"You want to mirror the market you serve. And our customers are diverse," Salesforce ANZ and ASEAN chief executive Pip Marlow. Photo / Supplied
Salesforce Australia/New Zealand chief executive Pip Marlow talks to the Herald about a hardscrabble upbringing, suffering imposter syndrome, breaking down diversity barriers in an industry still dominated by men, and addressing her industry's staffing crisis.
Palmerston North-raised Pip Marlow credits her low-income, hard-grafting parents with instilling values that helped her become a top executive with Microsoft and Salesforce, a director of Rugby Australia and a member of Chief Executive Women - a group that engages with business and government to address gender imbalance.
Her mother - formerly a nun - bought fruit and vegetables, packaged them up and sold them to office workers. Her father worked in admin at Massey University.
"My parents were very down-to-earth and very values-driven," she says. "It was always hard work with little money. My first job was mowing lawns when I was 12.
"I think I got a hard work ethos from my parents.
"I used to get up really early and go to the fruit and veggie market with my mum. And then we'd break things up into smaller packages and weigh them and that's how I would earn my pocket money. She would say, 'You'd have to work for me or work for somebody else. There are no free handouts'."
Marlow had two sisters and two brothers. "There were no gender roles with chores. We all did firewood chopping or cooking. You just did a job. And that had me thinking that you could do anything and gender wasn't an issue," she says.
"I also loved to travel, but travel for me as a young kid was in a tent because putting up five kids in hotels wasn't something we could afford, so it was lots of camping. I definitely saw the country, but I wanted to see the world."
She moved to Australia and sold PC monitors before joining a three-person startup selling storage technology. In 1995 she joined Microsoft - and ended up spending the next 21 years with the tech giant, with roles in the US and across the Tasman, culminating in her becoming managing director of Microsoft Australia. Then, after a two-and-a-half-year stint at Suncorp Group, in 2019 she became chief executive of Salesforce's Australia, New Zealand and southeast Asia operations.
Being a regional chief for Salesforce - a US$190 billion market capitalisation company that now includes a dozen brands, including the Salesforce customer relationship management software, Mulesoft and Slack - makes Marlow one of Australasia's highest-achieving tech executives.
But she doesn't always feel that way. At times, she grappled with imposter syndrome in an industry that is still dominated by men.
"It's that moment when you turn up somewhere and you look at your peers and think 'Am I worthy to be at the table?'," she says.
"Gender diversity has been a challenge in the tech industry, yes. And so often, you know, I was the only female at a meeting, and you didn't necessarily have people like you in the room for support."
As columnist Paul Catmur explained recently for Herald readers, imposter syndrome was initially identified in the late 1970s when a number of highly qualified women admitted to feelings of inadequacy despite their peer-recognition and undoubted expertise.
"Of course, when men spotted that women had found a psychological issue all to themselves, they felt disadvantaged and rushed across to get a piece of it too. Consequently, these days incidences of imposter syndrome are split evenly between the sexes," Catmur says.
What's behind imposter syndrome?
"It's that internal self-critic; that part of us that tends to be our own worst enemy," says psychotherapist, Herald mental health columnist and NewsTalk ZB Nutters' Club co-host Kyle MacDonald.
"Imposter syndrome is just that in another guise. If the inside doesn't match the outside - if we're being told that we're skilful and successful and being offered these opportunities but at the same time as the internal self-critic is fired-up - then we can end up in an uncomfortable place."
So how do you get over the self-doubt and insecurity?
"The first thing is to recognise it's just a feeling," Macdonald says.
"Any strong feeling will try and influence how we think. And once we're in the grip of a feeling, it tends to take over our mind and construct a narrative - the imposter syndrome. What's helpful is to actually just try and observe the feeling, and find ways just to sort of gently accept and observe that it's just a feeling, it's not a fact."
His other major tip: "It's really important to make sure that you've got trusted people that you can receive feedback from."
The operative phrase here is "a few". A couple of close supporters you know and trust can be transformative, "But often, when we get lots of feedback from lots of different people that cannot necessarily be helpful," MacDonald says.
That proved to be one of Marlow's main techniques for dealing with imposter syndrome.
"Luckily I had some really good mentors, people like Steve Vamos," she says, name-checking the former Microsoft Australia then Xero chief executive.
"Steve's been an incredible supporter. Some really good people have helped me through. Having that support crew has been important for me and my career."
Diversity remains a serious problem for the tech sector.
The draft Digital Industry Transformation Plan published by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment in January said only 27 per cent of the IT workforce is female, only 4 per cent Māori and only 2.8 per cent are Pacific peoples.
Marlow says that needs to change. Among its other benefits, having a diverse workforce is simply good commercial sense.
"You want to mirror the market you serve," she says.
"And our customers are diverse. They're male, they're female, they're from different economic backgrounds, different skill levels. So if we have an employee base that only looks like a proportion of our customer base, then it's highly likely our product and solutions will not be a great fit for everybody."
So how is Salesforce doing on that front? It's a work in progress.
"When I started [with Salesforce] in 2019, sub-10 per cent of our employees in New Zealand were female," Marlow says. "Now we're at 35 per cent."
It's helped that there has been a lot of hiring, and with it the opportunity to reshape things.
Marlow says Salesforce's NZ office has gone from 40 people when she started three years ago to 190 today.
The period included a huge win for Salesforce, and partners Amazon and Deloitte: winning the $38m contract to create new, cloud-based vaccination register Covid hit and the Ministry of Health issued an emergency tender for the project. Ian McCrae, head of the snubbed incumbent Orion Health, made no secret of his anger at being sidelined.
Marlow says her company had proved its chops with the system it created to manage bowel cancer screening.
And she sees scope for Salesforce and its partners to expand their role beyond the immunisation system as the patchwork of DHB systems is replaced by centralised software,
"We want to continue to work with the government on how they get more out of the platform, what are the other use cases that can create a better citizen experience, and help deliver ciitzen services in a much more transparent and effective way," the CEO says.
Broadening diversity is also about broadening the appeal of careers in tech to demographics beyond Pākehā males, and addressing the lack of diversity that has compounded the tech talent squeeze.
Marlow says part of the solution is to get more - and a more representative group - of students into stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects at school.
But it's also partly about making it easy for a broad range of people to re-skill mid-career. Here, Salesforce has its range of "Trailhead" online courses that are free for individuals (there's a small monthly fee for employers who use them to upskill staff).
Some 14,000 New Zealanders are currently taking Trailhead courses, Marlow says.
She gives the example of a woman who was working in personal banking, who is now a Salesforce Administrator - a much more highly-paid role. MBIE says the average IT salary has shot up to $119,442 vs the New Zealand white-collar average of $59,703.
And in March, Salesforce committed to training 400 New Zealanders through the Mission Ready programme and an expanded relationship with TupuToa, a programme created to foster leadership pathways for Māori and Pacific peoples.
"We've got 60 people participating in a TupuToa programme right now, which includes an internship," she says.
Marlow points to her company's Global Digital Skills Index survey, which found 80 per cent of Kiwi respondents said they didn't feel they were equipped for the jobs of the future but only 20 per cent were actively doing something about that.
"So you've got a community that knows it's not ready, knows it's got to do the learning but isn't - so we've got to find a way to close that gap," Marlow says.
"Most people can't afford to go back to university for a couple of years, so micro-credentials that let you learn as you earn are really important. Business is going to have to take a role creating these programmes."
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