Brian On Software

Written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of SalesForce.com, “The Business of Changing the World” is a wonderful and inspiring collection of twenty essays written by great leaders on strategic corporate philanthropy. Amongst these leaders who each wrote their essays, we find Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins of Dell Craig Barrett of Intel Marc Benioff of SalesForce.com Steve Burd of Safeway Steve Case of Revolution Jim Donald of Starbucks Mike Eskew of UPS Larry Fish of Citizen Bank Peter Gabriel of WITNESS Jean-Pierre Garnier of GlaxoSmithKline Alan Hassenfeld of Hasbro Akinobu Kanasugi of NEC Phil Marineau of Levi Strauss & Co. Micheal Milken of The Milken Institute John Morgridge of Cisco Systems Marilyn Carlson Nelson of Carlson Companies Laura Scher of Working Assets Klaus Schwab of The World Economic Forum Jeffrey Swartz of Timberland

The main idea behind the novel is that major corporations are doing well because they’re doing good. Even though I only knew maybe half of these organizations (remember that I live in Canada and most of these companies are from the U.S.), it was nevertheless challenging to read how each of these leaders once asked themselves if there was something they could do to give back to society, because society once helped them at some point in their lives. Of course not all major organizations, such as Google and Microsoft, are included in the book. That’s fine because it’s not hard to learn about their philanthropic whereabouts and activities, given that they’re so big and popular. Therefore, the book actually presents what other small, medium, and large companies are doing to help back those who’ve helped them at some point in time.

It wasn’t easy to let the book down once I finished reading an essay, because I felt like reading what the next organization had to say about its own vision and plan towards philanthropy. Another neat thing about the book is that each essay is divided in two parts. The first part discusses about the founder or the CEO of a given company, and how that company came to be. Therefore you get a little history lesson behind some of these big names that are so well known nowadays. The second part deals with the different approaches and activities adopted and supported by the companies and their employees towards philanthropy. It’s brilliant because you also get to know some possible (and very realistic) ways that you can adopt within your own organization in order to give back to society, whether it’s time, money, education, etc. Every essay also presents statistics and facts that compare a company’s overall performance before and after adopting a mindset of doing well by doing good. Therefore you can compare yourself with those organizations if you want, but more importantly it gives you a concrete sense of the real power behind these acts. This is a book that I will read over and over again, and share with my friends and people who want to make a positive difference in their own society and hopefully on a worldwide scale. Living in North America, it’s sometimes easy to forget how blessed we are (financially, materialistically, academically, etc.), and be blind to other communities and nations who are more in need than the rest of us. I believe we have more than the necessary to help each other within our local communities, as well at the international level. I’m glad this book is out because I also believe that we’re going to see more corporate philanthropists in action in the near future, and this time their business will be to change the world.