Our Favorite Ohana Moments
This bonus episode delves into the meaning of “Ohana”, and how being part of it has left a lasting impact on current and former Salesforce employees. You’ll hear past guests describe their own experiences and discover why the Ohana is forever.
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- Welcome back to Inside The Ohana.
This is your host, Dan Darcy.
Listeners of the show, "No Buy Now."
There's one question I ask of all my guests.
What does The Ohana mean to you?
And to me, The Ohana is of course,
all the people in the Salesforce ecosystem,
the customers, the employees, the partners,
the shareholders, but it's also a feeling of belonging.
And you belong because you become part
of a larger movement of people
who are working hard and building a platform for good.
So for today's special bonus episode,
you'll hear from current Salesforce employees
and Ohana alumni about what The Ohana means to them
and why it's so special to everyone who experiences it.
Enjoy.
- I think of it as kind of a thing with rings, right?
Like there's the very inner circle of The Ohana,
which is probably where we put the employees,
but there are some, you know, NZPs
in the Salesforce ecosystem
who I think fit right in there too, you know?
And one thing that to me is so powerful
about what we've somehow managed to create here
is the transformational impact
that discovering this ecosystem
has had on so many individual lives, right?
And I might mean to say careers just like lives.
And I've had this amazing experience lately
with a friend who's a refugee from,
he's from Cameron and he has been here in the US
for a couple of years now.
And he, after he was released from immigration detention,
he was determined to make himself successful.
And in the US, and he did it on Trailhead.
You know, he went and he learned
and he got himself all the badges
until he could get scratch his way into a role
working for a nonprofit customer of Salesforce,
doing some administrative work,
got himself a gig with a consulting company.
Now he's a product manager
and he's launched a brand new product,
which by the way, is aimed at helping
other people who are refugees today,
managing all their experience, legal process and so forth
on the Salesforce technology platform.
And I just think about the transformational power
of that kind of thing for him as an individual,
but for all the people who he's now able to help
by virtue of this technology, the skills he's able to grow,
the network he's able to build
and the power of all these people working together.
It's really awesome.
- Well, Alhana literally means family,
but in the Trailblazer community, it's like just giving.
Coming from the service industry,
it's pretty much the norm to keep knowledge a secret.
Let's say if you're a bartender
and you come up with this really cool drinks,
you're not telling a soul how you made that drink.
It is not like that at all in the Ohana.
Nobody gate keeps knowledge.
When people build something cool
or they learn about something cool,
they cannot wait to share it.
They are shouting it from the mountaintops.
And I love that.
And also it's not just technical know-how.
Like if someone has resources or connections
own a new position and they know someone's looking for jobs,
they're sharing that information.
It is a family.
- I'm telling you, the thing that made the Ohana special to me
was just going through like my father
when he was gone through prostate cancer back in the day.
Mark, bending up, it's like, Jim,
we're gonna get your dad with the best prostate cancer
doctors in the world.
Like that, I'm like, Mark, look, I appreciate that.
But that's, you know, if he like insisted on it.
And there's so many stories that Mark has done that,
you know, this is not just like window dressing.
Like there's a lot of things that he does
and he's taught all of us to do for our people.
Like go way beyond, you know, the business side,
that because we're immersed in our job.
Like, you know, it tells us I was traveling around the world
200 days a year.
I was at a hotel somewhere and there was early days
when Mark gave me the Twitter label, you know,
Roadward 24/7.
And, you know, he recognized that business and personal,
you have to, at times you have to blend the two,
you can't keep them separate.
And just the way he did that,
he also officiated my wedding,
which not too many people have their bosses to do this,
but Mark offered to do it.
And I gladly accepted his offer.
And of course we had to go through a beat of mom exercise,
which is a whole different story to get to that point.
But these are things that, you know, you can't replay.
So like, you can't just see that, you know,
in any other company that I've been a part of,
I've been a part of probably five major corporations,
four of which were public companies.
And I never, never experienced that kind of,
that kind of ohana that we have at Salesforce.
- We talk about ohana a lot, it needs family.
It's talking about your ecosystem.
But I will tell you, since I have left Salesforce
in the year or so that I've been gone,
I actually really appreciate, and I'm so grateful
I was part of that ohana,
because it was something really special and hard to create.
So for me, ohana, it's like about people,
whether it's your employees, your customers, your partners,
your family, like it is everybody kind of rallying around
a cause that you believe in.
And in this case, it was software,
but it was more than software, right?
It was how Salesforce can help your business,
how Salesforce could help the world,
how you could drive change, do good.
And like to have that sort of energy and belief
that you were rooted in, like it really is powerful.
It is a powerful thing.
And I now looking back, like I have friends for life
from Salesforce and put you in that bucket, you're welcome.
- We work with it, we've worked with a group called the ARK
in San Francisco, people with different abilities.
And we just lost our first ARK complete, it just passed away.
Incredible human, 20 years with the company,
did everything from cleaning the whiteboard,
making coffee, to walking the golden retriever,
to helping conference rooms.
The ohana moment for me there was the way that our employees
looked after him.
And even actually after they left the company,
they would take phishing on the weekend.
They gave him relationship advice.
And there was, they organized the whole service,
like from just start to finish, like they had his back
like 1000% as a human.
And I'll just never forget a time when he was in the hospital.
He actually had both of his legs amputated
during the time at Salesforce.
And he drove around the silk carvees,
liver candy to people, and always with a smile.
And I went to the hospital to see him and I brought my daughter
and I had made some banana bread for him.
It was around the holidays.
And first of all, there was a whole schedule
that they had some employees have put together
to like sign up to visit Michael so he wasn't lonely.
And I was like, where, you know, I'm here to visit
this person, where is his room?
And the nurses smiled and just looked at each other
and said, just go down the hallway, make a right,
and you'll see it.
So I would go down in the hospital,
look very white, you know, like, you know,
sterile hospital.
And I make a right.
Yeah.
And at the end of the hallway,
I see this like pulsating room,
like these lights just flashing.
I get down there and like people,
there had been like a whole group of employees a day
who had decorated his room with Christmas lights,
a Christmas tree and all these holiday lights,
flowers and gifts.
And it was like the brightest place in the hospital,
for sure. And so anyway, that for me,
those are, it's the employees that really give of themselves.
I think that demonstrate Ohana.
And that's it for this episode of Inside the Ohana.
Thanks for listening and happy holidays.
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