User: What are Salesforce's Inc current state and challenges?
Assistant: Salesforce can be best described as being in the “Elaboration” stage within the organization's lifecycle. Salesforce, to date, has managed its growth very well. Despite growing to 17000 employees, Salesforce managed to retain its core culture. It also responded to external challenges, especially against the competition, as Salesforce today competes in the CRM industry and emerged as a viable alternative to AWS. Salesforce relies more heavily on bureaucratic control mechanisms than clan and market control. Salesforce divided itself into functional units, namely, Product, Customer, People, Strategy, and Revenue. It does have some core focus areas, like the public sector as an industry vertical. Even though Salesforce, when viewed through a rational lens, is a bureaucratic organization, it is designed for flexibility, i.e, organic design. The decision-making is pushed down to the business unit rather than being driven by the top management. Salesforce’s Tableau and Slack acquisitions are adaptive, quick, innovative, and much required in a changing and complex environment. With Slack and Tableau, Salesforce has an edge against other cloud providers in the platform space.