Hi, I'm Meida Malik. We are the co-host of the Brown Table Talk

podcast where we discuss how to help women of color thrive in their

workplaces.

And we invite allies to join us to help women of color win at work.

We have a seat waiting for you.

Subscribe to Brown Table Talk wherever you enjoy podcasts.

From the news team at LinkedIn, I'm Jesse Hemple, and this is Hello Monday,

our show about the changing nature of work and how that work is changing us.

So what's the purpose of business? The most narrow answer to this question is clear.

To maximize profits for shareholders, put another way, companies exist to make money for the people

who own them.

But personally, I take a broader view.

I think businesses have a much broader set of stakeholders.

Their customers, their employees, the communities in which they exist.

And sometimes good business means making a decision on a longer horizon, one that will benefit more people even at the expense of immediate returns.

One of the most outspoken people I know on this topic is Mark Benyoff.

Mark runs Salesforce, a software company that he founded 21 years ago,

and it's been wildly profitable. But Mark has always thought beyond

shareholders. So our employees are stakeholders, our customers are stakeholders, the

homeless in our city is stakeholders, the planet is a stakeholder. So look what I'm saying is we've had a great shareholder return. We've had a great stakeholder return. These things have to work together in a modern company.

I've known Mark as long as I've reported on Tech,

and I asked him on the show because he's lived through an interesting chapter

...