Yahoo Finance Mandatory yoga, massages and staff culture: 'Salesforce CEO's outlook was unlike anything I'd seen'
My First Boss: The people who helped shape business leaders
Phill Robinson is one of the most accomplished chairpeople, CEOs and non-executive board members in the European software industry.
He is founder and CEO of Boardwave, a not for profit community, dedicated to UK and European software founders and CEOs. He launched the company in 2022 following a Parkinson’s diagnosis.
For 15 years I had been seen in Europe as ‘the marketing guy’ and so I landed what I considered at the time to be the best job in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s.
Marc Benioff was my boss at Salesforce (CRM), the cloud-based software company he co-founded in 1998, which now has a market cap of $192bn (£151.7bn) and over 70,000 employees. It’s an incredibly successful company.
I was working as CMO and joined with Salesforce at $100m in revenue. I was there for nearly five years and in that time it grew to $1bn in revenue. Working for Marc turned out to be a double-edged sword, he is the consummate marketeer and I learned a great deal from him.
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He is 6ft 5in, wore a Hawaiian shirt a lot of the time and had a dog called Koa, a golden retriever who was registered as the chief love officer of the company.
Marc was always late and over committed but, when you spent time with him, it was obvious that he was very interested in the human beings sitting inside his company.
I sometimes drove to work with him and his outlook on life was unlike anything I had seen before.
Six of us had jumped ship and joined Salesforce from Siebel Systems; we had to wear suits and ties in an era where everything was going casual in Silicon Valley.
On our first day at Salesforce we realised there was mandatory yoga for staff. In our first meeting, with 25 people in the room, a whiteboard had everybody’s name with a slot next to it. Every hour someone would leave the room when their name came up. It turned out it was for a massage and their hair would come back all ruffled.
Marc ensured that people were looked after and treated well holistically, while the business wasn’t just there to make profit but to help society. His outlook was about loyalty to the mission. It was an interesting culture and people bought into it.
He would always talk about compassionate capitalism; businesses not existing for their own purposes, but existing to help society and the community within they operate.
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One of the things Marc used to say to me was ‘tactics dictate strategy’, while 99.9% of the time he was also always right. He was pragmatic, loose and tactical to get things done to protect the company.
Where he took fast actions and decisions to get results, it may have taken other companies two quarters or more to figure out. And by then the stock could have been in the tank for a year. Essentially, he made quick and effective decisions with the data he had and took everyone with him on that journey.
Salesforce has this concept model called 1-1-1; giving away 1% of equity to charity, to technology and employees’ time. It turns out that across the working year, 1% equated to five days. Employees were then given this time off to do personal good for charity or the community where they live. Be it working for the scouts or raising money for cancer care.
It turned out to be an amazing tool to generate change around the world. It was also a great tool for teamwork. I went to Poland and painted an orphanage for a week with eight colleagues. Those bonds existed in the workplace and a great culture was created.
In 2013, I was running around Regent’s Park and experienced pain in my arm. I went to various specialists and physios and spent four years working out what was wrong. Eventually I went to a neurologist who said I either had Parkinson’s or a brain tumour. This was 2017, I was running a business in the Netherlands but I couldn’t be a CEO as it was too stressful and so I spent time in the garden before I got bored.
Having continued to embed Marc’s concepts into the companies I ran after Salesforce, my time off allowed me to start Boardwave, a social enterprise where the money we need to run the programme comes from a consortium of blue chip companies and organisations. If we have money left over, we give it away to medical research.
This hasn’t been about doing good for the sake of it. Doing these things makes a better business, makes people more integrated, work better as a team, stay longer and work harder.
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In all, we are helping the software community, charity and also run an impact partner programme, which shows and explains to software CEOs how the model all works of integrating philanthropy and giving back into the company culture which gives you mission and purpose. It turns out that’s the greatest recruitment and retention for talent you could ever have.
We need to create an industry that is more ambitious and successful at building bigger companies in order to build a vibrant European software industry. Boardwave is an attempt at building a community of all the best CEOs and founders across Europe for a successful network.
That was two years ago and it turns out it was a good idea. We now have 1,500 people on board, who are like minded in sharing what they know and helping people in the industry.
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