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Marc Benioff's Five Leadership Secrets

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By Nick Mehta

I’ll admit it. The first time I saw Marc Benioff speak, I wasn’t that impressed. The chief executive of Salesforce.com wasn’t a typical suave, clean-cut CEO. He didn’t have the black turtleneck cool of Steve Jobs. He came off as a little cheesy.

Yet a couple of weeks ago at Dreamforce 2011, Salesforce.com’s annual user conference, I was honestly in awe. And it wasn’t just because Benioff put together the largest technology conference in the industry or because his company is worth billions and is taking over the IT world. Okay, maybe it was a little because of that.

A lot of people wrote a few weeks ago about what they learned from Steve Jobs. Indeed, even Benioff talked about it. Yet as someone who has spent most of his career selling technology to businesses, I think we can all learn a lot from Benioff, and not just from his business model and technology. Here are a few lessons we can all learn in terms of vision and leadership:

1. Be inclusive. At Dreamforce, I think I heard the term “you” (spoken to the audience) at least a hundred times. “You created the social enterprise.” “You told us you need mobility.” Every presentation involved customer case studies. Salesforce even featured a video from KLM, the airline, that wasn’t related to Salesforce.com at all, but just illustrated a creative use of social media. Benioff clearly wants Salesforce.com to be a community, not just a company. And a community is much harder to stop.

2. Be confrontational. Benioff is not afraid to pick a fight. In fact, he seems to enjoy it. You can’t listen to him give a presentation without hearing a swipe at Oracle and a jab at Bill Gates. He wants to create a narrative about the Salesforce.com community being a revolution against the old guard. Indeed, he even referred to the Arab Spring and a revolution happening in corporate America, in which old guard CEOs, who don’t get the social enterprise, are falling like Qaddafi. He’s calling out his own customers. Many of us in the CEO role are afraid to be provocative. We want to make friends and avoid enemies. And this is good. But playing nice to a fault doesn’t make headlines. And, more important, it doesn’t inspire people—whether they are employees or customers.

3. Be evolving. The term pivot has become almost cliché in the startup world. But while changing directions is impressive and imperative, it’s relatively easy for five people in a garage and much harder for big enterprises. Although Salesforce isn’t Hewlett-Packard yet, it’s not easy to get 5,000 employees to do a 180. Salesforce.com had a good thing going, crushing Siebel with software-as-a-service for CRM (customer relation management). But Benioff saw the arrival of cloud computing, and software-as-a-service was suddenly a thing of the past. Then, just as cloud computing became hot, he perceived the next trend in social media, and shifted his focus to redefining the "social enterprise.” Each time he pivots, he makes the previous phase (for instance, cloud computing) seem obvious and de facto, further cementing his company’s position. And none of his competitors can keep up.

4. Be imitating. For all the flak Benioff gives Microsoft for copying innovations from Apple and others, he’s absolutely willing to imitate where appropriate. Check out Chatter. Benioff openly admits that it’s designed to look like a Facebook inside Salesforce.com. He realized that people understood Facebook, and that enterprises needed a corporate equivalent. He didn’t try to reinvent the wheel and devise a user interface to be more “enterprise-friendly” than Facebook. He almost literally copied the look and feel we all know, down to the latest Chatter Now instant messaging feature, which is a doppelganger of Facebook Chat. The UI may not be innovative, but for corporate users who’ve gone blind after years of looking at 1980s-designed SAP user interfaces, Facebook at work is refreshing and exciting.

5. Be infectious. If you’ve ever been to an IT conference, you realize that if there is a hell it probably includes the typical IT trade show. Bored customers race past booths seeking out free T-shirts, watered down drinks, and scantily clad booth babes. If customers do stop at your booth, they are most likely just eyeing your giveaways, your staff, or both. Yet my company exhibited at Dreamforce this year and we were mobbed. And, no, it wasn’t because our cheesy giveaways were any better than our neighbor’s. Every booth was mobbed. Customers actually wanted to talk and learn. They were excited. In many ways, Salesforce.com has done the unthinkable and made customers feel that they aren’t fighting with vendors, that they and vendors are shoulder-to-shoulder together on the right side of history in an epic battle.

What I first saw as cheesy in Benioff, I now respect as genuine passion. He really believes there is a revolution. Or at least that’s what it feels like. And then you start believing it too.

Heck, the guy with a scruffy five o’clock shadow and a sometimes-frumpy look actually has style.

Nick Mehta is the chief executive officer of LiveOffice. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and at Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.