLD Research & Associates. Social scores measure things for its strength and concerns. The shareholder scores involve the business metrics which is three year average total return (stock appreciation plus dividends) through the prior year. An example of a social score would be in the community category, a look at charitable giving at over 1.5% a year, innovative giving, support for volunteer programs, etc. Tax disputes would go to the negative side of the community score. Clearly the idea here is that a company can be socially concerned and successful and that this should be rewarded.
Emotion Capture
What makes this so real is that I got to spend some time about 1.5 years ago at salesforce.com's HQ in San Francisco, finally meeting all those there that I had never met but had been talking to for a long time. And while I was there I found that salesforce.com was entirely serious about corporate philanthropy - and despite its hypermarkety approach to a lot of things - this wasn't marketing. This was a genuine desire, led by Marc Benioff, and inculcated deeply into the DNA of his company, to just return something to the world. I had a conversation with the folks at the Salesforce Foundation who made it passionately clear to me that they wanted to do good. Period.
Interestingly there is a requirement to be employed at salesforce.com that you individually must donate 1% of your working hours - yes, that's working hours - to community service. The company donates 1% of all profits to the community through the Foundation. I remember that the Foundation mavens told me that they opened a Foundation branch office in every salesforce.com office regionally or locally over a certain size - I don't remember what the size was. Keep in mind what I said, every Foundation office is located physically inside the salesforce.com office itself. Their passion and pride was evident and one of the things that truly impressed me - far more than the enterprise functionality of what was then the services offering (Not that there was anything wrong with that).
Marc wrote a book on his philanthropic philosophy which was an okay book, but I never thought it got across the passion that he truly felt for doing the good things he and salesforce.com do.
So allow me to say it. Congratulations to salesforce.com for achieving something that only six other companies did better - and something that should be meaningful to the customers and all the other humans who serve the earth and who the earth serves.
Just one request. Capitalize the "s."
Every individual has its own strategy when it comes to selling their business. I still believe on ability of a good person.
Posted by: wine bags | February 16, 2011 at 05:56 AM
It's so easy--and, yes, tempting--to criticize business practices we consider unethical. It's so easy, in fact, that we tend to all too forget to recognize those who are successful and ethical at the same time!
Posted by: thebizofknowledge | August 27, 2006 at 07:56 PM