I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.
Interpretation
Businesses should focus on making a positive impact on the world.
Marc Benioff emphasizes the idea that the primary purpose of a business goes beyond profit-making; it should strive to contribute positively to society and the world at large. This perspective encourages companies to take responsibility for their actions and work towards improvements that benefit not just shareholders but also the wider community and environment.
In practice
In a keynote speech about corporate social responsibility.
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.
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change 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.
A well-run restaurant is like a winning baseball team. It makes the most of every crew member's talent and takes advantage of every split-second opportunity to speed up service.
Simply put: we don't build services to make money; we make money to build better services.
We are not influenced by the techniques or fashions of any other company.
If a company is profitable, the founder is in control. If it's not, investors are in control.
The hard part of running a business is that there are a hundred things that you could be doing, and only five of those actually matter, and only one of them matters more than all of the rest of them combined. So figuring out there is a critical path thing to focus on and ignoring everything else is really important.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world-not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
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