Salesforce, we have a problem

Reckoning with toxic masculinity and the glorification of hustle culture

A few months ago, I came across a quote from Tricia Hersey of The Nap Ministry on Instagram that really resonated with me. It was,

“Resting is generative. It’s not frivolous and it’s not a luxury. It’s something that allows us to tap into our creativity and imagination and heal our bodies.”

A woman I know from Women in Dataviz, the online community I founded and moderate, messaged me after I reposted the quote, saying she’d just purchased Hersey’s new book, and shared that the author had recently been a guest on Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. I was aware of the Nap Ministry and Hersey’s work generally, but this particular quote struck a chord that could not be unstruck. I bought and began reading Hersey’s book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto. Conversations with my therapist around how I could undo this societal brainwashing and overcome my chronic exhaustion ensued.

On November 22, I was writing a blog post about the fate of the Tableau community on Twitter. I never finished that post. As I was fact-checking myself regarding the number of employees Elon Musk fired after his installment as Chief Twit (about 3,700) and the approximate number that resigned (“hundreds”, says the New York Times), I came across a retweet from Salesforce Chief Digital Evangelist Vala Afshar. After Musk demanded Twitter employees work in-office in an “extremely hardcore” manner for who-knows-how-many hours per week, many Twitter engineers resigned, unwilling to devote themselves to a manic CEO whose business decisions surrounding Twitter so far are questionable at best. Afshar’s commentary on a photo of Musk surrounded by Twitter employees reads, “Show me another CEO that has more skin in the game at 1AM in the office. These young engineers are learning from the most innovative person of the twenty-first century.”

I was disappointed and angered by Mr. Afshar’s interpretation of the photograph, not because I don’t expect that sort of commentary from men in business, but because Salesforce, Mr. Afshar’s employer, acquired Tableau in August of 2019, and I am a Tableau Social Ambassador. I’ve been fine just rolling with the Salesforce-ification of Tableau’s branding, Tableau Conference, and the integration of Tableau into Salesforce events like Dreamforce. (I even contemplated accepting Astro as my personal lord and savior.) But I am not going to roll with the glorification of toxic work environments, narcissistic CEOs, and rhetoric supporting the environments that are destroying our collective mental health.

The glamorization of — and even reverence for — hustle culture has been a topic of interest to me for a long time, and I find it extremely problematic if Salesforce — a company with which I am associated by virtue of being a Tableau Social Ambassador — finds Mr. Musk’s work ethos as inspiring as Mr. Afshar does. Of course Mr. Afshar doesn’t represent everyone at Salesforce, but as an evangelist, he’s in a very specific and very public-facing role. To be as fair as possible, the rest of his Twitter content seems reasonable — some even agreeable — to me. So my intent isn’t to demonize Mr. Afshar.

Tableau’s beloved Senior Evangelist, Andy Cotgreave, is currently on sabbatical, which makes me happy both for him and for us. He’s modeling a world where success is compatible with rest. Presumably, Salesforce is ok with his decision to take time off, so I am not trying to demonize Salesforce either. But we do need to talk about toxic work cultures. An already-burned-out, possibly traumatized, workforce doesn’t need a single additional executive encouraging them to work into the wee hours of the morning or else accept the inevitability that their careers will suffer. It’s time to end the veneration for the stereotype of the hoodie-clad tech-bro-startup-founder-turned-billionaire who has ascended to success by working 20 hours a day, eating mostly ramen, and fending off twelve roommates. The HBO series Silicon Valley’s last new episode aired in 2019, and the toxic work culture the show’s characters struggled, thrived, and failed within should’ve seen the curtain come down on it, too. Hustle culture is rooted in racism, sexism, and greed, and it has poisoned our working environments.

I wrote the previous paragraph prior to being informed by a trusted friend who was proofreading my post that Marc Benioff, Co-CEO of Salesforce, replied to Mr. Afshar in support of Musk’s methods, offering a photo of himself in a conference room with Steve Jobs and a bunch of white dudes and the comment, “I worked for another one in 1984.” I was stunned. It was heartening to see a large number of folks from Salesforce and elsewhere openly disagreeing — and in some cases even chastising — Afshar and Benioff, but these two men are powerful executives. When they amplify a message like Musk’s, it’s problematic at best.

I have exactly zero insight into whether there’s any connection between Afshar’s and Benioff’s tweets and the following events, but the timing is interesting. On November 30th, Bret Taylor, the other CEO of Salesforce, announced his planned resignation as of January 31, 2023. “Whatever his reasons, it was a shock to all who cover this company, and it’s safe to say that few if any saw this coming — even his mentor, Salesforce co-founder and co-CEO Marc Benioff,” wrote Ron Miller on TechCrunch. After the news of Taylor’s departure became public last Wednesday, Salesforce shares fell 6% in after-hours trading. Salesforce stock is down more than 40% this year.

On the following day, December 1, Mark Nelson, CEO of Tableau for just 20 months, announced his departure. According to GeekWire, “Tableau generated $516 million in revenue for Salesforce in its third fiscal quarter, up 8% year-over-year and making up about 15% of Salesforce’s total quarterly revenue of $7.8 billion. Tableau’s revenue was $1.95 billion in the 2022 fiscal year ended Jan. 31.”

On We Can Do Hard Things episode 139, host Glennon Doyle asks Tricia Hersey to expand on her assertion that “grind culture is a collaboration between capitalism and white supremacy.” Hersey responds (you can read the whole transcript here), in part,

“I think all of this work is really from a historical lens…a lot of people don’t know that capitalism was created on plantations, that it comes right out of the chattel slave system…And capitalism is trying to kill us and this economic system that we’re living under that’s killing all of us and the planet itself…they don’t trace the roots back to the history of this idea of looking at a body as a machine…As seeing us all as a tool for the production of wealth, for profit over people. “

Since a short time after the COVID-19 pandemic reached the United States in March of 2020, we’ve been talking about work and mental health more than ever. I know more people who are experiencing or have recently experienced burnout than those who aren’t or haven’t. But no matter how many resources we provide to workers, no matter how much the leadership of a company cares about their staff, no matter how many workers organize and unionize and otherwise empower themselves, these are all Band-Aids on a wound requiring much more intensive care.

We must, at some point, reckon with the root causes of hustle culture, burnout, and trauma. We must look at our history as a nation, at white supremacy, at capitalism, at our form of government, and be honest about what we see there. It’s not pretty. But as someone with a personal history of trauma, with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), I can say without a doubt that looking at the reality is the beginning of the healing. It is hard, it sucks, and of course we’d rather look away, but until we come to terms with our past, we cannot and will not achieve the futures we dream of, aspire to, and desire for our children and loved ones.