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.
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.
Layoffs are business as usual.
Maybe so, but not all crises are identical. An action that might be fine in one kind of crisis can be gauche in another.
> Layoffs are business as usual.
Layoffs are different, especially large and prominent ones. Definitely not the same as a "quarterly report ... met by analyst derision."
edit: I'm also going to throw shade here because businessinsider isn't really media property with any value.
i mean.... the only part i disagree with is the 'dont deserve breaks'. we all read the book, everybody poops.
I've never had "just" a vacation in French Polynesia, I guess many of us haven't, either.
the timing of the vacation is perhaps inconsiderate, but not sure what points we are making here
I don't know the specific demographics of the 7k that were laid off from Salesforce, but the chances are fairly good that some portion of those will end up homeless or near to it due to the loss of income before they can land another job. Those chances are highest for those who are already in the worst shape (particularly those with chronic illnesses or some form of disability).
But the CEO is "mourning" these people so hard that he has to go on a (guesstimating) five-figure vacation to the tropics...?
This is more than "perhaps inconsiderate," it is pointlessly cruel, a mark of someone completely out of touch with his current and former employees, an indicator of someone who puts profit above literally everything else, which is not okay.
0. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CRM/salesforce/gro...
Edit: Do not tell me being a CEO of a startup is a job, that's a totally different thing.
There is absolutely companies where the CEO is basically a visitor on a walking tour and where you are right. Honestly, I would argue from Marc's missteps the last two years or so, Salesforce might be closer to the second.
Is Joe Biden’ s job hard? No. But the chance to get it is almost zero.
At least as CEO he has to stay solvent and be responsible to the board, almost he is not spending my money.
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.