2015年春天,Salesforce的兩名高管登門拜訪了公司的首席執行官馬克·貝尼奧夫,向他匯報了一條令人不快的消息:他們懷疑,公司在薪酬方面存在性別歧視。貝尼奧夫對此感到既憤怒又驚訝。在他備受矚目的新書《開拓者:商業力量是最大的變革平臺》(Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change)中,貝尼奧夫寫道:“我承認,當時內心很抵觸這件事情。”該書由貝尼奧夫與《華爾街日報》(Wall Street Journal)的前作家莫妮卡·蘭利合著。 貝尼奧夫是一位靠技術白手起家的億萬富翁,公司的業務是出售客戶關系管理軟件,雖然聽起來平平無奇,但在當時他已經是舉世聞名的慈善活動家。早在很久以前,他就制定了所謂的1-1-1慈善模型。在該模型中,Salesforce拿出其產品、股票和員工工時的1%用于慈善事業,后來有很多企業也以該模型為藍本推出了類似的慈善項目。而貝尼奧夫的個人捐款已經達到數百萬美元之巨,他還推動未捐過款的硅谷精英加入到慈善事業之中。他有理由相信Salesforce不會存在薪酬不公的問題。“不可能,”他告訴同事,“這種做法是錯誤的,不是我們的工作方式。” 然而事實確如其公司高管所言。為了將女性員工薪酬提升至男性同等水平,Salesforce前后兩次各投入了300萬美元,總計600萬美元。第三方審計機構發現,之所以后來又出現薪酬不平等現象主要是由于Salesforce在此期間收購了幾家公司,而在被收購的公司中存在男女薪酬不公問題。 對于那些熟悉貝尼奧夫的人來說,這則軼事已經是耳聞能詳。但在《開拓者》一書中,貝尼奧夫對他的感悟以及經歷進行了更深入的描述。諸如:偏見何以滲透到商業活動的方方面面,被排斥在會議之外如何剝奪一個人的機會,以及他和蘭利在書里所寫的,“企業文化也能滋生不平等現象”,而他的管理理念正來源于此。這些理念應該成為當今商業領袖的必修課程。《開拓者》的每一章節都有值得列入企業宣言的金句,例如:與僅僅服務股東相比,服務員工和社區能夠更直接地實現增長、推動創新。 在書中的一些地方,貝尼奧夫向讀者所作的知識普及,可能會影響其主題的表達。比如,如果他沒有簡述自己對冥想的思考,我可能會更容易理解他想說什么。但是總的來說,他所展現出的領導智慧值得所有的企業家學習,也值得商學院收錄作為授課內容。(財富中文網) 本文登載于《財富》雜志2019年11月刊,標題為《貝尼奧夫式營商》。 譯者:梁宇 審校:夏林 |
In the spring of 2015, two senior Salesforce executives paid a visit to the home of their CEO, Marc Benioff, to deliver some uncomfortable news: Women at the company, they suspected, were being paid less than their male counterparts for the same jobs. As his colleagues spoke, Benioff could feel the indignation and astonishment reshaping his face. “I’ll admit, my defensiveness was welling up,” he writes in his compelling new book, Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change, coauthored by former Wall Street Journal writer Monica Langley. The self-made tech billionaire, whose company sells subscription software for a rather prosaic-sounding task—customer-relations management—had already made a name for himself as a philanthropist-?provocateur. Long ago he had instituted a widely copied program called 1-1-1 in which Salesforce donated 1% each of its product, equity, and employee time to charitable causes. Benioff had personally given away millions of dollars and tweaked the Silicon Valley elite who didn’t. And in the case of Salesforce itself, he was sure things couldn’t be so unfair. “Impossible,” he told his colleagues. “That’s not right. That’s not how we operate.” As it turns out, it was—and Salesforce spent $3 million to bring women’s salaries up to parity. The following year, when his team, again, discovered that pay was out of whack, it cost another $3 million to fix. A third audit found that the inequity persisted, largely due to acquisitions Salesforce had made in the interim. (Gender pay gaps had been built into those companies too.) For those who have followed Benioff’s career, the anecdote is a familiar one. But in Trailblazer, he goes much deeper into what he learned and how he learned it. And the management insights he draws from this experience and others—how bias creeps into the day-to-day practices of business; how being left out of a meeting can rob someone of opportunity; “how a company’s culture can breed inequality in ways small and large,” as he and Langley write—ought to be a required curriculum for today’s business leaders. Indeed, in chapter after chapter, Trailblazer draws the tenets of a new corporate manifesto—one in which serving employees and community offers a more direct path to growth and innovation than serving shareholders alone. There are moments in the book where Benioff’s personal pursuit of enlightenment may be a distraction from the message—I could have done without his brief meditation on meditation, for instance. But overall, the leadership wisdom he delivers is one every businessperson should know. If only the B-schools taught it as well. This article appears in the November 2019 issue of Fortune with the headline “Business the Benioff Way.” |