This post is about the book
“The Virgin Way” by billionaire Richard Branson. In this book, Richard talks
about values and beliefs he holds dear in regards to leadership.
The book is filled with amazing witty quotes, and the one
it starts with is: “Life’s too short. Don’t enjoy it? Don’t do it!”
Richard explains the last quote using another one that “Life
is not a dress rehearsal!”. So you should not waste any of your limited time on
this earth doing stuff that doesn’t lighten your face.
The book is divided into four parts: Listen, Learn, Laugh
and Lead.
Reading from “Preface”, Richard had dropped out of
high-school at the age of 16 to start off a magazine called “Student”, simply
because he wasn’t enjoying his school as he had difficulties learning due to
dyslexia. But he adds he does not mean to start some kind of ‘burn your books’
movement!
He writes “Having ‘Fun’ is at the core of the ‘Virgin
Way’. Being passionately engaged and enjoying every minute of what you do is an
attitudinal thing – a spark – It’s something that’s either in a person’s DNA or
not, and as such has to come from within.”
As any of Richard’s colleagues at Virgin will attest, in
his vocabulary the phrase ‘seemingly impossible’ is defined as ‘something that
should be a lot of fun disproving’.
Now, “Not
every author is as candid as Richard!”
Richard mentions he didn’t read any of the 93,000 books
he found on Amazon for the search string “Leadership books” nor does he have
any idea of what these authors have to say but he doubts that few if any of
them have had a fraction of the fun that Richard has had in the forty-plus
years leading the charge with the Virgin group of companies.
So here is a search string he then tried instead:
‘Having a great time while building a highly
diversified global business with an extended family of simply wonderful people’
Guess what? There is not a single match to this day!
This presentation will take you through some of the best
stories told in the book.
This first story is about the “Power of forgiveness and
giving people a second chance”.
On an odd occasion Richard had been guilty of helping
himself to a few pennies that his dad used to keep in his bedroom wardrobe. And
in his mind, he was only borrowing with no terms or structure for repayment
established. Richard was using these ill-gotten gains for buying chocolates
from a sweet shop just around the corner from his house.
One day, though, he’d taken a much bigger ‘loan’ than
usual from his dad’s wardrobe bank and promptly done his part to boost
Cadbury’s shareholder value. The old lady in the sweet shop smelled the rat,
she did not say anything to Richard but next time when he was there with his
father, she blurted out “Now I don’t want to get him into any trouble, Mr.
Branson, but I don’t know where young Richard’s getting all his money from. I
hope he isn’t stealing it.”
But then, just as Richard was thinking, ‘Oops, I’m really
in for it now!’ his dad staggered him by putting his nose right up to hers,
looking her straight in the eyes and loudly declaring, ‘Madam, how dare you
accuse my son of stealing?’ Richard was even more surprised when, after they’d
marched out of the shop, his dad never said another word about it. Sometimes,
though, the power of the unspoken word can be a frighteningly powerful thing
and his father’s studied silence with him for the rest of that day spoke
volumes. In addition, the fact that he’d immediately jumped in and vehemently
defended his light-fingered son’s integrity made Richard feel more guilt-ridden
and miserable than if he had berated him in front of her. Dad’s handling of the
situation taught Richard a hugely effective lesson. Not only did he never pinch
another penny from his parents, but it also taught him a life-lesson on the
power of forgiveness and giving people a second chance.
***
Richard attributes his success a whole lot on his
listening skills, about which he writes that he learned in school that “Listen”
and “Silent” were anagrams and to make a list out of it, he added the word
“Enlist”. Now using these words in a sentence he quotes “if more of us
could ‘enlist’ the art of remaining ‘silent’ in order to ‘listen’ we would dramatically
improve our ability to learn”.
Next, lesson is titled “Mirror-mirror” that tells you the
importance of taking customer feedback.
The saying that he starts with is ‘If it walks like a
duck – it usually is a duck”, which means that if the customers are
getting a perception of what you are doing to resemble a duck and then it
usually is a duck. You should make it a habit seeing your actions from the eyes
of the people at the receiving end of it.
To this Richard adds “Now I am not suggesting that
soliciting the input of foreign dictators is necessarily the way to go, but
when you have family and friends who are also consumers, it is downright
foolish not to take full advantage and listen to their outside-in points of
view.”
***
Trusting the consumer instincts is a tried and true
belief so much so that people make their investment decisions based on it. If
you like a product and all your neighbors like it too then the chances are that
this product is going to last and hence is a good investment.
The ultimate example of such consumer behavior is the
tale of American Entrepreneur Victor Kiam and his company Remington Products.
As the story goes, his wife bought him a Remington electric razor and, as he
famously said in their advertising campaigns, ‘I liked the product so much, I
bought the company.’
Next few slides are about public speaking skills.
The key to making a good speech is that you “keep it
simple, stupid!” Yeah, that is the full form of KISS here.
Simplicity wins every time. Short and snappy lines sell.
As the saying goes “A good speech should be like a
woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create
interest.”
***
Now don’t worry about nervousness and stage-fright, even
the best of the best speakers get nervous.
To make you feel better, here is what Mark Twain has to
say:
‘There are only two types of speakers in the world: The
nervous and The Liars.’
The strange fact is that nervousness is good. The best
and most experienced public speakers still get nervous, so don’t fret about it.
A touch of the jitters sharpens the mind, gets the adrenalin flowing and helps
you to focus. The best way to mitigate it is quite simple, practice, practice,
practice and practice some more. Go through it until you are saying it in your
dreams and it will be a lot easier on the day!
***
On “Navigating the Next”:
This was in 1975. Kodak had developed a digital camera
that was one of its kind. But the product was soon dropped for the fear that it
would threaten their existing photographic film business. Instead of embracing
the opportunities that the new technology presented and exploiting their
resources to lead the charge, Kodak’s senior management instead seemed to bury
their heads in the sand as if by ignoring the digital, they would magically
make it go away.
Eventually, seeing the error, Kodak went on to create something
called ‘Photo CD’ that fell somewhere between their traditional analogue
offerings and digital technology, but compromises seldom work.
While Kodak tried desperately to hang on to the past and
the huge 70 per cent profit margins they enjoyed, newcomers to the camera game
like Sony came and ‘ate their lunch’. Kodak’s share price dropped by 80 per
cent in 2011 and they filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012.
The fact that other major analogue-era imaging companies
like Canon and Nikon all successfully navigated the transition to digital would
seem to indicate that the only plausible reason for Kodak’s rapid decline was a
catastrophic failure in leadership. And as is almost always the case, leaders
who spend too much time looking in the rear-view mirror are seldom positioned
to navigate the road ahead.
***
Next story is about “Luck”.
The first part of the story is about Google. When Antonio
and Sergey (one of the Google’s founders) were refused a ticket at a theater
due to houseful, the two went for coffee and Sergey told Antonio about the
search engine that he was working on. Antonio did not understand the
technicalities of the project but he liked the idea of organizing vast amount
of information on the web. In short, it struck him as an idea that had a lot of
market potential. When Antonio met up with his new friend the next day,
therefore, he asked how he could get involved. He was told they were in the
early stages of raising capital to launch their business, that it was valued at
a million dollars and they’d love to have him as an investor. In what was to
become the watershed moment of his life, Antonio responded by saying, ‘Well, I
have $10,000 that was earmarked for a second-hand car but I might consider
putting it into your company instead. What would that get me?’ He was told it
would give him a one per cent ownership stake and so they agreed that they had
a deal.
***
A counterpoint to Antonio’s story is that of Ronald
Wayne. Wayne had worked alongside Steve Jobs at Atari and became one of the
co-founders of Apple with Jobs and Wozniak. At forty years of age, Wayne was
almost twice as old as his young co-founders and so he agreed to essentially
act as the venture’s ‘adult supervisor’ in return for which he was given a ten
per cent stake in the nascent company. Among other things Wayne drew up the
partnership agreement between the three, drafted the first company logo and
wrote the Apple 1 manual. For a variety of reasons, however, Wayne just didn’t
feel that things were going to work out, and also didn’t particularly enjoy
working with Jobs, so after only a couple of months Wayne called it quit and
relinquished his stock in the company for a one-time pay-out of $800. Had he
toughed it out and hung in there, that stock would today have been worth close
to fifty billion dollars! So was it bad luck or bad judgement? Maybe a bit of
both. But Antonio was no Ronald Wayne and had been astute enough never to sell
a single Google share. He never got the used car but that $10,000 is now worth
billions of dollars. In terms of making the luck work for him, Antonio had to
have the smarts to recognize an opportunity when it came along and greater
still the guts to risk his $10,000.
***
On dog fights between small and big companies, Richard
quotes “What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight – it’s
the size of the fight in the dog.”
Virgin has always reveled in being the little guy chasing
much larger.
He explains how a David might actually win against a Goliath.
David has to know that to fight Goliath, he has to know
what his strengths are and what the strengths of Goliath are. David cannot win
the game Goliath is playing so he has to redefine the rules and play it as it
fits him.
What routinely fools a Goliath is when, instead of going
after their market share, someone instead goes out to create a whole new niche
market. They are well practiced in defending their turf against unimaginative intruders.
This is usually achieved with such no-brainers as deep discounting, leveraging
their distribution clout or what can best be described as simple bully tactics.
But when someone arrives on the scene with a hybrid
product that they cannot pigeonhole – as was the case with the biblical David’s
slingshot – it can cause massive confusion in the enemy’s ranks. When all else
is equal then the big guys will usually find a way to outmuscle any pesky
upstart, so that is why the newcomer has got to make sure that the playing
field is anything but level. You always know it’s working when they cry foul!
All it takes for the status quo of mediocrity to be
shaken up is for one little outsider to step into the ring and start punching
above their weight.
***
Next few slides are about Innovation.
“INNOVATION IS NOTHING NEW. Ask any passing bumblebee.”
And this is quite interesting to know that according to
all the laws of aerodynamics, the humble bumblebee should not be capable of
flight.
The story I am going to tell is about the greatest
innovator who has ever lived – Leonardo da Vinci. This dates back to the 1500s.
Da Vinci was called in from Italy to Constantinople to work on building a
bridge that was going to be an unprecedented feat of engineering, a single-span
240-metre-long bridge.
Excited by the challenge, da Vinci set to work and the
dramatic result was an incredibly futuristic bridge design that with the use of
unheard geometric concepts produced a soaring single-span bridge that was truly
a work of art.
The engineering and architectural experts of the day were
appalled and condemned it as an abomination and a work of fantasy that could
never possibly work.
As everyone knows, obtaining planning approvals in a city
can be a long and frustrating task, but in da Vinci’s case 500 years is pushing
the envelope! Setting new standards in ‘better late than never’, Leonardo’s
sixteenth-century bridge design (with a few updates based on
twenty-first-century building materials) was finally given the go-ahead in 2012
by the city of Istanbul. But history is littered with da Vinci-like tales of
how the greatest innovators of their times have had to struggle to get their
ideas past the power of incumbents who can only accept those things that fit
into their existing pigeonholes, and the established theory.
***
Next, we tell the story of Sara Blakely. Sara had been
wearing tights with the legs cut off but always had problems with them riding
up her leg. So she started looking into how she could make a shaper that
worked. The birth of Spanx was a classic entrepreneurial case study where if
you can’t find something you want, then go out and create it.
On naming the company “Spanx”, she writes it was a
branding decision. Sara had heard somewhere that names with a K in them sold
well, so she came up with the name Spanks, a name that a lot of people in the
Bible belt found too offensive. So she put the garments in a red box and
changed the spelling to Spanx with an X – people were still offended, but she
thought it was more fun.
Started in 1998, company’s sales were pushing $700
million by 2012 and Sara owned a brand name that, rather like Google is to
search engines, has become generic to the market segment she created.
***
On hiring and keeping people, Richard writes about Chris
Rossi and Xiki Baloyi.
Chris Rossi who is now Virgin Atlantic’s senior
vice-president in the USA started out working behind the check-in counter when
the company first began flying to Boston in 1991.
At Virgin Active in South Africa, Xiki Baloyi began her
career in 2003 as a receptionist – she had trained in sports management but
couldn’t find a position in that field. But as in 2013, she was named the
assistant general manager of Virgin’s new Alice Lane Health Club.
Passion is the key to working at Virgin. It is innate to
person, you cannot infuse it, either it is there or it is not.
On keeping good talent, we have some points brought out
by the study ‘Project Oxygen’ at Google.
It says the three top reasons people quit are:
1 à
They didn’t feel enough of a connection to the company’s mission, or their
individual contribution was not considered important.
2 à
They didn’t get along with or respect their co-workers.
3 à
They thought they had a terrible boss.
***
Next slide talks about the challenges that our female
folks face in the corporate world.
The numbers from EU say that the percentage of female
board members stands somewhere between 20 to 25 per cent for the various
countries in the EU region.
And, according to the 2013 Fortune 1000 list of
CEOs, only 4.6 per cent (that is, 46) are women and that number has been
virtually stagnant for a decade.
***
Richard is a person with “get-go” attitude.
To explain how leadership works, how decisions are made,
he has devised three categories into which a business manager falls.
First and foremost, there is the serial procrastinator. This
is the one with a perennial approach of ‘Why make any decision today when I can
put it off until tomorrow?’ The type: ‘SCREW IT – DO I REALLY HAVE TO
DECIDE?’
The second personality type is the one into which Richard
is most likely to fall. ‘SCREW IT – WE’LL DO IT – TODAY’
The third ‘SCREW
IT – LET’S THINK SOME MORE ABOUT IT’, probably the smartest all-round
approach is what I like to call ‘the art of orchestrated procrastination’. This
is an acquired discipline whereby the first thing to be addressed as part of
the decision-making function is timing. Is it a ‘carpe diem’ situation or not?
If you don’t seize the day, might the window of opportunity close or might it
be filled by a start-up or existing competitor?
That’s all for the day, thank you, have fun!
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