When Salesforce employees fall ill, the company provides more than insurance. Marc Benioff calls, tweets -- and picks up thousands in extra costs.
By David A. Kaplan, contributor
A healthy John Greene at Salesforce headquarters
FORTUNE -- John Greene thought he worked for a pretty good company. Then, at 40, he got cancer -- and found out for sure.
In November 2010, after he'd been in Salesforce (CRM) engineering R&D for barely a year, Greene was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Married and the father of two young children, he started a blog from his hospital bed called "jg will kick its ass." He posted about day after day of chemotherapy, kidney function, and the view of San Francisco from his window. And he managed to keep a sense of humor. "I think I'm going to donate quite a bit more to cancer research now," he wrote.
Initially Greene shared details of his illness only with his boss and his small team. But his best shot was a bone marrow transplant, and he decided to send a systemwide message at work. "Within five minutes, [CEO] Marc Benioff called me," Greene recalls. "I was in touch with him throughout. He even made sure I got the right medical care at UCSF."
Salesforce.com: No. 27 on Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For
Colleagues used Chatter -- Salesforce's internal ubiquitous social-networking app -- to look for bone marrow donors. And late one night, Benioff tweeted, "Salesforce employee John Greene has AM L and needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. Are you a match?" By morning, 350 Salesforcians had signed up with the match registry. Salesforce covered insurance costs that Greene would have had to pay for himself. Its foundation made a $25,000 grant to the marrow registry in Greene's name.
The story isn't exceptional at Salesforce. Last month a 43-year-old British employee, Gillian Jenkins, found out insurance wouldn't cover a new antibody drug for her Hodgkin's lymphoma. Salesforce picked up the $54,000 tab. Benioff wrote her that if treatment would be better at UCSF, she could come to the U.S., and "we'll take care of the costs for housing and treatment."
Greene, who once worked for Phish doing software development and these days plays Grateful Dead songs once a week at his kids' preschool, is back at work. He had a successful transplant (though in the end not from a colleague) and is doing well. "The company was awesome," Greene says. If he didn't know that already, he can ask his mother, Adrienne, back in Philly. Whenever he's gone to work for a public company, Greene says, she buys stock in it and also checks out "who's running the ship." Lately, she's been rather impressed.
This article is from the February 6, 2012 issue of Fortune.
Back to: Salesforce's happy workforce
Despite a 500-fold increase in radiation exposure from cell-phones since 1990, brain cancer rates have fallen.
FORTUNE -- During the 1980s, just as Americans began pumping low-frequency radiation through their skulls with cell phones, brain cancer rates in the U.S. slowly increased. At the beginning of the decade, doctors delivered the devastating diagnosis of brain cancer to 63 out of every 1 million Americans every year; by 1990 that number had risen MORE
Scott Woolley - Jun 7, 2011 11:22 AM ET
The six weeks the National Enquirer gave him are up
Source: The National Enquirer
A supermarket tabloid shows a radio talk-show doctor and a Florida critical care physician photographs of a patient they have never examined. They pronounce him gravely ill and give him six weeks to live.
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Philip Elmer-DeWitt - Mar 30, 2011 7:14 AM ET
Fortune has learned that Apple CEO Steve Jobs spent part of 2009 at a hospital in Basel, Switzerland seeking treatment for neuroendocrine cancer, which he had surgically treated in 2004.
By Doron Levin, contributor
Steve Jobs
In early 2009, the tech and investing worlds were trying to untangle a puzzle about Apple. The company was putting out incredible devices, but it was unclear why the legendary leader wasn't there. As Fortune reported [See: MORE
Jan 18, 2011 11:42 AM ET
Reasons are vague. No end-date given. COO Tim Cook will once again step in to run Apple.
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Team,
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I MORE
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Rare photos taken shortly after his cancer operation are now available in Getty's archives
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Some tech CEOs are more forthcoming than others about their illness.
Kenneth Oshman
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Steve Jobs
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Hugh Martin, CEO Pacific Biosciences
Everyone at Pacific Biosciences knew something was up when CEO Hugh Martin called for an all-hands meeting on a Thursday. The company always held its big meetings on Friday, and it was rare that the staff didn't know the agenda in advance. So it was with some anticipation that all MORE
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A year later, he talks about the liver transplant operation that saved his life.
Credit: San Jose Mercury News video
"I was lucky," said Steve Jobs in brief remarks Friday in support of a new California organ donation bill. "Because many others died waiting for a transplant."
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Dr. James Eason. Video clip: Bloomberg
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