Busy Is a State of Mind

Today was another packed day filled with back-to-back meetings, interviews, and very little time to breathe. Being here, I have most definitely learned to value the one hour here or half hour there to do my own work. My dad would be happy to know that I have fully embodied his not-so-subtle message from yesterday: "You've got 15 days. You're not going to waste one of them."

I began the day with an interview of Hubert Ban, Vice President of reporting and technical accounting. I found his approach to management and more generally, a successful career beautifully simplistic: "Smile. Be friendly." I think his response speaks nicely to the kind of person I have come to know him as: caring in nature, engaging always, and highly collaborative in a work setting. My conversation with Hubert was then followed by an interview of Alex Buldrini, Vice President of revenue recognition and John Pinkerton, Senior Director of worldwide revenue management. Instead of answering questions, they arrived purposefully with a binder originally used almost a year ago for vetting the newly minted CFO, Mark Hawkins; each divider within the binder, they explained, delved into a specific function of revenue management (ex. Team Structure, V2MOM, Policies, etc.), mine to review for the remainder of my time at Salesforce. I found their explanations informative and as with most employees here, I loved the excitement with which they brought to their work. After lunch, I attended a cash flow review meeting with Ernst & Young employees. I would be lying if I pompously said I could explain most of the vocabulary they were using, but overall I greatly enjoyed watching people present on topics within their fields of expertise, work together to ameliorate the content, and even crack a few accounting jokes I also did not understand. My last meeting of the day was with my project advisor Don Rigler, America's Controller to discuss more generally the structure of Salesforce. He guided me through the organization chart comprehensively, which began at the CEO and progressed much like a food chain down by position within the company. He demonstrated where many of the people I knew landed on the chart; he even introduced me to chatter, the company's own version of Facebook.