- Salesforce’s Marc Benioff leans on Zen Buddhist wisdom to maintain his keen eye for new business, his proximity to new ideas, and his commitment to mindfulness as he scales the billion-dollar software giant.
Ohana isn’t the only cultural concept Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff turns to for strong, enduring leadership ideals—or for guidance on how to be a great salesman.
“I think that number one is what the Japanese say, shoshin,” Benioff recently said on Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast. “Shoshin is the beginner’s mind.”
As a CEO, Benioff explained, “you’ve got a lot coming at you all the time. You got your text messages, your email messages, your one-on-ones, your operational reviews, your investors, your activist investors, you have the media—there’s a lot going on in the CEO's life.”
After 25 years at Salesforce’s helm, Benioff credits shoshin with keeping him grounded.
“Reclaim your beginner’s mind," he advised up-and-coming leaders in conversation with Fortune senior editor Diane Brady. “In your beginner’s mind, you have every possibility, but in your expert’s mind, you have few. And every day, are you starting with some practice? Mine is, I have a meditation practice.”
He mentioned Agentforce, a new Salesforce AI initiative he and his team have been spearheading, as a project that requires shoshin. “I need to have a beginner’s mind because this is new. This is very different from anything that’s ever happened before. It does not fit in existing business models, or anything that I’ve seen in any other industry.”
Every CEO needs to cultivate shoshin to stay competitive and agile—or they’ll have “a problem,” Benioff continued.
“Those that get stuck and don’t have a beginner’s mind, they get in trouble because there’s too many things happening too fast,” he said. “If you’re fighting the flow of the river, you’re going to have a problem; you’ve got to get into the flow of the river.”
Taking cues from the Buddhists
According to James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, shoshin is a concept from Zen Buddhism describing the idea of releasing any preconceptions and approaching a job with an attitude of openness.
“When you are a true beginner, your mind is empty and open,” Clear wrote in a blog post defining the term. “You’re willing to learn and consider all pieces of information like a child discovering something for the first time.”
As Benioff explained, the more expert you get, the more close-minded you naturally become. “You tend to think, ‘I already know how to do this,’ and you become less open to new information,” Clear wrote.
That’s the danger of building expertise or adding years of work to your résumé, Clear argues. “We tend to block the information that disagrees with what we learned previously and yield to the information that confirms our current approach.”
Oftentimes, what experts believe they’re learning is actually a process of “steamrolling through information and conversations, waiting until we hear something that matches up with our current philosophy or previous experience, and cherry-picking information to justify our current behaviors and beliefs.”
Clear—and Benioff—are aligned on the idea that the higher up you ascend, the more vital it is to challenge your hardened beliefs. “When you are already familiar with 98% of the information on a topic, you need to listen very carefully to pick up on the remaining 2%,” Clear wrote. “To quote Zen master Shunryo Suzuki, ‘In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.’”
