If The Shoe Fits: Marc Benioff — Global Champion Of Women
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.
Ask most tech founders about role models and who they want to emulate and you’ll usually hear the same names — Gates/Jobs/Page/Zukerberg/Bezos.
Rarely do you hear Benioff.
Granted, Benioff’s Salesforce’s revenues aren’t as high and the valuation is “only” $66 billion, but Salesforce sells no consumer products — ads are products — therefore has a much smaller market.
Revenues aside, Benioff is a much better leader and role model.
Not just a philanthropist, but an activist philanthropist who is not afraid to use his clout and get in the face of his peers.
Given the same clout, would you do the same thing?
A guy who believes a company’s concerns should go beyond its investors to include all its stakeholders, direct and indirect.
How far beyond yourself do your concerns go?
Tech’s been on the hot seat lately for a host of reasons, with gender issues front and center, especially equal pay.
Most, including the “role models” listed above, have been vocal in their promises to address the pay disparity.
Benioff, however, has put his money where their mouths are.
In 2015, his company did a salary study, and it turned out they needed to make some changes. So they spent $3M to level the playing field. A year later, they put salaries under the microscope again and found they had to spend another $3M to close additional pay gaps.
Now Benioff has pledged to evaluate salaries on a regular basis. For this and more, he was named a “Global Champion of Women in Business.”
And before you whine about not having enough cash to do that stop and think.
If you pay your people equally when you hire and promote there wouldn’t be a pay gap for you to erase.
Image credit: HikingArtist
