Fortunes 2018 list of 100 Best Places to Work is out and guess who isn’t on it anywhere?

Google.

Why?

Because the criteria was tweaked this year.

But there’s something different about this year’s list, which was based on responses from more than 300,000 employees at large companies that opted into the survey. A change in methodology this year put greater emphasis on feedback from survey respondents who self-identified as women, minorities, or LGBTQ. It is the first time, says Michael Bush, the CEO of Great Place to Work, that the list reflects what he has dubbed a “Great Places to Work For All” mindset.

At first, adding “all” to the pot scared the heck out of many CEOs, but after explaining, most came back.

His clients could see that a “for all” commitment would mean the firm was “maximizing the potential of all employees.” (…) Bush reports that organizations scoring highest under the new “For All” methodology “grew their revenue about 10 percent faster over the same period than the companies that scored best according to [Great Place to Work’s] old methodology.”

Some of the Top 10 may surprise you, but Salesforce in the top slot shouldn’t.

One reason Google didn’t participate in the survey may be found in job site Hired’s 2018 State of Salaries report.

The average worldwide salary for a tech worker in 2017 was $135,000, says Hired, up 5% from the 2016 survey. (…) But the data also showed that a person’s race has what Hired called “a significant impact” on salary in the tech industry. And black tech workers are the ones getting the most shortchanged — Hired found that black tech workers are making $6,000 a year less than their white peers, on average.

Interestingly, the data suggests both a cause and a solution. Black candidates and Hispanic candidates tend to begin their salary negotiations at a lower point than their white counterparts, according to this data.

White candidates tend to ask for the highest salary, $130,000, and get offered $136,000 (+4.6% on their request).

Meanwhile, black and Hispanic candidates using Hired’s platform say their preferred salary is $124,000, on average. But even when an offer beats their initial request, it’s still relative to the lower number. Black workers are being offered $130,000 (+4.8%) on average and Hispanic candidates are offered $131,000 (+5.7%). Asian candidates ask for $127,000 on average and are offered $133,000 (+4.7%).

I guess it’s just simpler to ignore this and similar surveys and ignore the media questions about why you didn’t participate, than it is to fix the problem — and this one is definitely fixable.

No one ever said solving fundamental problems like diversity was easy, especially when it takes more than data and algorithms.

Join  my tomorrow for a look at why most diversity efforts fail, what works, and how diversity programs are being considered trade secrets.

Video credit: Fortune

KG Charles-Harris is a serial entrepreneur whose current startup, Quarrio, is involved in big data using AI.

As longtime readers know, KG writes here whenever he has time, which he hasn’t had much of lately. His most recent post on leadership was a two-parter (you can read it here and here in case you missed it).

Today, I need to share some great news about KG and his startup Quarrio. (KG would be writing this, but he’s sick.)

Quarrio is a business intelligence product built on top of Salesforces’ platform.

What we do is Business Intelligence for Salesforce. How we do it is quite a bit different. With Quarrio we make it simple to analyze Salesforce by using conversations. We help you understand what’s happening to your opportunities, leads, accounts – just about anything in Salesforce — by simply having conversations.

Simply put, you ask questions in plain English and immediately answers in plain English, along with graphs, charts, etc., if apropos.

That ability will be a little slice of heaven for anyone who needs to get information from the dashboard.

Now for the great news.

Salesforce opened a new incubator today.

The new space, called the Salesforce Incubator, finally opened on Wednesday. Located in San Francisco’s SOMA district, where a lot of startups open shop these days, Salesforce Incubator will house 14 startups for the next 5 months for free.

And Quarrio is one of the chosen!

“Freemium” isn’t a winning strategy for enterprise software, as Dropbox can attest.

In general, incubators are useful, but, for an enterprise startup using Salesforce’s platform, the focus, connections and access of the Salesforce incubator are unparalleled.

Obviously, it will be an intense five months.

Image credit: Salesforce

By any measure Mark Benioff  runs a successful, highly profitable company.

Moreover, he runs one of the most socially responsible companies in the world.

This BI interview with Benioff captures in a short read how Salesforce is a perfect example of a founder who incorporated his values into his company.

His socially conscious approach began when he launched Salesforce as a startup;  long before it was profitable.

I view that as a critical part of my business. That’s why when I started Salesforce, on day 1, we put 1% of our equity, 1% of our product, and 1% of our time into Salesforce.org.

Where other CEOs talk, wring their hands and use media time to bemoan the problems, Benioff fixes them.

Gender pay disparity is a good example.

When he saw proof that women were being paid less he made changes to eliminate the disparity and did it without whining or handwringing.

Two women, one our head of HR and one who ran our women’s group said, “Hey, we’re paying women less than men at Salesforce.” I didn’t believe it at the time, when we actually looked at the information we were actually paying women $3 million less than we were paying men for the same amount of work, and so we made an adjustment to how we pay women.

When asked how other companies handle the issue he furnished not only the how, but also the why it doesn’t happen.

Every company has an HR system, every company knows their salaries, that’s obviously how they pay people, and all a CEO has to do is push a button and look at, “Do I pay women the same as men?” Most CEOs are afraid to push that button.

Furthermore, Benioff  sees an attitude from a few academics in the 1970s as responsible for much of today’s inequality, — in short, he doesn’t believe that that a company’s primary purpose is to maximize shareholder value.

I believe that for business, which is where I can speak, we have to shift from shareholder maximization to stakeholder maximization.

Salesforce has been ranked as one of the top innovative companies year after year for a very simple reason.

They can’t look to me for all the answers. I don’t have them, and that’s not our culture. They are coming to me with their ideas and their visions. It’s not my role to be the only visionary in town.

All in all, Marc Benioff is a superb role model, whether your company is large, small or just starting up.

Flickr image credit: TechCrunch

First it was Uber drivers, members of the so-called 1099 economy, who sued Uber.

Next, the general public woke up to tech’s rapacious abuse of their privacy and personal information.

And last week nearly half of shareholders voted against the executive compensation plan of a company whose stock is near its all-time high.

According to an SEC document filed Tuesday, nearly 47% of the total shareholders voted against Salesforce’s executive compensation packages at its annual shareholders meeting…

Maybe, just maybe, corporate America has finally gone too far and we’re ready to fight back.

Flickr image credit: Annelid

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

When tech people talk about philanthropic role models these days they focus on people like Bill Gates and his foundation or Mark Zukerberg’s donation to schools where he grew up, which, obviously, are very important.

Sometimes they talk about a few million donated to San Francisco to off-set the anger directed at commute buses and general tech arrogance — which we all know is no more than a rounding error to companies like Google.

Marc Benioff has a different take on what companies owe to the cities that host them.

We have done a phenomenal job creating value for the world through our technology, but we are not really an industry known for giving that wealth back.

Benioff’s attitude isn’t a reactive to the current anger at tech; he instilled philanthropy in the company’s culture when he founded it in 1999.

He called it the 1-1-1 model of corporate philanthropy, in which the company would send 1 percent of its stock, products, and employees’ working time to the company foundation.

His approach inspired companies like Yelp, NetSuite, and Google to develop their own variations.

“Marc has been pounding the table getting everyone to pay attention and come up with their own philanthropic strategy,” says Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp’s CEO.

Benioff has a new initiative called SF Gives (run by nonprofit Tipping Point Community) to change things.

SF Gives to raise $10 million for regional antipoverty programs. Benioff got on the phone himself and successfully pushed executives at Box, Google, Jawbone, Zynga, and 15 other tech companies to join.

His goal is to add another 85 companies in 2015 and I have no doubt he’ll succeed.

In short, Benioff is a true proponent of doing well by doing good and sees it as a substantial competitive advantage and recruiting tool for Salesforce.

Embedding your own version of Benioff’s 1-1-1 in your startup’s culture and joining SF Gives at the earliest opportunity may not guarantee you the same success as Salesforce, but it will certainly garner you good press, important connections and a significant competitive advantage, which won’t hurt your chances.

Image credit: HikingArtist