I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.
Interpretation
Businesses should focus on making a positive impact on the world.
Marc Benioff emphasizes the idea that the primary purpose of a business goes beyond profit-making; it should strive to contribute positively to society and the world at large. This perspective encourages companies to take responsibility for their actions and work towards improvements that benefit not just shareholders but also the wider community and environment.
In practice
In a keynote speech about corporate social responsibility.
Once you know what you want and what is important for you to achieve, also define the values associated with it. What is important? That is something a lot of entrepreneurs pass by too quickly. For us, the things that were important were, No. 1, customer success. Nothing is more important to us than making sure every customer is successful in our service.
The secret to successful hiring is this: look for the people who want to change the world.
I don't look at business as a zero-sum game. I don't. I've never seen it play out that way in our industry, and I think you innovate and you add value, deliver value back to customers, and you get value back from the world.
Although I loved working on technology - I've always been a computer geek at heart - my professors encouraged me to get a real-world job working with customers.
The only constant in the technology industry is change.
The antidote to inequality is equality. The question is how do you achieve equality? I believe that, for business, which is where I can speak, we have to shift from shareholder maximization to stakeholder maximization.
Values-based business behavior is no longer simply an interesting option - it's crucial to your survival. Once you understand your mission and values, you have a strong basis for evaluating your practices and aligning them accordingly.
The idea that you can create a template that will work forever doesn't happen in any business. There's some really, really bright people in this business. You can't do the same thing the same way and be successful for a long period of time.
Now that knowledge is taking the place of capital as the driving force in organizations worldwide, it is all too easy to confuse data with knowledge and information technology with information.
Market leaders inevitably slip into decline when they tell the people what they want instead of giving the people what they want.
There is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.
When you are in business for a long time, you go through good times and bad times. When you go through bad times, you learn to control costs, satisfy customers better, satisfy employees better and become more transparent. Therefore, you build character in the company.
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