Business & Management Lessons From Sir Richard Branson
Larry Olmsted Senior Contributor
The latest management tome from self-made billionaire Sir Richard Branson.
So you just devoured the hot biography of a famous technology guru and learned to treat employees like dirt, customers not much better, to take credit for others people's work, and to generally choose form over function. Maybe it's time for something completely different, management-wise.
For a breath of fresh air, try LIKE A VIRGIN: Secrets They Won't Teach You at Business School by Sir Richard Branson, which was released a few weeks ago.
For anyone not familiar with Branson, his credentials are many and varied, starting with the fact that despite cracking the Forbes list of the world's richest, he is one billionaire who never went to business school, making the title somewhat dubious, but it fits with the irreverent nature of his previous business tomes, Screw It, Let's Do It; Business Stripped Bare; Reach for the Skies; and Screw Business As Usual, along with his autobiography, Losing My Virginity.
Branson is an anomaly, even among his dive-into-business-and-education-be-damned peers like famous Harvard dropout Bill Gates. For starters, he's dyslexic, which never seemed to slow him down a beat - he began his entrepreneurial career at 16. He's also prolific, not just in writing books with sexy titles, but also in business: his Virgin Group has literally hundreds of entities, quite diverse. He brought back the golden age of air travel and made money on it with his Virgin Atlantic airline, complete with Mad Men-style upstairs bars in the 747s and massages in the airport lounges. He has launched several more airlines, a mobile phone company (which he sold for well over a billion dollars), a cola, an entertainment content company, and a hotel group. He scored hugely in music, both on the production and retail sides with Virgin Records (the Sex Pistols were signed to his label early on) and he famously donned a white wedding gown to promote Virgin Brides, something you would be unlikely to have seen Mitt Romney doing for Bain Capital. Virgin Brides was one of his several business flops, but measured against the homeruns he's still way ahead. He's also an innovator - with Virgin Galactic he basically invented space tourism, something I covered here before (there were other one off space efforts but nothing even remotely mass market or ongoing like this).
Branson does far more than wear dresses: he has participated personally in several adrenaline laced record setting and exploratory endeavors, including smashing the mark for fastest sea crossing of the Atlantic, the fastest crossing of the English Channel by amphibious vehicle (a car/boat he drove while wearing a tuxedo), and was the first to cross the Pacific by hot air balloon. On the basis of these undertakings I first interviewed him years ago for my book about record setting, Getting Into Guinness, found him fascinating, and have kept an interested eye on him ever since - plus I just plain love flying Virgin.
Branson recently visited Wall Street to introduce his book and massively revamped Upper Class product on Virgin Atlantic airline.
The new book isn't really that new, it's a collection of his internationally syndicated column, dispensing Branson's often counterintuitive business sense in his relatable, everyday voice. But since most Americans haven't read the column, it's new to us. I don't run a multi-billion dollar business, so I can't say one ideology is better than the other, but here are two snippets from his book that demonstrate the management divide that exists at the opposite ends of the spectrum between folks like Branson and folks like Apple's Steve Jobs:
"Businesses are nothing more than a group of people, and they are by far and away your biggest assets. In fact, in probably the majority of businesses your people are your product."
"Remember to have fun. There is no point in being in business if it is not fun. Have fun with your team, your suppliers and the companies you work with. It is so much more rewarding to build up a healthy rapport than to find yourself in a constant battle. Don't take everything so personally. Let your hair down now and again."
Here's a real life example of how Branson's business brain works, taken not from the book but rather from an event he staged two weeks ago on Wall Street, called "Conversations in a Cloud." Branson is big on consumer feedback, and firmly believes that constant reinvestment is necessary for any brand or business idea to survive. So after spending over £100 million to revamp his already exemplary Upper Class, the business/first hybrid on his airline, he brought pieces of the product to lower Manhattan so that the public could take a look at the new Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, while interacting and asking for business advice from Sir Richard himself. If you missed the chance to ask him something, just read the book.
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Larry Olmsted
I am the NY Times Bestselling author of Real Food, Fake Food and have been traveling the world as a journalist and passionate fan of all things fun for 20 years. I have ...