Thousands piled into a packed auditorium to hear former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deliver a well promoted and highly anticipated Dreamforce 2014 keynote. Professor Klaus Schwab, German engineer and Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (billed on their site as “an independent, impartial not-for-profit organization committed to improving the world”) helped billionaire Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff introduce Clinton.
So how did Hillary do? Well let’s just say we walked out before she said her closing line. Why? Why not? On a scale of 1 – 10 with 1 being the worse she rated (as my 10 year olds would say) minus infinity. Really. It’s not that she’s not intelligent. She is. It’s not that she’s not capable. She is. It’s not that she’s not qualified. She certainly is. It’s that she brought nothing noteworthy to the 130,000 participants who got up incredibly early to get a seat and wear a badge with a bunch of clouds on it.
Pantsuits Everywhere Took Offense
Really. Ok, so I’m exaggerating. Yet I can only imagine all the pantsuits in the audience were grumbling and whining about as much as my 4.5-inch heels were tapping to leave. Most anticipated that Hillary would share what matters most to the 130,000 participants by discussing her state department insight an apply it to real world national security threats recycling 24×7 like ISIS and Ebola. Nada. We also expected her to share how innovative companies like Salesforce are not exactly tackling our national security threats but are leading the marketplace by making the world a better place in other ways. Instead, Hillary just repeated Benioff’s philanthropy (for example, one goal Benioff set was to curtail hunger by pledging to feed 1 million mouths, and self-help guru, motivational speaker and author Tony Robbins pledged to match that) mantra rot
1) Innovative
2) Have Fun
3) Giving Back
No Substance, Just Fluff
Scores began exiting around the time my heels urged me stand up and walk. While Dreamforce isn’t exactly the place to deliver a full-on political stump speech, Salesforce was very generous towards president Obama and his campaign. The fact that Al Gore speaks Thursday on climate control and the environment says a lot. As much as I would love to see a woman hold the highest office in the land, Hillary’s speech was vacuous, water-downed and sugarcoated, and left many realizing she would be a better grandma then our 45th president.
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