“Ohana means family,” Benioff said in a 2018 tweet. “And family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.” That’s not exactly true these days. The San Francisco behemoth is slashing about 8,000 jobs.
Salesforce is about Ohana. It’s the founding principle CEO Marc Benioff embraced during a Hawaii sabbatical that inspired him to launch the trailblazing software company in 1999. “Ohana means family,” Benioff said in a 2018 tweet. “And family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”
* Then everything ground to a halt. It’s not just Salesforce. The whole tech industry and the broader economy started to slide. “Business finally slowed down after an amazing run for these tech companies, and cost structures had gotten too bloated,” Rob Siegel of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, told The Examiner.
* Benioff himself acknowledged this on last week’s earnings call: “You all know that we've never had an efficiency focus in the company before because we've had 24 incredible years where we've had to just grow, grow, grow.” That’s changing. * It was a curious shout out to the CEO with whom he once had an ugly public feud. After Ellison canceled Benioff’s Oracle World keynote in 2011, the Salesforce chief hit back with suggestions that his former Oracle boss was behaving like a dictator ousted during the Arab Spring.
* But Benioff’s pivot could backfire, Valoir analyst Rebecca Wettemann said. Embracing someone like Musk as a role model could harm employees and eventually “customer experience. “If Salesforce loses that, it has lost the game,” she told The Examiner. “You don't need costly baristas or ranch retreats to keep Ohana alive. But you do need empathy and a recognition that - at least in the short term - optics mean a lot.
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