It's all about a culture of "me". "Me" first, company second, customers last.
The most important thing at Salesforce is to create a “brand” for yourself, and maintain appearance. Not much else matters.
I've had various VP roles at Salesforce CSG over the past decade. The entire VP+ suite is fighting for survival, mostly against each other.
It's rationalized as being in a competitive culture, or as "optimization" or "unification". It is nothing about that. It's all about politics. And politics is not about being competitive or customer focus, politics is all about greed, power, and backstabbing. You need to build your own brand above anything else, and ideally better than all the other brands built around you by your peers. Self promotion is everything, consumes your every minute, and guides every deck you build, meeting you set up or attend, review you do, email you write ... you get it. Make your self look good in a hyper political environment.
Salesforce leadership and executives excel at that level of politics and self-promotion. Worst is the current Customer Success executive leadership. From the CSG President on down it's a culture of "look at me I'm so much smarter than everybody else, I'm so sophisticated, I'm so pretty ...".
So leaders duke it out, EVPs talk over SVPs, SVPs talk over VPs, VP's are consumed by making themselves look good to all those above, no one respects anybody else, there is incredible turmoil, reorgs after reorgs after more reorgs, no vision or direction, constant land grabs, leaders always name dropping someone higher up, peers always having their knifes out for each other, no one trusts anybody, fear is the leading motivator, and all are just trying to survive. Welcome to the jungle.
That means our teams are frustrated, our people demotivated, and the whole "Ohana" thing is a farce. Nothing gets done, and in the end it's all internal BS and customers are hurting.
Those that are thriving in this culture are the people who are pros at doing whatever seems most opportune to their careers, who brownnose best, who are great at kissing up and kicking down, and who leave any spine they ever had at the door when they go to work.
