Richard Branson - Business Stripped Bare

Three days before the collapse, in typical style, he said: ‘I’m flying high — I couldn’t be more confident about the future.’ And David Tait recalls sitting next to Freddie as they flew out of Gatwick airport on an Air Florida flight ten days after the collapse. Below, jammed in wing tip to wing tip in the Laker hangar, sat Freddie’s life’s work, a forlorn cluster of grounded DC-10s still emblazoned with the Skytrain logo. But Freddie turned to his distraught partner and said: ‘Don’t worry, mate, it’ll all work out just fine.’

His company was bust. Yet four-times married Freddie still knew that there was much more to life. He enjoyed reminiscing with me over a Pusser’s rum and orange on his yacht in the Bahamas, and he relished a pint and a laugh with his friends.

It was on another Air Florida flight that he met an off-duty Eastern Airlines stewardess called Jacqueline Harvey. It was love at first sight — or first flight — and Jacquie made Freddie’s last twenty years a lot more fun, erasing any memories of his airline’s failure.

It was his business sayings that were so memorable for me.

‘Only a fool never changes his mind.’

‘Don’t bring me your problems — bring me the solutions.’

And his most famous one: ‘Sue the bastards.’ Litigation lawyers the world over still celebrate that one! But it was about the best advice I got when I had to take on British Airways after their dirty tricks campaign against Virgin Atlantic in the late 1980s.

Freddie was never afraid of failure. He succeeded in life — and always gave it a go. That’s why we named one of our planes the Spirit of Sir Freddie .

Over the years, we’ve watched billions of dollars go into development aid and emergency relief. Yet, unbelievably, we still have well over 16,000 people dying every day from preventable and treatable diseases like Aids and TB, half the planet still lives on less than $2 per day, one billion people have no access to drinking water, and the list goes on and on. The fact that these problems persist is not due to lack of hard work and commitment from the social and environmental sectors; nevertheless, without normal market forces and businesses ensuring that the best ideas can be fully realised and communicated, what we end up with is a market of good intentions.

Through my travels over the last couple of decades, I’ve started to realise that the only way we are going to drive the scale of the change we need in the world is if we pull together some very unlikely partnerships with businesses, charities, governments, NGOs and entrepreneurial people on to the front lines. More often than not, the people most affected know the answers — we just need to listen to them. None of us can do it alone; we all have to put aside our differences and revolutionise the way we work together to ensure that we leave this world in good shape for at least the ‘next seven generations’, as is the philosophy of the indigenous people we are working with in Canada.

In this last chapter, I want to tell you about Virgin’s adventures in the territory where business and making the world a bit of a better place meet. This has always been important to me and really began when I was eighteen and opened up the Student Advisory Centre on Portobello Road, helping young people with sexual health. Forty years later, it has changed shape a bit, but it’s still there, and still in the same place offering counselling services.

When Aids first started to become a major issue in the mid-eighties we launched Mates condoms, combining our business and creative skills to get young people to wear a condom while still enjoying sex (well they certainly weren’t going to be stopped!). We decided that this was so important that we would make it a social business and all profits would be ploughed back into extending the safe-sex message. The team did a great job. We even got the BBC to run an advertising campaign for the first time in their history, which significantly raised awareness of the importance of safe sex across the UK — all in a cheeky Virgin way. Here in the Caribbean, the slogan goes: ‘No glove — no love’.

Several years ago, I realised that if Virgin really wanted to make a difference with some of the tougher issues facing humanity, we had to start pulling together everything we were doing. I knew that the only way this would work was if we put social responsibility at the core of what Virgin is. So we spent months talking with staff, customers and front-line organisations all over the world, and out of this we built a company philosophy of ‘doing what is best for people and the planet’ and created Virgin Unite. Virgin Unite has now become the entrepreneurial foundation of the group, working with our businesses and partners to develop new approaches to tackle the tough issues. It’s really about ideas and people — finding the best of both and then helping them to scale up. Our fundamental belief is that doing good is great for business. It’s not about the ‘golden charitable cheque’ but, rather, it’s about making sure that we leverage everything we have across our businesses — especially the wonderful entrepreneurial spirit of our people — to drive change.

There is such a thing as enlightened self-interest, and we should encourage it. It is possible to turn a profit while making the world a better place. And, inasmuch as there can ever be answers to the problems of the world, capitalism — generously and humanely defined and humbly working with others who understand the issues and solutions — can create some of those answers. More about Virgin’s ventures in this area later, but first I want to tell you about some of the people who have inspired me.

We’ve had many impressive and influential people come and stay with us on Necker Island. But the visit of Bill and Melinda Gates at Easter in 2001 provided me with plenty of inspiration for what I should be doing in a philanthropic way.

It takes a bit of time to get to know Bill Gates. He’s cerebral and intense about all he does. This intensity made for an excellent game of tennis which ended in an honourable draw.

During his visit he spoke to me a great deal about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2008 had assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world’s largest charity and a force for immense good in troubled parts of the world. In 2006, the foundation handed out $1.54 billion in grants in three areas: global health, global education and programmes in America, including the creation of forty-three new high schools in New York City.

I wrote in my notebook: ‘ He’s very involved with it. Not just giving way billions but reading up about African diseases and seriously trying to help with Aids/malaria/tuberculosis and educating people to use condoms .’

At that time, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had just overtaken, in the value of its trust fund, the Wellcome Trust — one of the UK’s long-established charities, which has funded research into human and animal health since 1936 and was spending £650 million a year. Since then, the Foundation has grown dramatically and is now, by far, the largest charitable foundation in the world, alleviating poverty, disease and ignorance around the globe. Bill and Melinda have done such a brilliant job as ‘venture philanthropists’ that Warren Buffett, who pipped Gates in 2008 as the world’s richest man, handed over much of his substantial wealth for them to look after.

My wife Joan didn’t know what to make of Bill at first, though she warmed to him and enjoyed spending time with his wife, Melinda. Melinda was then in her late thirties, a charming and intelligent woman. She had amassed a huge amount of knowledge about malaria-carrying mosquitoes, tuberculosis, Aids and rotavirus, a severe form of diarrhoea that kills more than 500,000 infants a year. Effectively she was giving Bill a running personal tutorial on some of the key issues in global health. While Bill was interested in the actual microbiological science of vaccine research and finding a scientific solution, Melinda wanted to alleviate as much suffering as possible now.