More Intelligent Tomorrow: a DataRobot Podcast

Disrupting a Market is Rarely an Overnight Transformation - Peter Coffee

May 20, 2022 DataRobot Season 2 Episode 16
More Intelligent Tomorrow: a DataRobot Podcast
Disrupting a Market is Rarely an Overnight Transformation - Peter Coffee
Show Notes Transcript

Disrupting a market is rarely an overnight transformation. And the right leaders see disruption as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Peter Coffee was the first person at Salesforce with the word “platform” in his title. This was in an era where the idea of cloud computing was still in its infancy. He’s spent the last 15 years helping transform Salesforce from a company that sold CRM software into one that offers an entire cloud platform designed to enable companies to offer complete solutions to their customers.

MIT host Dave Anderson caught up with Peter and asked him about how he thinks the future of the workforce will shape up over the coming years.

76% of workers say they are unequipped for the future of work. The traditional way to address this problem would have been to hire new talent out of college who would come in equipped with the tools and skills needed for the new landscape of the business world. But Peter feels new talent doesn't yet have the experience developed over time to really help customers solve their problems. He feels the answer to this problem is continuous education within the workforce. That’s the idea behind Salesforce’s Trailhead product. 

"We need to get back to a much more organic idea of what it means to learn and to adapt."

Usually, AI projects fail because of a team’s ability to implement, learn, and change the way they work. Changing the idea of ongoing skill learning requires it to be part of a company’s culture. And to change that culture, you need to hire people who can change it.  

Peter says, if you hire for talent, you're hiring for skills that can be taught. But if you hire for fit, you're hiring for someone who won't challenge you in your thinking. He suggests you hire someone who will challenge you.

"People are so much more capable than they're treated as being."

Dave wonders if a lack of urgency is part of the reason more companies don't make similar changes.

Too many companies focus on what they do and not on why. If they open themselves up to asking why they do what they do, then they're open to creating disruptive solutions.

Companies tend to focus on what leads to being better, faster, and cheaper than their competitor. But there’s a physical limit to those factors. Offering solutions to your customers opens limitless opportunities.

The iPod is a great example. Steve Jobs’s vision wasn’t about making a digital music player, it was about putting thousands of songs in your pocket. It was about offering the whole solution. This meant the iPod could adapt and grow with each generation to be an ecosystem and not just a single purpose device.

Listen to this episode to learn about:

  • Preparing the workforce for the future
  • What it takes to be a better leader
  • Creating moments of transition
  • A new concept for continuous learning in the workplace
  • The keys to giving customers a differentiating experience

Peter Coffee (00:00):
If you look at someone in the eye and say, "You can't do this." Or if you look at someone in the eye and say, "You can do this," either way, you're going to be right. If you tell people that it's hard, they'll believe you. If you tell them you are worth the effort that we're making to help you learn these things, I believe that most people rise to that. I genuinely do.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Welcome to More Intelligent Tomorrow, a podcast about our emerging AI driven world. Critical conversations about tomorrow's technology today. On today's episode, host Dave Anderson is joined by Peter Coffee, vice president for strategic research at Salesforce.

Dave Anderson (00:51):
Peter Coffee, welcome to the More Intelligent Tomorrow Podcast. How are you?

Peter Coffee (00:55):
I'm very well, Dave. Thank you. It's good to be with you.

Dave Anderson (00:58):
You sound fantastic. And this time of the morning for me, I am drinking coffee. Are you any relation at all to the wonderful source that keeps us awake?

Peter Coffee (01:06):
It's funny, it's an Irish name originally and the coffee's with an O-F-F-E-E and the A-F-E-Ys and all of us are just different misspellings of the same Gaelic words. So one of those things.

Dave Anderson (01:17):
Very good. Hey, so tell us a little bit about what you do at Salesforce.

Peter Coffee (01:21):
I've been with Salesforce for 15 years now. It's my belief and no one's ever told me I'm mistaken that I was the first person at the company to have the word platform in my job title. Because at the time that I was newly onboarding, Marc Benioff, and I had spent about three years talking about the idea of letting people have everything underneath the CRM, as a cloud platform, as a service. So the job is always reinventing itself. And now Salesforce, as you probably know, is more like a 60,000 person company compared to the 2000 person company that I joined back in 2007. And at any given moment, roughly half the people we have who are facing our customers and making this all real for them have been with us for less than two years.

Dave Anderson (02:09):
That's quite a journey, 15 years. For people that aren't familiar, let's go back. No iPhones.

Peter Coffee (02:14):
The iPhone was first shown on stage two or three months after I joined the company. And as they say, the world changed.

Dave Anderson (02:21):
And you guys went from CRM essentially to now, you're everything. You've reinvented yourselves as a company through the cloud.

Peter Coffee (02:33):
If you think about it, it's a really logical progression. When I joined the company, we had research that we did with our partners that showed the typical company if they really wanted to have a complete understanding of what they were doing with any single customer, would literally need to assemble maybe three dozen different splinters and fragments of process and identity. The email thread here, the spreadsheet there, the marketing campaign response over there. If the first thing we did was just help a company say, "Oh, okay. Now I fully understand the current state of play and probable future pathway I have with a single customer." That was an accomplishment. But then $6.5 billions worth of MuleSoft acquisition later, we're able to say, "Well, now you can know that about every source of data to which you have legitimate access, not just the ones that originate internally, but with that much data, you might be overwhelmed.

Peter Coffee (03:28):
So we bring in Tableau so that you can now visually explore that data and look for insights in that and bring in a tremendous amount of brain power to build under the brand name of Einstein, the machine intelligence capabilities that have the tool actively assisting you and not just presenting you with an overwhelming number of things you could do, but actually giving you recommendations of what you might want to do next. Bringing in velocity so that we can focus those recommendations in ways that have a lot of industry experience and tailoring with that.

Peter Coffee (04:00):
And now of course, with Slack, helping companies build the active platform and environment of collaboration, internal and external. And the ability to automate that, which should be automated close to the point where someone understands the need instead of throwing a specification over the wall to a programmer who doesn't really know what it is you're trying to get done. So it's all a really logical progression made possible by this extraordinary growth of our capacity to connect and to turn the resulting data flows into meaningful insights.

Dave Anderson (04:33):
Well, it's fair to say, then the company as itself has reinvented or it's continued to evolve and it's acquired new skills, new capabilities. I actually wanted to bring it back transformation. When we talk about transformation, often people talk about it being this thing not a continuous evolution, it's hard to relate to. And I had a conversation with your colleague, Brian Solas, a little bit more about the personal side of transformation. What does it mean? You talked about different capabilities that Salesforce as a platform brings and with that you would've brought people that have these capabilities. One of the things that Brian pointed out, and this was the Salesforce statistics that 76% of workers do not feel prepared for working in a digital first world. That is a significant stat and suggests that people aren't acquiring the new skills needed to be successful today.

Peter Coffee (05:30):
One of my colleagues at one of our partner companies said that a vast majority of companies believe that their people lack the skills needed for the company to be able to do what it wants to do in a digitally transformed, competitive environment or customer experience. But that only a tiny single digit percentage of companies were dramatically increasing training investments. The old idea, I believe infamously was that, well, you'll just hire fresh new blood out of university to bring that new perspective to you. And that's flawed in two ways. One, some of the most important perspectives are human perspectives developed over decades of time spent with customers solving the customer's problems.

Peter Coffee (06:17):
And two, a more immediate issue is that the pipeline of that fresh raw talent is simply not going to be delivering at the volume and quality that's needed to make this happen. The pandemic has reduced the rate of graduations, even from high school, let alone the rate of completion of college degrees. And the turnover time of knowledge has become so much shorter that someone who's been out of university for two or three years now is one might say as behind as one used to be after 10 or 15 years.

Peter Coffee (06:48):
So we need to rethink the environment of the workplace has one in which upskilling is not an occasional episodic remedial thing, but is just part of the environment that you're always being invited, assisted, nudged in the direction of, it looks as if this would be a valuable skill over the next 10 minutes. We've got a micro moment where we're prepared to deliver that. This of course is the architecture of our trail head learning platform, where instead of training being something that takes you away from work to sit in a classroom to be shown things that either you already know or that you don't yet know why you would need to know them, because that's really what training has the reputation of being and say, "No. We're going to have algorithmic detection of a need for a knowledge or a skill that gets automatically suggested to you. You have an opportunity to acquire it in the moment when you need it, which is when your brain is more likely to grasp and retained what it's being shown."

Dave Anderson (07:48):
I'm pretty pragmatic. I'm pretty blunt. And I got into intelligence and automation because I believe the way that we work was fundamentally broken in that there are better ways of working, but people are resisting the ability or the time that it takes to invest themselves to go and do it. I'm not one of those people. So it's hard for me to understand why someone working within a bank or an insurance company or a telco or whatever that is, doesn't have the capability or the scope to go and learn something new, to be better.

Dave Anderson (08:20):
If I take this podcast as a perfect example, I've learned automation tools that automatically do scripting that improve the video production. That help me publish more efficiently, but I've been given the capability to go off and create this new way of working and discover, this is going to make me more efficient, which makes it better for my employer. What is going wrong? Is it a leadership problem that's causing this issue? Is it individuals that have just been stuck in a singular way of working as a team and they don't know how to break the cycle? How does it change?

Peter Coffee (08:54):
Have you ever Alvin Toffler's book Future Shock written back in 1970, I guess it was, he talks about the invention of classroom education. He says before people were factory workers, they grew up on a farm. As soon as you were old enough to hold a tool, you were probably working next to an adult and you had a chance to see what people did every day. And your transition from being child to adult was a fairly natural, progressive thing. Classroom education was invented to turn those agile collaborative problem solvers who looked at a situation, saw it was needed and did what was needed into people who would show up, sit down, do what they were told and go home when the bell rang. And we still educate people as if we're trying to produce good factory workers, even though industry will tell you that's not the skillset they most value and desire now.

Peter Coffee (09:58):
They want people who are a lot more like those rural farm kids who as soon as they're old enough to help, are expected to help and learn from the environment as they're going. And we're rediscovering how to bring that into schools. And we're also discovering that it needs to be what happens at work instead of hiring someone to do what a job description says they'll do, sit them at a desk, tell them to follow the rules and go home when the bell rings.

Peter Coffee (10:29):
Robert Townsend when he was running, Avis said something very interesting about the way we try to get people to like their jobs. He said, "Look at the things we call employee benefits, sports teams and healthcare and retirement plans. Do you realize you can't enjoy any of those while you're at work?" You have to go home or leave the company before you get to start enjoying these things. And employee experience should be something that makes people wake up in the morning, eager to go be with people they respect, doing things they find stimulating and challenging. Feeling the endorphin rush you get from helping a customer have a better day. And this is where we're going with the future of the workplace. And it's darn well about time that we escape the mold we poured for ourselves when we are trying to turn farm workers into factory workers and realize we need to get back to a much more organic idea of what it means to learn and to adapt.

Dave Anderson (11:33):
Is it about giving people context, giving teams context, giving them the ability to make decisions to work autonomously to, and I'm going to bring up the word again, the C word. I'm going to bring up culture. Like it's going to be one of those ones that you go, oh gosh, here they go. They're going to go and talk about culture again. But the vast reason why most AI projects fail, it's not because of the technology at all. It's actually got to do with the ability of the teams to implement, to learn, to change the way that they work and it fundamentally sits with the culture of a company.

Peter Coffee (12:06):
If you look at the processes that we build in companies and the expectations that we state and so on, I feel that what we are often seeing is the accumulated scar tissue of all the time someone's done something intentionally wrong or manifestly stupid, and we've tried to build systems that won't let those things happen again. But the accumulated scar tissue also gets in the way of doing good things. We wind up building systems that frustrate us because we've made them so incapable of being abused, that we've also made them incapable of being exciting and delightful and stripping that away. And that is if you want to call that cultural engineering, I don't resist that idea. So much of what's called cultural engineering though designs a better experience for when you're not at work. And I think what we really want is to craft environments in which being at work is exciting in good ways.

Dave Anderson (13:11):
Okay. Let's break it down. Simple terms. I'm a hiring manager. Am I hiring someone for their personality and their fit culturally? Or am I hiring someone based on their skill set?

Peter Coffee (13:26):
No. That is to say, neither. If you hire for skills, you're hiring for things that can be quickly taught and that will soon need to be retaught. If you're hiring for fit, you're going to wind up hiring people who don't make you uncomfortable. You want to hire people who make you uncomfortable. You want to be hiring people who have some perceptions of the world that are different from yours and who therefore will have some ideas that are different from yours.

Peter Coffee (13:54):
We had an entire TV series called Mad Men built about a world in which middle-aged white men with drinking problems, thought that they were going to figure out what were the appealing messages to sell products to people who were nothing like themselves. And David Ogilvy was famously critical of advertising agencies that didn't understand. You have to have people who look like your customer in the room if you expect to produce messages that actually will engage. Well, in the same way if you're hiring people for so-called fit, you need to be very, very careful that you're not hiring for attributes of similarity to what you are, but are rather hiring for attributes of desire to collaborate in change.

Dave Anderson (14:40):
That's one of the best pieces of management advice I was ever given was from a CTO that I used to work with Bert Grenada. And he said, "Are you running the team or are you going to stand on top of the team and be like a player coach? Or are you going to dictate to them?" And one of the pieces of advice it was, was like, "Just don't get stuck in the middle. Don't bottleneck things don't make decisions. Let them make decisions. Give them the context." And fundamentally everything changed. The ownership and the flow from the next management down to the next to the down, everyone pushed towards a context and a cause, it was very, very special to see.

Peter Coffee (15:16):
If you think of your job as telling people what to do so that they can succeed You'll be one kind of manager. If you think of your job as eliminating their excuses for failure, you'll be a very different kind of manager and the people under you will grow. When they realize that you've eliminated all the things they could blame for, why something didn't get done, it's extraordinary how in innovative and energetic they will become when they realize that there really is no one they can blame if it doesn't get done. Every imaginable obstacle's been removed, every needed resource is being provided and then they discover what they're capable of doing. And people are so much more capable than they're treated as being.

Dave Anderson (15:57):
Is it a generational gap? Is this a change that's happening in the generations between traditional leadership that were they're only that way maybe because they were managed that way. Therefore, that's how they learned to be a manager versus the generation coming through that was taught a little more that it's okay to question? It's okay to ask questions?

Peter Coffee (16:20):
You can go back and find things that have been written in every language including Latin, about how the young people are just not what we need them to be. Every generation has managed to find ways. So if it were a matter of generations having successions of different attitudes, the tendency to ascribe different beliefs and behaviors to generations based on labels like gen X and gen Y is dangerously easy to fall into that trap. My friend, Tom Polis wrote a book called the gen Z effect, and he has an online questionnaire you can take that says essentially how gen Z or you, which he constructs as a set of behaviors of ways of using communication and collaboration tools of inclination to accept or reject certain kinds of change.

Peter Coffee (17:11):
And it's really not about calendar age, the generation that got us onto the moon and that one World War II is not a generation that failed to understand the importance of willingness to try new things or necessity of devolving leadership responsibility as close to the line of battle as you can get it. I mean, these are not radical ideas. Organizations grow in ways that make them stupider than the people who are in them. I know number of companies where everyone I know at that company is conspicuously smart. And yet the organizations are infamous for their toxic culture. Well, that's the job of leaders to fix.

Dave Anderson (17:57):
I've been in companies before where it's like, what are we doing here? What is the purpose? Do we have a vision for where we want to go? Do we know how we're going to get there? And there are not enough leaders within that business helping everyone drive towards this common purpose.

Peter Coffee (18:16):
There are two forces that take organizations into a place where the organization is stupid than the people who are in it. One of them is what's sometimes called streetlight effect that the data we can get easily that's of high quality and precision tends to be assumed to be the data that holds what we want. The expression streetlight effect comes from the old joke about walking down the street at night and there's a guy looking around on the sidewalk and you say, "Hey buddy. What's the problem?" He said, "I dropped my keys." And you say, "Let me help." And you look for a while and they're not there. And you say, "I don't understand. We should have found them." And says, "Well, I actually dropped them in that puddle up the street. Why are we looking here? Well, the light's so much better here."

Peter Coffee (18:58):
And we are in environments now where enormous volumes of precise, timely data are so easily available that there's quite a temptation to think, well, the metrics we need must be here. Look at all this data, that's got to be here. And maybe the things you actually need are measurements that are much squishier, much less unambiguous. So making organizations continue to look at the data that's hard to get an unsatisfying messy is a challenge. You're trying to overcome that.

Peter Coffee (19:37):
The other one is what John Gall once called Orwell's Inversion, the confusion of input with output. It is very easy to measure activity. You can measure lines of code written. You can measure number of sales calls made. You can measure any number of things. Measuring outcome is harder. If you look at the way healthcare is done, we measure activities, number of pills, prescribed number of procedures, performed number of office hours of visit executed. And you needed to do that because you needed to be paid for something. And you could measure effort while measuring outcome, that was harder. Health happened somewhere else. Health happens later.

Peter Coffee (20:20):
One of the interesting things about healthcare today is that now people are wearing their Fitbits. You can measure wellness indicators in a way you could not before. And you can see what it's doing is turning the healthcare system inside out from measuring the inputs of how hard did you try to make the patient better to measuring outputs, which is how healthy and vigorous people are. When you can measure the right things, you get smarter behavior, but organizations tend to become more bureaucratic in that they measure the things they're doing instead of the results they're producing, because that's the data that's easier to get. And they measure the kinds of data that are easier to get in general and then measure activities rather than outcomes, because you can quantify those and you can accept responsibility for those.

Dave Anderson (21:12):
Is this the issue too many companies sitting idle, complacent, not taking the time to scenario map the end outcome, and then delivering their service offering or their solution to line up with the customer pain point?

Peter Coffee (21:28):
Well, if you think about the evolution of discoverability of a brand, we used to have what I call the white pages world, as in the white page of the phone book where you're advertising and other conventional marketing efforts had created brand name recognition. And you hoped that when people needed, you they'd look your name in the white pages of the phone book. And then things evolved and the market became a little bit richer and more multifarious. And now when people need something like you, they look in the yellow pages in your category where there you are, and you can buy a bigger ad than others, but all the other people who do what you do are right there. But there's a tendency to think that your competitors are defined by those who are on the same pages of the yellow pages.

Peter Coffee (22:18):
Now we live in Google world. Do you know when people Google, they rarely Google the name of a company. They rarely Google the name of a product. The most frequent input to Google is a question, how do I this, or what would fix this? And if you don't show up on the first page of Google hits, you might as well be on another planet. And every company needs to ask, "How am I behaving in a way that makes me show up literally or figuratively on the first page of Google hits when the person I believe should be my customer has the problem that person is likely to be having? And how do I make sure I'm solving that problem?? And you know where that leads you?

Peter Coffee (23:01):
The expression, think outside the box is sometimes used to acknowledge that there are limits on what you can do. But someone said, imagine if every time you think about the edges of the box, you don't think of a boundary or a constraint. You think of an interface to what someone is doing before or after or concurrently during the time that they're using what you sell or experiencing what you do. And then ask yourself at every one of those interfaces before, during, after, is that something I should be acquiring so I can sell it under my brand or partnering so I can sell it as part of a collateral experience or inventing because none of the things that do it now do, it very well? That idea that it's the scope.

Dave Anderson (23:56):
I think too many B2B companies, it's actually simple. I think too many companies talk about what they do. They don't talk about why they do it. So they pigeonhole themselves into a what not a why, if they're a why, they're then open to the solution. Do you agree?

Peter Coffee (24:15):
It even goes beyond that because if you allow yourself to be trapped in the what, you'll lead yourself in the direction of a better, faster, cheaper version of what you do now. If you look at the why, there's physical limit on how small, fast, or cheap something can be made. There's really no upper bound on how wonderful it can be. And you really would have a hard time doing better than the experience of Apple with the iPod on this one. When Apple introduced the very first iPod, it entered a space in which MP3 digital music players were already quite a well established marketplace with many, many well established brands and a lot of competition and a company like Sony, my friend, Ray Wang at constellation research has said there were three different divisions of Sony competing against each other to make MP3 players. And thinking that Sony's ownership of a large library of recorded content represented a differentiating feature for their MP3 players.

Peter Coffee (25:17):
So when the iPod was first introduced, the market looked at it through the lens of an MP3 player and said, "This is a very expensive and rather under featured MP3 player from a company with no content library, what is Steve Jobs thinking?" Well, what Steve Jobs was thinking, and if you've seen the movie titled Steve Jobs with Michael Fassbender in the titled role, which is not a documentary, but the last scene of the movie has the fictional Steve Jobs saying to his daughter, "I'm going to put your favorite 1,000 songs in your pocket." He defined the iPod not as a digital music player, but as songs in your pocket and the way he did that was by getting all the record companies each individually to fear that they'd be the only one who didn't enter his reality distortion field and make their songs available for 99 cents a song, which was such an outrageous idea that no one else had dared even suggests such a thing.

Peter Coffee (26:16):
But by doing it, he literally changed the language of discovering and consuming internet content as witnessed the fact that three years later, the Oxford English dictionary entered the word podcast into the language. We didn't call it podcasts before there were iPods. He changed the language we used to describe discovery and use of digital network content by making songs in your pocket, the outcome, the product.

Dave Anderson (26:53):
Has there ever been a bigger visionary in our lifetime? But before you answer that he didn't just do it on his own. If you're sitting there as a manager now, or a leader of a company, and you're like, "We want to be disruptive, we want to focus on the why, we want to be outcome focused. We want better culture." Some companies are stuck, it's just not going to change. They're they're not going to do it. What did Steve Jobs do to transform Apple? Was it a matter of disrupting his own business? Did he reteach a culture or did he splinter off a group and go, "We're going to create the department of the unknown." That's going to bring forward his vision

Peter Coffee (27:39):
To be clear, I am anything but an unmixed fan of Steve Jobs because some of his leadership style was toxic. And in fact, in the earlier acts of the movie with Fassbender, some of his justly infamous interactions with some of the people who made his successes possible are portrayed in some pretty intense and vivid terms. So I'm not suggesting that anyone should adopt his behaviors, although they can admire his strategies. It is known that when they were building the Macintosh, they literally moved to a separate building and flew a pirate flag over it because there was certainly a well established constituency at Apple for the Apple two family products, which were an enormous cash cow in elementary schools, for example. And the notion that you would build something that could kill that golden egg laying goose was not well received within the company. It does take a willingness to say, "We can either disrupt ourselves or we can wait for someone else to do it to us. Let's do the first of those."

Dave Anderson (28:48):
Yeah. Disrupt or be disrupted.

Peter Coffee (28:50):
Yeah. And I try to use the word disrupt in a very precise way. Clayton Christensen when he talked about disruptive change, had a very specific trajectory in mind that you disrupt industries when you come in with something that looks too simple to compete with the leader, but can be made available in such an easily discovered and acquired way that it grows the market at the entry level. And then as that much larger now market grows with you, you wind up eating the incumbent from below. And too many people say, "I'm going to be disruptive," when all they mean is they think they've got a great idea. Disruption is a specific set of behaviors and people should ask themselves, "Am I on a trajectory that's a genuinely disruptive trajectory, or am I just helping that everybody else likes my idea," because the second of those is not disruption.

Dave Anderson (29:45):
Are you seeing a lot of companies that'll create a separate entity, a separate department, a technology first division, that solution and outcome focused devoid of the legacy silos and hierarchies. Are you seeing that within companies globally right now? And is that how they're being disruptive, where they're going to reverse engineer and reverse take over their cash business?

Peter Coffee (30:11):
I've certainly seen some catastrophic results from companies that thought that approach would work. That one can anoint oneself a technology company when all one really is an aggressive adopter of technology in a business that's already pretty well understood. WeWork, for example, believed it was a technology company. I think we can all agree it was in the office space, rental business, and certain facts about that business assailed to them unmercifully when they thought that they could escape those realities. So that's just the thing.

Peter Coffee (30:45):
I think when you start one of these pirate operations to borrow from the image of the flag that Steve used on the Macintosh show unit, you need to know why. For example, Nordstrom bought one of our customers little off called Trunk Club, which was doing some really wonderful things with technology. I think you probably have the experience that when you buy a men's dress shirt from any of five different companies, the size you need to buy is different for each of the brands. One of them runs a little small and one of them you need the tall size and one of them you don't and so on.

Peter Coffee (31:23):
They do things like build an app that with 28 measurements of a customer would accurately pick the right size for any of the brands that they did for the kind of thing they were doing. And what that did, of course, is hugely reduce the friction and overhead of returned products due to size not fitting or the costs of someone ordering three sizes and keeping the one that fits best and so on. So they did some really very clever things. They were very aggressive in their adoption of cloud when they were being shown their new real estate. And someone said in this room over here would be great for a server room. And they said, "That's not going to be a server room. That's going to be a fitting room. We're going to be running 100% on Salesforce." So they were a marque customer for us.

Peter Coffee (32:03):
And when Nordstrom bought Trunk Club, they didn't buy it to squash an upstart competitor. They bought it hoping to achieve a viral takeover of the host by infusing some of that vigor and readiness to adopt new technology, to solve well understood problems and have a takeover the company. And if you start a splinter unit because you're afraid that the mothership will kill it, well, that might be an accurate idea, but you should have an objective. You should know, what am I trying to build that I will then reintroduce? It's like the blood doping that athletes do. You take a couple of pints of blood out, and then you go train and then you bring the blood back in. Only this is even more so this. Is like bringing in the blood only, now it's been super powered.

Dave Anderson (32:52):
But this is good because too many companies get acquired, get squashed. The founders, leave. The culture gets broken. If you are a leader taking over the business or the other way around, you have to be empathetic to know where your faults are, where your failures are, where your culture is broken. Be willing to learn, to change, to adopt this new way, or give them the scope to continue in that new way. Too many companies just they buy for technology and don't buy for the culture and it breaks. But it seems to be changing. I'm reading a lot about companies buying companies for their IP, for the way that they work, for their culture, not just about the technology and that seems like a tipping point.

Dave Anderson (33:44):
How do we get to a more intelligent tomorrow? You've covered off in this podcast today with us leadership principles, how to be better leaders, how to not join stupid organizations? Well, we didn't talk about how not to join it, but what to look out for if you're joining one of those organizations and how to focus on the why. But you also talked really importantly about the need to change behaviors. And we started off at the very start by saying 76% of workers do not feel prepared for working in a digital first world. How do we get to a more intelligent tomorrow?

Peter Coffee (34:21):
I think if we overwhelm people with a notion that there are things they don't know, they'll see what's wrong with them as the most important thing that's on the agenda. They'll see themselves as being perceived as needing to be fixed. I think we can change the tone of that conversation by reminding people how much they bring to the party that no one knows how to write code to do. That no one knows how to build a robot to do and say, "We want to help you be better, not fix what's wrong with you, but to make the things that are right about you capable of greatness." And if you look at someone in the eye and say, "You can't do this," or if you look someone in the eye and say, "You can do this," either way you're going to be right. If you tell people that it's hard, they'll believe you. If you tell them you are worth the effort that we're making to help you learn these things, I believe that most people rise to that. I genuinely do.

Dave Anderson (35:44):
You're saying inspire people?

Peter Coffee (35:46):
Offer them a vision of what they can be, and then get out of their way. Don't try to achieve the behavior by imposing it on people, make it possible and give them reason to believe that they'll be rewarded for the effort they make. Now, we do this in a lot of very straightforward ways here at Salesforce. We have this trail head education environment in which rather than big monolithic training classes, people are encouraged to take modules and stitch them together. You can author your own what we call trail mix. If you have a reputation for being someone who knows certain things, you say, "Well, okay, if you take these eight badges and stick them together into my personal trail mix, you'll have some idea of how I'm getting these results." So we invite everyone to become a leader, a visionary, a content creator, a subject matter expert, and so on. It sounds silly but the points you accumulate lead to ranks like trail head ranger, double star ranger, triple star ranger.

Dave Anderson (36:53):
It's such good advice, but like breaking down this big goal into small chunks and achieving these small chunks, whether it's a goal of, hey, I want to get really fit. I'm going to break it down into my daily habits of what I'm going to do to get there. Or I want to be certified in AI. I'm going to take these courses and these steps. You're talking about breaking down the monolithic. I've talked for years about talking about monolithic applications into microservices. You're talking about breaking down monolithic education into microservice courses for continuous learning, for continuous adaption, which makes people more adaptable and more valuable and more productive and happier and excited when they go to work.

Peter Coffee (37:34):
And think about another dividend of this approach, in a class you might be able to measure, did students pass the test at the end of the course? In a fully digital platform, the kind of I'm talking about, we can tell you which questions did people seem to take the longest before answering and which individual questions did worst. And we can ask questions like, was the question poorly worded? Was the content not clear and so on? And it takes me back to when my children were in second grade and my wife and I would occasionally be in the classroom doing some parent volunteering work. And one of the things that second graders used to be taught to do is read the face of a clock. And some of the children did well and some did poorly, but you know what? Some of the children made mistakes that suggested that they didn't realize the hands were different lengths.

Peter Coffee (38:24):
Other children made mistakes that suggested they were confusing, left versus right. And two different children could be getting the same result on an exam and yet be making a mistake that was completely different from the mistake an another child was making. And if you have that ability to measure and target the thing they don't seem to get, instead of just banging them over the head with the same hammer, harder and harder and hoping eventually the nail will get driven. That is a reinvention of education. It is the ability to do personal tutoring at scale and personalized experience at scale is what I tell people Salesforce produces. We produce non siloed, personalized, experience at scale and CRM is the way we used to do that. But what we're giving people now is the way we can do it and the way we think people want us and want our customers to do it going forward.

Dave Anderson (39:25):
Peter, thank you for your time. It's inspiring to listen to you and to learn from your experience, writing the wave of Salesforce, seeing cloud transformation, seeing the evolution of personalization and mobile technologies, it's been a wonderful chat. And I really appreciate you taking the time to-

Peter Coffee (39:44):
None of this is leveling off. None of this is even slowing down. Pat Gelsinger, before he left VMware to go back to Intel said, "Try to wrap your head around the idea that the current daunting pace of change that everybody talks about every day is the slowest of the things are going to be changing for the rest of your life." And everything that we do needs to be looked at through the lens of, can we be the $100 billion annual revenue company that we plan to be in the near future if we keep doing things this way? Or do we need to start changing behavior now, if we don't want this behavior to be a major problem, as our scale grows? Anticipating scale and being what you need to be to function at that size, instead of trying to fix it once you get there is one of the key differences that I think is going to make for our own success and for that of other companies that do likewise.

Dave Anderson (40:37):
I love the idea that the pace of change isn't going to slow down, it's going to be more chaotic and there's going to be more urgency or more need to evolve.

Peter Coffee (40:44):
And you're right to measure both of those attributes because it isn't just about speed. It's also very much about volatility and the emergence of competitors from directions you didn't expect, because they won't be on the same page in the yellow pages anymore. They're going to come at you from spaces where you say, "Wow. It never occurred to me that they would have designs on my market, but it turns out they know more about my customer than I know. And I'm now just part of their supply chain." And I tell people, "Don't let that happen to you." Don't let yourself be turned into a mere supply chain component for someone who had a better idea of how to deliver a differentiating experience in which you're just a component part. You need to be the one preferring that experience and branding it and making customers look to you to meet that need.

Peter Coffee (41:32):
And by the way, not just advice for companies, that's advice for people too. You don't get a degree in mechanical engineering and say, "Fine. Now it's people's job to figure out what they want to do with a mechanical engineer." Even as a teenager, you can be starting to think ahead about what's the need I want to meet in the world. What are the things I'm going to do that are not in the college course catalog. I counsel applicants to my own algorithm MIT. And one of the things I say is please, the things in the course catalog are not the menu in the restaurant. They're the pantry of ingredients and you should be making up your own dishes and not just taking the ones that other people have liked. You should be taking everything the course catalog as examples of what can be done, but then making it your own with a purpose in your mind for the change you want to see in the world.

Dave Anderson (42:20):
It's exciting.

Peter Coffee (42:21):
Come back in a year and we'll step any of what I said turns out to have had some predictive power.

Dave Anderson (42:25):
It's good. It's been a really great chat with you. I've really appreciated it. Thank you.

Peter Coffee (42:29):
Great to be with you. Thanks for the time.

Speaker 2 (42:33):
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