Page 27 - The Way to the Top

Marc BENIOFF

Chairman and CEO of salesforce.com

Strange as it sounds, the best business advice I ever received wasn’t about
how to make money—but how to give it away.

In 1997, while I was an executive at Oracle Corporation, Colin Powell

stood up with the five living presidents and launched America’s Promise—
a program that challenged the nation to make a greater commitment to its
youth. That motivated Oracle CEO Larry Ellison to start a corporate
philanthropy program called Oracle’s Promise, and I was tapped to spend
$100 million to get computers into schools. All of a sudden, I was living in

two worlds. I spent half of my time in management meetings and the other
half at schools in south-central Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Northern
Ireland, and Israel.

Although we placed thousands of computers in schools worldwide, our

small team felt as if the efforts fell short of leveraging Oracle’s full
philanthropic potential. I thought back to Colin Powell’s call to America’s
companies to “take the lead” in getting involved in youth service projects
and to give employees paid time off to participate in these programs. I

realized that philanthropy was about more than giving away money and I
knew that if we had been able to draw on Oracle’s full assets—its
employees, its customers, and its partners—we could have made an even
bigger contribution.

That was a defining moment that helped inspire my concept of
“integrated philanthropy,” the practice of emphasizing social service from
the inception of a company. Shortly after I started salesforce.com, the
company launched the salesforce.com/foundation, a 501(c)3 public charity
with a mission of integrating philanthropy and business. In tandem with