Innovation Culture

Companies that you have worked at, Charles Schwab, PayPal, Salesforce, DocuSign, all very innovative companies defined their categories. So, when you were there, I would imagine you had to constantly inspire innovation among these team members, because they were very innovative companies. What creativity practices or tools do you use to inspire innovation among your team members?

What's interesting about this is I thought a lot about innovation from the context of like building an innovation culture. When I started to work at Salesforce, it was 2008 and quite honestly, every time I told someone I worked for Salesforce, they thought I worked for a temporary staffing agency for some people. So, it wasn't this brand that everyone knows today as being one of the most innovative technology companies in the world. And what I watched and what I learned at Salesforce is the importance of a culture of innovation because Marc very much has a culture of innovation, Parker Harris, very innovative. And it comes from, you used the word curiosity earlier, it's this curiosity, it's this constant feeling like I am not satisfied with the status quo. I have to think about how to do thing I do in new ways. There was an expectation at Salesforce that you would be innovative. And if you came with the same idea, if you came sort of like, well, this is how we did it at Oracle, that was like the absolute kiss of death. We didn't want to be doing thing like anybody else was doing it. We wanted to be doing it like Salesforce was doing it. One of my favorite interview questions at Salesforce was, you've just won the lottery and you have more money than you ever imagined. What is the thing that you have wanted to do that you haven't been able to do because you haven't had the financial resources to do it? And listening to an innovative person answer that question is very different than someone who is going to bring the idea of what we're doing at Oracle.

So, give me an example of that. What was one of your favorite responses and what was like a dud response?

So, I always loved the answers where people were following their passion. So, I would hear a lot of people say, well, I'm a fencer and I would love for there to be the kind of excitement around fencing that there is around soccer. So, I'm going to take my winnings and come up with a way to bring fencing to the whole population it's like, okay. And then they'd go through different things and the I'm going to do what Oracle, they would say something like wherever I'm working, I would want to make sure that I brought as much value as I possibly can. I know not what you would do if it is, you are really, really missing the point, right.

I see what you mean.

And a lot of developers have really great ideas about new products that they're working on. I heard a lot of gaming references, new games that were going to be developed, but you could see the look in their faces when they were so excited about these things. And the difference between I'm going to give you an answer you want to hear, and I'm going to give you the answer that's from my heart. That really is because I've been thinking about what I would do and I'm going to try to make it happen even if I don't win the lottery,