As Dreamforce returned to San Francisco in large numbers for the first time in three years, co-CEO Marc Benioff couldn't help but be a bit wistful about what the world has gone through — and how businesses and their workforces have been impacted.
He addressed all of the workforce trends of the last couple years, right up to the idea of "quiet quitting," which splashed into mainstream discourse after the Wall Street Journal published an article about the trend in August.
He even invited his friend — and Salesforce brand ambassador of sorts — actor Matthew McConaughey to have a conversation about the "new frontiers" of work and life (and hopefully some work-life balance).
"We've been through so much in the last two years," Benioff said during the keynote address. "It was a Great Separation. We didn't enjoy being apart from all of you. We want this conference every year, and we want other conferences all over the world so that we can be together, so we can be connected. So that we can be one."
If the Great Resignation evokes discontent and disconnectedness (perhaps rightfully so), then Benioff’s new era is more about reconnecting and resetting our personal and professional goals.
"We've all come so far. It's now the Great Relocation. The Great Resignation, we saw. We saw the Great Reshuffling. The Rethinking. The Great Reimagination," Benioff said. "We saw a Great Renegotiation with ourselves, with our families. We saw a Great Negotiation with our employers. We kind of re-decided — what are we going to do now that we've had time to look at our lives, our companies, our society?"
The Salesforce co-founder weighed in on the debate around “quiet quitting” — the idea that workers are either doing the bare minimum or setting boundaries with their time. It's hardly a new idea, but it's a way to disconnect from modern day hustle culture and burnout.
During a press conference with reporters from around the world at the St. Regis Hotel, just around the corner from Moscone Center, Benioff framed quiet quitting and burnout as an aspect of a collective trauma response to the Covid era.
"Everyone is reassessing their lives. We're still going through it. It's not like some door closed and you had two years to reassess your life, and now if you didn't do it, it's too late," Benioff said. "We've gone through this mass trauma on a global scale and now we're in recovery."
It's a bit like dealing with collective post-traumatic stress disorder, he said, and people should always think about what they want and what's important to them.
"People should do what makes them happy, and they should do less of what makes them unhappy," Benioff said. "Then they will be happier."
Benioff also shot down the idea that he might run for mayor of San Francisco and implied that being mayor would, in fact, not make him happy.
"No," Benioff said, "speaking of being happy."
Later that afternoon, Benioff interviewed McConaughey about what they called “the new frontier” — also the theme of Salesforce's recent Super Bowl ad starring none other than McConaughey, which visually and rhetorically looks for a mission that's more down to Earth.
"While the others look to the metaverse and Mars, let's stay here and restore ours," McConaughey narrates in the 60-second commercial. "The new frontier, it ain't rocket science. It's right here."
During their conversation at Dreamforce, the two men looked back on McConaughey’s career, his father’s death and the mass shooting in Uvalde, which spurred him to get more involved in the gun violence debate.
Their conversation eventually came back to Benioff's vision of an emerging collective renegotiation to supplant the more fractious Great Resignation of the pandemic.
"There's new frontiers of where we're going physically, there's new frontiers of where we're going spiritually,” the Oscar-winning actor said. “There's new frontiers about where we're going between our ears. And there's new frontiers about where we need to go between our head and our hearts, as well. Those are the highways that I think we need to really personally check in on to see where we're going together."
"And that's what we were also insinuating in the ad," McConaughey continued. "Don't quit right here. Don't quit looking at the mirror. Don't quit looking to your left and to your right and each other. It's OK to go out there and go explore. There's a whole lot of acreage to explore right here."
So, what does the new frontier hold for McConaughey? He left the future open but still isn't interested in running for political office, at least not while his children are young. Will you find him at the office? Depends how you define "office."
"Earth is the address for the office," McConaughey said. "Let's go to work with each other."
The new frontier of work is asynchronous for many people who work in the knowledge, creative and tech industries, but that flexibility also makes these jobs among the most difficult to clock out of at 5 p.m. It's not hard to see why employees are checking out mentally and seeking escapes from corporate life.
Do more of what makes you happy, of course, but the work still needs to get done.
