Richard Branson: Like a Virgin

This is where so-called ‘space tourism’ comes into the picture. Still in its pioneering days, the new space race has become the catalyst for private industry to develop new technologies and delivery vehicles. Virgin Galactic’s space ships will increase the safety of the trip to space while significantly lowering the cost and the environmental impact. To date five hundred wannabe astronauts have put down more than $50 million in deposits, providing part of the justification for our investment of more than $450 million in developing Galactic’s unique system of air-released space planes.

Our astronauts come from all walks of life. Ranging from artists and scientists to entrepreneurs and financiers. They share one dream: seeing the planet and experiencing weightlessness while helping to pioneer a new approach to space travel.

This is not an easy project. To aid the effort, in 2004 in the USA the Bush administration enacted legislation to set up a regulatory framework that will ensure we develop safety standards that inspire the confidence of the world. In time, other governments will do the same.

Virgin Galactic is not the only company designing new launch systems. Elon Musk, chief executive and chief technology officer of Space X, is currently developing a new ground-based rocket that will be capable of revolutionising the economics of shuttling to the International Space Station. Other companies may enter the market in order to fulfil the need to protect the environment by moving industry off-planet.

Space travel isn’t just the stuff of science fiction or something that might happen in the distant future. It will help us to develop practical solutions for some of the biggest problems humanity faces, and that, combined with our innate curiosity, will inspire all of us to quite literally reach for the stars!

I have always found that an instant barometer to the state of any company’s employee relations is the way their people use the words ‘we’ and ‘they’.

You ask a salesperson for an item and he says, ‘Sorry, they decided not to carry that brand any more.’ Or you get to the front of the check-in line at the airport and the airline agent tells you, ‘Sorry, they have just cancelled that flight.’

This mysterious anonymous entity ‘they’ is held responsible for limitless problems. Bad news tends to be delivered in the third-person plural, whereas good news is much more likely to be relayed in the first-person singular. I wish my old English teacher could read this, as he was convinced I never listened to a word in those lessons!

So if the requested item is in stock, the salesperson will likely reply, ‘Yes, I have that.’ When a flight is on time, the agent will say, ‘I would like to announce the on-time departure of flight 123.’

Managers and business leaders should watch for this tendency. A company where the staff overuse the word ‘they’ is a company with problems. If employees aren’t associating themselves with their company by using ‘we’, it is a sign that people up and down the chain of command aren’t communicating – and if that turns out to be the case, you’ll usually find secondary problems throughout the company, affecting everything from development to customer service.

A company’s employees are its greatest asset, particularly in service-based operations where your people are your product. When a company fails to grasp this simple business tenet, the result is invariably an oppositional ‘us and them’ divide between management and front-line staff.

Listen for complaints from the front line such as ‘They [management] are a bunch of idiots who never ask for our opinion on anything’ or ‘If they had only asked us, we would have told them that their new square peg doesn’t fit the round hole we operate in!’

Meanwhile, from managers and executives, you might hear: ‘They [employees] just don’t seem to get it. Don’t they know that square pegs are all the rage with our customers these days?’

Just as two wrongs have never made a right, these two conflicting ‘theys’ will never make a ‘we’.

Resolving the underlying issue is not that difficult. If employees feel they are on the outside looking in – so far outside that they refer to their company as ‘they’ – then who’s to blame? Managers and executives may be investing no effort in making staffers feel like valued insiders. For example, try asking employees where they learn about new products and other important company news. If the answer is the newspapers or a next-door neighbour, then they are truly stuck in a ‘they say’ quagmire.

Repairing an ‘us and them’ environment is a cultural challenge that usually calls for greater employee involvement and improved internal communications from the executive suite all the way to the shop floor. In my experience, middle management is a good place to look for the source of the problem. Feedback from up and down the chain often hits a wall in the person of a mid-level manager who has fallen victim to the ‘knowledge is power’ syndrome. Identifying such blockages and unclogging corporate arteries will bring huge payoffs.

At all the Virgin airlines for instance, if we are creating a new aircraft cabin we will always have the marketing, design and management teams involved from the very beginning. Representatives from the product delivery group (aka cabin crew) will work alongside them, as the crew will ultimately be responsible for the success or failure of their new work environment. In the absence of such input, you risk the crew walking into their new multimillion-dollar cabin for the first time and saying, ‘Hmm. Nice, but where’s the trash compactor?’ Such retrofits can be very expensive!

Involving every relevant employee group in development not only drives better product design but also adds a huge pride-of-association factor: ‘We came up with this as a team.’ Everyone wins, including customers and shareholders.

This ‘us and them’ problem is endemic to corporate life and Virgin is no exception. When someone on our team tells me, ‘Sorry, Mr Branson, but they don’t have that any more’, my standard response is, (with a smile!) ‘“They”? Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you worked here.’ Tough love, maybe, but it certainly gets the point across!

This problem is exacerbated by our reliance on impersonal digital communications technologies. One of a leader’s greatest challenges these days is getting people to actually talk to each other; one-on-one meetings and old-fashioned brainstorming are vital to the success of any growing business. Sending an email with an attached PowerPoint presentation to a hundred people may be effective in some situations, but most of the time nothing beats gathering all the contributors to a project, soliciting everyone’s input and then acting on it.

So, rather than sending that email to the product team, why not walk over there now and talk to them. I am sure ‘they’ will thank you for it!

I know that I drive people mad by refusing, point blank, ever to rate their work or new product ideas a perfect 10. No matter how brilliantly conceived something may be, I have always firmly believed that it can always be improved. On the ‘Bransometer’, a nine is as good as it gets.

There’s an inherent danger in letting people think that they have perfected something. When they believe they’ve ‘nailed it’, most people tend to sit back and rest on their laurels while countless others will be labouring furiously to better their work!

I have always been an extremely picky consumer. Unlike most ‘problem customers’, however, I just love it when I am on the receiving end of really bad service. No, I’m not some kind of market-masochist; it’s just that some of my best business ideas have stemmed from experiencing bad service.