Trying to change productivity at Salesforce is rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The truth of the situation is their core product (Basically a layer which allows you to map your business problems onto a relational database + workflow thing) is losing some relevance because the world of tech has moved on, relational databases are not the hotness they were back in the 80s and 90s, people have realised you can model a lot of problems very simply using things like k/v stores etc and they’ve reached a certain level of saturation in their existing customer base. There’s only so many people that need to have the data entry/workflow screens or the reports they generate out of the system, and only so many big enterprises that are going to pay the kind of software license fees that will keep a tech behemoth like that running.

Secondly, their business model has attempted to diversify from just being about sales but fundamentally they are long the economy in general. If the economy is struggling, the appetite for “sales enablement” and collaboration-type tooling is going to wither. Some of the products they acquired (Tableau, Slack in particular) are pretty cool but came at a hefty price tag that is going to be tough to recoup as the environment generally gets tougher and their competition (free and paid) increases.

I don’t think either engineering or sales productivity is going to solve this and if there’s some magic there I’m pretty skeptical that BCG would find it.

> “From what we know, [Boston Consulting Group] made some significant recommendations on how salespeople and developers should be measured to improve productivity,” Wang told TechCrunch.

Huh, so SalesForce, up to this point had, no idea on how to measure if their salespeople or developers were doing anything useful?

That seems implausible so I assume this is just about reducing headcount without having to pay the costs of laying people off. Or am I being too cynical?

"Activist investors" are just hedge funds trying to extract as much short term rent from the work of others as possible.

That their short term desire for a brief bump in profit regardless of long term cost has an impact on the executive management of the company is more an indictment of the ineffectiveness of that company than anything else. The use of consultants to launder their incompetence is a BS activity - I've never heard of any consultants in these circumstances doing anything other than say that the executives are awesome, and that all the employees have too many rights and need to be put in their place and/or fired, as close to the bounds of legality as possible.

Capitalism only works in theory. While it might sound good in principle, the realities of human nature make it impractical as a way to organize an economic system.

Capitalism is the most successful system we’ve tried.

Or, at least, of those that we can remember we’ve tried—- where our memory consists strictly of… the set of written artifacts that have survived all the way until today. Subject to interpretation, and with a built-in bias for the more recent.

What percent of all human organizational structures in history exists in that memory? How many exist in dig sites buried beneath the oceans, where the coastlines once stood? How many were written down on something temporary, such as, say, paper, and were destroyed before we could read them?

I think this is why people feel strongly that there could be a better approach. We haven’t explored much of the space at all. Though any unexplored option would be very risky to try at scale, of course, and perhaps there lies the rub.

Human nature is often contradictory, and is in no way universal across humanity. No system of organizing humanity will fit neatly with human nature. No economic system, religion, moral system, government, educational model, language, and so on, will ever work well universally. So this leaves us all with a series of tradeoffs and concessions. Capitalism has one set of tradeoffs, feudalism had another, socialism a third.

We might disagree on the relative importance of the concessions required, but I hope we can all agree that there is simply no perfect system (yet).

Capitalism DOES work to generate more wealth than any other system. But if profit is your ONLY motive it causes you to treat humans very badly, as the flat out murder of strikers in the past have shown us. Capitalism needs to be tempered by requirements for employees to be treated like actual human beings. EU countries are a good example of this. Capitalism is also very good at concentrating wealth, which is bad for society in the long term as you end up with small numbers of incredibly rich people hiding away from the vast number of desperate poor people. The solution to this problem is extremely progressive income taxes and a 100% estate tax on anything over $100 million. Taxing people after they are dead is the fairest possible time to do so.

I find it remarkable to note that not a single person, since, well, recorded history on the subject, has ever matched criticism of capitalism with a viable, well-tested and proven alternative. Perfect it is not. And yet, no other system in human history has elevated more people out of poverty than capitalism.

This is odd phrasing because usually capitalism is sold as the pragmatist solution, imperfect by design but stable and “good enough”

Usually “only works in theory” is applied to the other economic systems which tend to sell high on the idea of equality, but devolve into the same problems of haves and have-nots.