The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
Interpretation
Successful hiring focuses on finding individuals who are passionate about making a positive impact.
Marc Benioff's quote emphasizes that the foundation of effective hiring lies in identifying candidates who are driven by a desire to enact change in the world. Such individuals often possess the motivation, vision, and work ethic necessary to contribute significantly to an organization's success and to inspire others in the process.
In practice
In a leadership workshop, I shared the quote to emphasize the importance of vision in team building.
Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were, No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.
I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.
I don't look at business as a zero-sum game. I don't. I've never seen it play out that way in our industry, and I think you innovate and you add value, deliver value back to customers, and you get value back from the world.
Although I loved working on technology - I've always been a computer geek at heart - my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.
The only constant in the technology industry is change.
The antidote to inequality is equality. The question is how do you achieve equality? I believe that, for business, which is where I can speak, we have to shift from shareholder maximization to stakeholder maximization.
If you want to occupy the C-suite or the top one-tenth of 1% in any organization, you have to be obsessively devoted to your career at the expense of everything else. And women look at that, and they think, 'No.'
I think a simple rule of business is, if you do the things that are easier first, then you can actually make a lot of progress.
I do not interfere, and people become rich by themselves.
Greatness comes by doing a few small and smart things each and every day. Comes from taking little steps, consistently. Comes from a making a few small chips against everything in your professional and personal life that is ordinary, so that a day eventually arrives when all that's left is The Extraordinary.
Whatever you want in life, you've got to give away first.
We try not to have many investing 'rules,' but there is one that has served us well: If we decide we were wrong about something, in terms of why we did it, we exit, period.
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