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.
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 thing is, there is always a crisis. So if you operate that way, you never take vacation. Even a successful quarterly report could be met by analyst derision. At that point you behold yourself to the press which is no way to live.
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.
Thankfully, their extremely cushy salaries, lack of need to take responsibility and work hours that consists of taking a few hours in the company paid sauna allow me to feel absolutely no remorse for saying that the CEOs of Salesforce, Oracle or Google are lazy sacks of shit.
The point, which seems pretty clear to me, is that if you are going to dramatically disrupt the lives of 7000 people while reporting profits in the tens of billions of dollars, 19% higher than the previous year[0], you are cruelly exploiting the pain of others in pursuit of needless profit. If you then show up late to meetings and make jokes about it before jetting off to an extended vacation most of us will never have the wealth to experience, you further reveal that you have no regard for what you've done to the 7000 people whose careers you've sacrificed to juice your quarterly bonus.
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.
The point is that not only is the timing woefully insensitive, but the duration, locale, and purported reason ("digital detox") serve to painfully highlight the inequality between the CEO and the people he just made unemployed.
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...?
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
This varies wildly company to company. There's companies where the CEO legitimately is the hardest worker there...because it is theirs and their equity of course.
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.
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.
Some people here (there is a rude word for these cheerleaders of the feudal system, but I'll save that for less polite corners of social media) saying "he deserves a vacation".
A CEO is a leadership role - akin to being prime minister of a country, or captain of a ship.
Their ridiculously outsized rewards come with responsibilities, and they are supposed to lead by example. There was not much sympathy for the captain of an Italian cruise ship when he abandoned his post before his crew and passengers. Or a PM who partied through lockdown.
Likewise a CEO who lays off a huge number of employees and then fucks off to a Pacific island is not deserving of any sympathy, let alone nice sunsets and cocktails.
What should a CEO do? I dunno, but some CEOs took pay cuts, because they realized the impact on morale on their employees. Instead this guy just dumped more work on the employees left behind and went off on holiday.
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.
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.
This is fine. CEOs are people, and it's good for people to take vacations. If you're against toxic hustle culture, don't be mad about this. It feels oddly puritan.
A lot of people seem to have this idea that layoffs are usually wrong, and that it means the company/CEO did something bad. That's just not reality. Laying off people wasn't a sin, and his vacation isn't him reveling in his sinful lifestyle.
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?
I don't know the details of his 10-day French Polynesia vacation, but I just did some pricing and I imagine a lot of Salesforce employees could afford a fairly luxurious 10-day French Polynesian vacation. Both the Salesforce employees I know could.
Of course, I think he sees the people he laid off as people. What I don't understand is why you seemingly don't think of the CEO as a person.
can afford a $3,000-$5,000 vacation. On the internet someone said they got 5 months of severance pay, if it's true and it's a lump sum payment then it seems like all of them have the money for it, unless they were spending more than they were making or need more than 4 months to find a job that pays the same.
Maybe, maybe not, but I don't think any of his employees could be hired for his job, either.
I would assume that he does see the people he laid off as people, yes. I know a lot of executives and wealthy investors, and I have yet to see the sociopathy people attribute to them (though I do know of a few credible stories of particular exceptions, particularly in older industries). And Benioff in particular has a fairly good reputation among people who have worked with him, from what I understand.
"Benioff's digital detox offers an interesting glimpse into how one tech CEO navigated a time of change at the company, seeking out a temporary period of quiet, free of digital communication."
That would certainly be one way to put it (the businessinsider.com way). Another way would be "Benioff goes to where criticism cannot be heard".
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.
as opposed to staying at work where they can be held accountable? why would they do that instead of enjoying some freshly paved runway on the balance sheet
Well, in hindsight, that's really bad, truly inconsiderate timing by Benioff.
He should have gone through the usual ritualistic theater of accepting all responsibility and showing that he feels ashamed and remorseful about the ~7,000 individuals who had bought into his Hawaiian spiel and have now been kicked out of the company to fend for themselves.
CEOs can't just fire people and disappear; they must act publicly with contrition, as if they care -- even if it's only temporarily for show.
Fittingly, "aloha!" can mean either "hello!" or "goodbye!" in Hawaiian.
The question is why the board of directors would allow that. Otherwise I didn’t see why is this a problem. He is not spending people’s tax money to do so.
> In a letter to employees, Benioff blamed the layoffs on the company hiring too many people during the pandemic as "revenue accelerated," and took "responsibility" for hiring people leading into the current "economic downturn."
Or that companies have sussed out better competing products?
Yes he does, he was responsible for overhiring, and now he has taken responsibility for fixing that by laying off the employees no longer required. Problem solved in the eyes of the shareholders, responsibility fulfilled.
> "... took responsibility..." - I don't think it means what they think it means.
They think it means "I take responsibility for the 10% jump in the stock price on the announcement of layoffs and expect my bonus to reflect the increase in shareholder value, please ignore the 60% decline in the shareprice over the last year which is due to market conditions and not my responsibility."
Its too early to call; but come the end of financial year its probably going to mean exactly what they think it means.
It's funny. Benioff is probably one of the most pro-employee tech CEOs. He's consistently advocated for "stakeholder capitalism"[1], a movement which, in part, seeks to align corporate objectives with those of the employees rather than just shareholders.
He also pledged not to make significant layoffs during the peak of the pandemic fear in early 2020, and encouraged other companies to do the same[2].
I honestly wonder if this last year will change his mind on trying to be a compassionate and socially conscious leader... It seems if you're a tech CEO these days people will hate you regardless of what you do. Am I seriously suppose to be angry he took a 10 day vacation after making difficult layoffs?
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.
He should take a permanent vacation as soon as possible. I really hope Elliot does something to get this guy out, unreal how much shareholder value this idiot destroyed with his acquisition strategy over the last 5 years.
