Richard Branson: Business Stripped Bare

HIV/Aids and climate change are issues that I have a personal passion for and that make sense for the Virgin Group to get behind. We are working on other social and environmental investments, but the one thing all of our efforts in this area have in common is that they leverage Virgin’s biggest asset — the entrepreneurial spirit of our people. This spirit, coupled with the right partners and great ideas, can truly help us make a difference, help communities thrive and help our planet.

If we want a world that we can be proud to leave to the next seven generations, every business needs to look at how they can drive change in every aspect of their operations. One last point: don’t forget to listen — as some of the best ideas will come from your staff, customers and people on the front lines!

If you ever fancy joining us as a partner in any of our endeavours to make the world a better place, please contact us at Virgin Unite: www.virginunite.com.

If I hadn’t badly damaged my knee as a teenager I would likely have been a sportsman. If I hadn’t been dyslexic I wouldn’t have left school at sixteen and created a magazine, which means I wouldn’t have ended up running Student , which means Virgin Records would never have been born, which means…

There are different paths that you can take in this life, and choosing the correct path is supremely important. And as if that weren’t pressure enough, it’s no good choosing not to choose, because that approach to life absolutely guarantees failure.

I don’t think there is enough attention and help given to young people in life to set them in the right direction. All young people deserve wise counsel. They need someone who can show them a future. They need to be able to work out what they can do with their lives, how they can enjoy their lives, how they can pay for it and how they can take responsibility for their actions.

I think it’s a shame that we teach children everything about the world, but we don’t teach them how to take part in the world, how to realise an idea, how to measure the consequences of their actions, how to take a knock, or how to share their success. What kind of world have we built, that people can use the phrase ‘it’s just business’ without challenge or contradiction?

Entrepreneurship is business’s beating heart. Entrepreneurship isn’t about capital; it’s about ideas. A great deal of entrepreneurship can be taught, and we desperately need to teach it, as we confront the huge global challenges of the twenty-first century.

Entrepreneurship is also about excellence — not excellence measured in awards, or other people’s approval, but the sort one achieves for oneself, by exploring what the world has to offer. I wrote to someone recently who, like me, is dyslexic. I said that it is important to look for one’s strengths — to try to excel at what you’re good at.

What you’re bad at actually doesn’t interest people, and it certainly shouldn’t interest you . However accomplished you become in life, the things you are bad at will always outnumber the things you’re good at. So don’t let your limits knock your self-confidence . Put them to one side and push yourself towards your strengths.

This, I think, is sound advice for the young. For those of you who’ve left youth behind, my advice would be: reread the paragraph above, adding exclamation marks after every sentence.

Because, in business, you always have a choice, and you always have an obligation to choose. With the right attitude, business will keep your mind eternally young, because business is always changing, changes always bring opportunities, and you can never hide from the changes that are round the corner.

In entrepreneurial business, a conservative mindset will hamstring you, defensiveness will weaken you and a failure to face facts will kill you. Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind. It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the joy of doing so. It favours people with a humane and engaged view of the world; people who can imagine themselves into the skin of their customers, their workers and the people who are affected by their operations. Business favours people who, when they see a problem or an injustice, try to do something about it. It favours pragmatists over perfectionists, adventurers over fantasists.

Done well and in the right spirit, business will also bring you success — whatever that is.

Indeed, how do you measure who’s truly successful? My list of the world’s most successful people includes Sir Freddie Laker — hardly an obvious choice, to go by the headlines, the rich lists and all the other paraphernalia of business celebrity. So let’s strip this particular business bare once and for all: when we talk about success, what are we really talking about?

Are we talking about money? As a measure of success, money’s a crude one at best. People are always inquisitive about how wealthy other people are. It’s a fascinating subject and one that produces endless reams of copy and discussion. But the reality is that wealth is like a running stream of water. During some seasons the flow of money is a torrent and you’re inundated with cash. The next moment, you’ve put money in to develop a business and your cash flow dries up overnight leaving a barren riverbed.

So even the more well-researched rich lists have to take a bit of a potshot when arriving at their figures. There have been times I was almost bankrupt, and I was very glad to see my name in the Sunday Times Rich List, because I thought it would assuage the bank manager. (The figures were often wildly off the mark both ways — but I wasn’t complaining.) In the last few years things have gone well for the Virgin Group. In 2008, it had a reach of nearly £12 billion.

And me? I’m rich. There — I said it. It’s quite an American thing to talk about wealth. In Britain we’re still sort of slightly embarrassed about it, and I think that’s a good thing. When I go to a party I see people, not bank statements, and I’d like to think that when people get chatting to me they feel the same. To be perfectly honest I hated the word ‘billionaire’ going into the title of that show I did for Fox. It was a great title, but it wasn’t my style at all. Money’s only interesting for what it lets you do. On paper, if I was to sell up my shareholdings in the companies tomorrow, I would have considerable wealth. But where would be the fun in that?

If money’s a poor guide to success in life, celebrity is worse. The media likes to personalise and simplify matters — and that’s understandable. It’s much easier to talk about Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft or Richard Branson at Virgin, but that doesn’t really acknowledge that there’s a legion of senior people doing significant jobs and making major decisions every day. Everyone wants to make business ‘simple’ and that’s one of my constant goals, but in reality there are certain complexities about running a media company, a space-tourism business or an airline. And the financial implications of running a global business across many jurisdictions require a substantial level of expert knowledge in accountancy, taxation and legal affairs, not forgetting the IT, marketing and HR functions too. I’ve never met a CEO who had all of those skills. Of course, the figurehead at the top does make significant strategic decisions but this is based on the work and capabilities of other people within the business. We all still have the same number of hours in the working week. In successful businesses, working hard is never confined to one or two people — you’ll usually find a strong work ethic runs right through the company.