Salesforce CEO took 10-day digital detox In French Polynesia after laying off 7k

In the all-hands call the day after layoffs, Benioff compared losing employees to layoffs to mourning people who died. Insider reported that he showed up around 18 minutes late to a company-wide meeting the day after announcing layoffs, and then, as the Times of London reported, he joked, "Did I miss something?"

Salesforce is a 100bn USD company. this type of tonedeaf behavior from a key leadership position during a recession and in the midst of layoffs would be expected from a startup --heck Bird fired nearly everyone over a five minute Zoom-- but here its just pathetic.

actual leadership is present and accounted for during the worst of times and the only reason youd flee to a remote island away from your "digital life" is because youre concerned you might be up next for termination.

> Alternate headline: “Man with stressful job takes vacation of reasonable length after difficult decision” Come on now. This is just a vacation. I’m all for holding people and corporations accountable, but this just feels designed to make you angry for the hell of it.

The timing and structure this vacation seems specifically designed to avoid some of the consequences of that decision, which looks selfish.

Also, the optics are pretty bad: he just cut off a bunch of people's livelihoods (and likely made the work of the remaining employees more difficult), then immediately went off to enjoy himself in an extremely rich way. A better leader would do something that shows some kind of solidarity, and take the vacation later.

The MSM narrative is that executives don't care about people they are robots and don't deserve breaks. They get money and power but shouldn't get time off, ever.

edit: I'm also going to throw shade here because businessinsider isn't really media property with any value.

> This is just a vacation.

I've never had "just" a vacation in French Polynesia, I guess many of us haven't, either.

Yeah, just look at all the stress Elon Musk has to put up with all the time as CEO of his various companies, constantly neck-deep in making essential business decisions and definitely not hanging out on social media all day. Life as a CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company with a set of fully-autonomous direct reports is _super hard_ you guys

Being a CEO is not a stressful job. It's hardly even a job.

Edit: Do not tell me being a CEO of a startup is a job, that's a totally different thing.

Meh. I'm all for taking a vacation and all that...But this take mistakes the role of CEO. The CEO's job is to be the public and private image of the company. To the employees, the CEO must rally them together when misaligned. This means praise in times of success, and owning the missteps in time of failure. Why? Because pay and stock options define this as the job. It is why they are worth the pay they get.

The internal optics of this is "He laid off a bunch of my closest friends, then ghosted the company for two weeks while sipping champagne." He had no such difficult decision you describe. It is well known that he basically flubbed the whole thing. Marc is obviously destroying his legacy, shareholders are downright angry with him. This was his chance to align the company and hurt with the workers, make promises to cut his own luxuries or such to show that he stands with them. After all, it was his own failures. Instead he chopped 8,000 people and did his best to ignore internal conditions for two weeks. If it was an engineer after a project failed, I totally get the vacation. But let's not pretend that CEOs take fewer vacations than workers here. Everyone deserves vacations and almost every CEO takes far more than most workers are allowed.

I could not agree more. I feel like perhaps so many people here are CEOs themselves, or perhaps plan to be, or envision a day where they may be in a similar situation and therein lies some bias but I mean come on… sure, it is a “vacation” by technical standards. But it could not be more tone deaf. None of these CEOs care or value the peons that work for them. And if you delude yourself into believing they somehow do (or you yourself are one of these CEOs in question) then you lack empathy my friend. Ra ra corporatism is a plague and should be called out. He couldn’t wait a few months after things settled down? He ran, like a coward, call a spade a spade.

>… and they are supposed to lead by example

Not really, they are supposed to make the necessary decisions to steer the company to maximize its value to the shareholders. While this vacation might give a little negative blip for a day or two in the tech media and commentary space, this vacation is not going to do jackshit to the stock price, where the layoffs will have a positive impact.

Do you think any of his employees could have even afforded that vacation? Do you think he sees the people he laid off as people? Why should we give him that courtesy?

Ia orana!

In the US we often refer to FP as Tahiti even though Tahiti is the name of the largest island in the chain. Others are Bora Bora, Taha’a, Maupiti and my favorite Moorea.

"... took responsibility..."

CEO's keep using that phrase. I don't think it means what they think it means.

Or that they blew $27B on Slack and then had an almost public feud with Stewart and was careless about him leaving...destroying Slack's morale.

As a former Salesforce employee, Benioff likes to grandstand to get PR, but doesn't much care about following through.

The "no layoffs pledge" article you linked is a great example: he talked a big game about how Salesforce wasn't going to do any layoffs during the pandemic, and how other companies can't be expected to meet that standard, but they should pledge no layoffs 90 days as a start.

Then, 91 days later, Salesforce did major layoffs. Bret Taylor, who was co-CEO at the time, repeatedly reassured the whole company at a series of all-hands meetings that this was a one-time strategic unfortunate necessity, on the same day that Benioff was trying to drive up the stock price by telling MSNBC that it would be an annual exercise (and it was). Since then, they've done major layoffs every year, and the word I hear from my former colleagues is that Benioff's personal V2MOM (which is "pushed down" from the top through the entire org chart as mandatory priorities) includes mandating 5% stack ranking across the company, alongside a required return-to-office 3 days a week, and a high mandatory "badge level" for all employees on the internal corporate-trainings tool (meaning all employees have to complete something like 40 hours of mostly-irrelevant formerly-optional trainings).

"Stakeholder capitalism" was brought up on several occasions internally during that first wave of layoffs, and during at least one of the subsequent waves that I saw happen while I was there, and numerous questions were submitted to each exec AMA I saw about how layoffs fit in with "stakeholder capitalism". In every case, the question was either dodged with a "that's not applicable here" answer, or else not even posed to the exec (as if it hadn't been submitted at all) even though it was submitted by at least several dozen people.

There are several other examples, like his "just the tip" joke about his ego-skyscraper (and plenty of other cases where the executive suite had to do an apology tour after Benioff made yet another sexist or racist comment internally, like talking about "opening the kimono" and stuff like that -- despite the company always talking up "hashtag equality" as a company value).

The reality is that Benioff is just Larry Ellison, but with ostensibly-slightly-blue-flavored politics (except for where it comes to anything that would impact his bottom line, like corporate tax rates or software patent reform), instead of red-flavored politics. He came from Oracle, and Oracle is in his blood -- every day it becomes more and more obvious that the only thing he didn't like about Oracle was that someone else was running the ship instead of him.