That’s Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff on the cover of Forbes in a piece in which he’s being hailed by “disruption expert” and Harvard professor Clayton M. Christiansen as one of the great innovators of our time. Writer Victoria Barret tracks the San Francisco entrepreneur’s passion with Chatter, the office collaboration software that Salesforce.com offers largely free as a loss leader to spread the company’s reach with clients worldwide:
At the company’s annual management meeting last August, a gathering of 300 executives, Benioff set up video cameras so that any employee could hear the discussions and comment—via Chatter. For a few minutes, as the cameras rolled, nothing but the crushing weight of silence. Then someone from Singapore chimed in, and employees from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia piled on. “With that,” says Benioff, “the culture of our company changed.”
