Richard Branson: Business Stripped Bare

I stared at the report. Here I was, a supposedly non-political industry figure, commenting on key political figures in a country where I was doing business. From a purely commercial perspective, it certainly wasn’t wise. But I felt, and still feel, it’s more important to do what you believe to be right in life , and if this contradicts your business interests, so be it. Business can’t be allowed to float above ordinary morality.

But this wasn’t about me. This was about a country and a people and, yes, a leadership that I loved. I wanted the ANC to be remembered for the good work it had done for the country, not for turning a blind eye and effectively killing a large percentage of the population by refusing to accept that HIV and Aids are linked.

I immediately received a letter from President Mbeki and, much to his credit, he did not condemn me for speaking out, but instead engaged in a dialogue about what he felt needed to be done. He also offered an honest perspective on his views of the issues that South Africa was facing, from HIV to the lack of job opportunities. After several open and frank communications, we both had the guts to put our differences aside and agree to partner up on building the war room to tackle disese in sub-Saharan Africa. This was the first step on a journey that we hope will make a great difference. As I write this, I have just joined Priya Bery and Jean Oelwang from Virgin Unite for a week of meetings with the ANC government, some amazing South African entrepreneurs and many other health partners to prepare for the launch of the war room.

The war room will become a memorial to Donald Makhubele and all the countless others who have died of disease in Africa. It is also another example whereby entrepreneurial skills coupled with health expertise and knowledge from the front lines will together build a powerful force for change.

One day in April 2006, I received a copy of the starfish parable — from Starfish, a charity that focuses on the Aids orphan crisis in South Africa.

A girl walks along a beach, throwing starfish back into the sea, when she meets an old man. The man asks the girl why she is throwing starfish into the ocean. She says: ‘The sun is up and the tide is going out, if I don’t throw them back they will all die.’ The old man says, ‘But there’s a whole beach and it runs on for miles. You can’t possibly make a difference.’ The girl picks up a starfish and throws it back in the sea. ‘It made a difference to that one.’

What can you do to make a difference? And why should you do it?

If the account of some of our work in Africa has leapt rather dizzyingly from small-scale innovations to big-policy manoeuvres and back again, it did so for the very good reason that the scale of one’s social investments doesn’t matter .

What matters is that you operate as a force for good at every scale available to you. An Aids policy rolled out across the staff of your business is as important as an Aids policy rolled out across the entire Virgin Group, or across an entire nation. The important thing is to have the idea, and realise it, however modestly.

This includes looking at your future investment strategy to try to find business opportunities that will also help tackle tough issues.

Over the last five years Virgin Unite has grown into a platform to help all of us across the Virgin Group drive change. It brings everyone together with a common focus to try to do our best for people and the planet. Virgin Unite is making sure that it’s not just me trying to do my bit, but instead the whole Virgin community works to do whatever we can — small or large — to make a difference.

These differences come in all shapes, depending on the business. With Virgin Atlantic, in their quest to become the most sustainable airline possible, they are looking at various aspects of the operation to see how they can reduce their impact on the environment. One thing I’m particularly excited about is the biofuels test they successfully completed a few months ago. Finding an alternative environmentally friendly fuel source will be one of the biggest contributions we could ever make as an airline.

Dan Schulman and his team at Virgin Mobile USA have worked with Virgin Unite, their staff, customers and young people in the US to come up with ways they can use their core assets to make a difference for the 1.5 million homeless teenagers in the US. It’s still shocking that in such wealthy countries we are allowing teenagers to live on the streets. Virgin Mobile have used their text messaging communication channels, website, lobbying voices and anything else they can find to help build awareness of the issue and to raise money. They teamed up with singer/songwriter Jewel and Virgin Unite to lobby the US government who have now made November ‘Teen Homeless Month’. This has been a great initiative not only for our partners, such as Stand Up for Kids, and the young people they serve, but also for the business. It has truly built a community among our customers, staff and homeless teenagers, who have come together to drive change and learn from one another.

Sometimes the businesses focus on their own programmes and other times they come together as a group to make greater impact. For example, one initiative we recently launched is finding and supporting the best grassroots ideas that have environmental benefits and also help to create local jobs, from employing Aboriginal people in Australia to practise their ancient land-burning techniques which minimise carbon output and protect biodiversity, to working in Kenya on an ecolodge that will help the Green Belt Movement sustain their reforesting projects. We hope that these smaller projects will scale up over the coming years, using the fight against climate change and the need to protect our natural resources as an opportunity also to fight poverty in the world.

Good small solutions are like gold dust as it’s often possible to scale them up, or replicate them manyfold, so that they acquire global influence. Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank is a classic example.

So don’t let relative scale put you off your goals. Think realistically and creatively about what you can achieve . You can do this whether you’re a corporate manager or a sole trader — and what you learn by way of entrepreneurship will directly benefit you in your business.

If there is one line that could sum up all the varied and curious lessons I’ve learned in business, it’s this: scale doesn’t matter — people do . This thinking is reflected in some of my current work: creating small entrepreneurial ‘war rooms’ to tackle big issues. So let me show you, finally, how I’m working with Virgin Unite and other partners to set up a war room to help deal with the biggest, most elusive, most pressing and most abstract problem of all: climate change.

Reading comic books, when I was growing up, one of my recurring nightmares was the invasion of aliens from Mars. It was terrifying stuff: everywhere I looked, bug-eyed monsters were zapping humans with their ray guns. The sci-fi films of the 1950s such as The Day the Earth Stood Still and The War of the Worlds regularly showed our planet under attack. It was a horrifying prospect. The solution was invariably that all the world’s nations had to bury their differences and get together to ward off a common enemy.

The equivalent of that alien invasion is already here. It’s impossible to see, it’s odourless, and it’s everywhere. Our war is against carbon. Not an alien menace, after all, but — irony of ironies — one of the building blocks of life.

On the Celsius scale, zero is the freezing point and 100 degrees the boiling point of water. For the last 10,000 years, the average surface temperature of the Earth has been around 14°C. The hottest recorded temperature has been 58°C at El Azizia in the Sahara Desert in 1922. The year 2007 was the warmest on record.