LAST FALL, LIDIANE JONES discovered that Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield was leaving Salesforce by learning that she was a candidate for his job.
Jones was blindsided by the news but immediately interested in the "dream job" that combined her love of consumer-focused design with enterprise technology. "I was so emotionally invested because I was so excited," she says. But she worried she "wasn't going to be picked."
Jones was a somewhat unlikely contender for the role. For one, she didn't work for Slack, the workplace productivity platform Salesforce acquired in 2021 for $27.7 billion. The 43-year-old was a Boston-based executive vice president overseeing Salesforce's experience cloud, commerce cloud, and marketing cloud products-all key pieces of Salesforce's product offering to enterprise customers. Slack didn't fit that bill. It represented just 5% of Salesforce's $31.4 billion in annual sales, and the omnipresent messaging tool didn't overlap much with Jones's duties.
What's more, Butterfield was departing after reportedly clashing with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff following the acquisition. (Salesforce declined to comment; Butterfield didn't respond to a request for comment.) The next Slack CEO needed to take the reins from the platform's founder, patch up the arranged marriage of Slack and Salesforce, and boost morale among Slack's workforce even as its new corporate parent instituted 7,000 layoffs, Slackers included. A Salesforce incumbent hardly seemed like the pacifying pick.
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