Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Richard Branson
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Foreword
1. Capitalism 24902
2. Stop Saving, Start Reinventing
3. If You’ve Got It – Use It!
4. The Next Frontier and Beyond
5. Gaia Rocks
6. The Global Village
7. The Power of Communities
Postscript
I Rest My Case Studies
Copyright Acknowledgements
Epilogue
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ALSO BY RICHARD BRANSON
Losing My Virginity:
The Autobiography
Screw It, Let’s Do It:
Lessons in Life and Business
Business Stripped Bare:
Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur
Reach for the Skies:
A Personal History of Aviation
This book is dedicated to my children, Holly and Sam, and their children who will hopefully see that we did the right thing and made sure that we screwed business as usual to protect this beautiful world we live in to ensure that everyone in our global village has the chance to live the wonderful life they deserve.
Just by buying this book you’ve already made a difference as 100 per cent of my royalties are going to our not for profit foundation, Virgin Unite, to support entrepreneurial initiatives on the front lines.
Thanks for helping to spread the word and join us in screwing business as usual.
To get involved, join in at:
Web
virginunite.com/screwbusinessasusual
@virginunite #sbau
Facebook.com/VirginUnite
ON THE NIGHT of 22nd August 2011, this book was complete. I had written the last words to the Epilogue. Hurricane Irene – at that point still only a tropical storm – was raging, but we have lived through many big storms, so it was life as normal.
After a big family party in our beautiful home on Necker Island with our guests, Kate Winslet and her party, we all retired to bed. My mother, Eve and my daughter Holly and my nephews and nieces were sleeping in the great house, and even though there was room for twenty people, it was full, so with my wife Joan and son Sam we battled the storm and saw the island illuminated by great flashes of lightning and headed a short distance up the hill.
I admit it: I had drunk a lot of wine, so I was a bit confused when I heard explosions and Sam shouting, ‘Fire! Fire! At the great house,’ and then he was running like a deer, leaping barefoot through thick cactus plants to reach the great house. To my horror, the orange glow of a massive fire was reflected off the rain, flames were sweeping hundreds of feet into the night sky, urged on by the high winds. Naked, as I was, I raced out after Sam and ran straight into a cactus bush. It hurt, but I barely felt it.
Through the fire and the smoke, people emerged. Kate Winslet, carrying my mother down the stairs, followed by Kate’s two children, and Holly, all sooty-faced with her cousins. One by one, my family and guests emerged into the wind and the rain. What began as a complete nightmare turned into utter relief as we realised everyone was safe.
The lightning we had seen the night before had been the cause of the fire when it struck the Balinese roof. Sam was in tears, hugging everyone. For minutes we both thought we had lost our family and the relief of finding them sooty, but safe, overwhelmed him. Holly called the manager – who was in another part of the island. The Bransons are renowned for their practical jokes and at first he didn’t believe her. (The last words our manager had said to our deputy manager on leaving the island the day before had been, ‘Don’t burn the house down’.) When he came, instantly he and the staff swung into action, fighting the flames, so they wouldn’t spread further through the undergrowth.
The rest of us huddled together in my outhouse watching the 90mph winds fan the massive flames that completely ignored the torrential rain. It’s at moments like these one realises how unimportant ‘stuff’ is. All our family and friends had survived. They had lost all their possessions and were standing in their underwear and bare feet. That house represented so many years of memories for me and my family. The children had grown up there, Joan and I had welcomed friends; we had had some amazing times. I could almost see my father, Ted, who had died recently, leaning back in one of the comfortable rattan chairs in the great room, sipping wine and laughing at a joke. Everything was still so fresh in all our minds and yet no fire can take away the memories or the wonderful projects that have been conceived there.
‘Come on,’ I rallied everyone the next morning. ‘Let’s have breakfast and we can talk about the new house we’ll build.’ We all pitched in with ideas for the new house that, like a phoenix, would rise from the ashes of the old one. It would be more innovative, more beautiful, even more inspiring. We would have many more memorable times and some great parties. Joan and I had married on Necker and Holly and her lucky (!) fiancé, Fred Andrews, would also be married on this magical island in December on the exact spot we had – even if it had to be on the ashes of the old house.
I hope new generations of our family will come to know and love a new great house as much as we have. The future is still ours to hold and share.
Richard Branson
September 2011
Can we bring more meaning to our lives and help change the world at the same time?
Richard Branson, at his brilliant and motivating best, reveals how with his exciting new vision for the future. It is time to turn capitalism upside down - to shift our values, to switch from a profit focus to caring for people, communities and the planet.
Inspiring for everyone, Screw Business As Usual shows how easy it is for both businesses and individuals to embark on a whole new way of doing things, solving major problems and turning our work into something we both love and are proud of.
Sir Richard Branson is a hugely successful international entrepreneur, adventurer and icon, and is founder of the Virgin Group. His autobiography, Losing My Virginity, and his books on business, Screw It, Let’s Do It and Business Stripped Bare, are all international bestsellers. He is also the author of Reach for the Skies. He lives on Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands and is married to Joan and has two grown-up children - Holly and Sam.
OVER THE LAST few decades as I’ve started up one exciting business after another, I have often thought that life and work could not get any better. In writing this book, however, I’ve come to realise that we’ve really been on a dummy run, preparing ourselves for the greatest challenge and opportunity of our lifetime. We’ve a chance to take a shot at really working together to turn upside down the way we approach the challenges we are facing in the world and to look at them in a brand new, entrepreneurial way. Never has there been a more exciting time for all of us to explore this next great frontier where the boundaries between work and higher purpose are merging into one, where doing good really is good for business. In this book I’ll share some great stories about people who are already leading the way. We’ve learned a great deal from some of these pioneers as the Virgin Group continues on its journey to transform itself into a force for good for people and for the planet. I’ll also share some of our own Virgin Group stories and, I hope, help you learn from some of the many successes and (yes we do have them at Virgin too) the occasional failure we’ve had along the way.
First and foremost, I have written this book for the new wave of emerging entrepreneurs as well as for existing business people who are transforming their organisations, at the same time as trying to develop a business and to make a living, trying to do more to help people and to help the planet. It reflects a vibrant and very marked sea change from the way business always used to be done, when financial profit was the only driving force. Today, people aren’t afraid to say, Screw business as usual! – and show they mean it.
The other day I was speaking to James Kydd, a former marketing director of Virgin Media in the UK, and he was talking about how this new attitude is wired into the next generation. ‘Today you’ve got an emerging generation of young people who have a perspective that’s different from the one that politicians and many industry leaders have,’ James said. ‘They have a more balanced view. Just making money, in order simply to give it away, is out of date. There’s a massive generational shift occurring that will blur the distinction between doing good and doing business.’ I couldn’t agree more. I constantly meet a growing army of entrepreneurs around the world, and when they ask me if I have one single message which will help them, I tell them it’s this: doing good can help improve your prospects, your profits and your business; and it can change the world. Fabio Barbosa, the Chairman of the Board of Directors and former CEO of Santander Brasil, recently summed it up beautifully in an interview with Upsides magazine: ‘It is becoming more and more clear that there is no incompatibility between doing business in an ethical and transparent manner and achieving good financial results. This “false dilemma” needs to be eliminated from business talk. Our social and environmental risk analysis at Santander has shown that, in the long run, companies with adequate environmental policies, well-defined labour relations and a balanced relationship with the community end up achieving more consistent financial results and establishing a more attractive brand name. It is in the company’s own interest to adopt corporate governance policies in line with the development of the country.’
It’s amazing how I keep coming across the same message, from bustling global cities, small towns in rural England, to the townships of South Africa and to small villages in India, to G8 climate conferences, to new medical centres, to schools. And the message is the same everywhere: we must change the way we do business. In the townships enthusiastic young people are grabbing opportunity by the scruff of the neck to develop their own businesses as a way out of poverty; women in small villages are funding new opportunities with loans as tiny as $15 from microfinance organisations; entrepreneurs in emerging markets are creating enterprises that respond to issues such as lack of sanitation and electricity; successful businesses such as cleaning care company ‘method’ are emerging and existing giants such as GE have made millions by reinventing their product offerings – at the same time as protecting the planet. Now I am sorry if this is going to smack of the ultimate in name-dropping, but this is a subject that is also discussed at Buckingham Palace. (This reminds me of a lovely joke Archbishop Desmond Tutu once told me: ‘People keep accusing me of name-dropping. Only last week I was at Buckingham Palace and the Queen said to me, “Arch, you’re name-dropping again.”’) Anyway, I was recently fortunate enough to be invited to dine there with a cross section of guests to meet Barack Obama and what was it that the Queen and the President of the United States were talking about so animatedly? They were discussing climate change and foreign policy challenges in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya, as well as the best ways to address declining living standards and to rebuild post-crash economies.
It’s no mere coincidence that so many people are talking about the same thing, and, more interestingly, driving the change. They are doing so because, in our newly interconnected world, no one can any longer ignore the issues we are facing. The best bit is that people are finally starting to realise that it’s not about throwing charity at issues – it’s about working in partnership with people on the front lines to turn those issues into opportunities. Change is happening.
People often associate me with challenges, with trying to break records and occasionally my neck by sailing the Atlantic or flying a balloon in a jet stream at two hundred miles an hour, or going into space with Virgin Galactic. But this book isn’t just about fun and adventure and exceeding one’s wildest dreams (although, of course, there will be some of that!). It’s a different kind of business book. It’s about revolution. My message is a simple one: business as usual isn’t working. In fact, it’s ‘business as usual’ that’s wrecking our planet. Resources are being used up; the air, the sea, the land – are all heavily polluted. The poor are getting poorer. Many are dying of starvation or because they can’t afford a dollar a day for life-saving medicine. We have to fix it – and fast. Even people who say they don’t believe in climate change, or who simply don’t care about pollution, poverty and war – out of sight for them is out of mind – admit that people everywhere are mucking up things.
Despite this, I wake up in the morning feeling positive. I feel positive because I have a great belief that we – ordinary people everywhere – not only want to do the right thing, but we will do the right thing. We will fix things, not just because we have no choice, but because this life and this world are all we have. As former Costa Rican President José María Figueres, my esteemed colleague in the Carbon War Room, says, ‘There is no Planet B.’
All my life I have thrived on challenges; they’re what drive me, whether in business or at play. Writing this book has been a huge challenge because I feel it’s very important to get this message across. The message is stark and simple: things have to change.
In this book I will discuss why things have to change – what they must change from, what they must change to. So far, business, or capitalism, for the most part, has been a means of making money for the directors of a company and its shareholders, rarely about doing good. The means by which that money has been made have not been as important as the end result – the damage that might be inflicted on humanity and the environment. We must work hard to change that.
People are also becoming more aware of unfairness. It’s not OK that nearly half the world’s population lives on less than $2 a day and that two out of three of these people have no access to clean drinking water. This imbalance is not just isolated to the poorer nations of the world; in wealthy countries like the US more than two million teenagers live on the streets. We’re all aware of these statistics; luckily we now live in a new world where one of the great benefits of technology is that people are now directly connected to those suffering as a result of this unfairness and are no longer prepared to accept that it’s OK. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to acquire wealth must play a role in looking at how we use these means to make the world a far better place. It’s not about martyrdom, it’s about balance and compassion and figuring out how we can build new ways to live together, as a truly global village, that allow everyone to prosper. I’m not talking about an uprising, or armed conflict in a Marxist sense – I’m talking about the power of the ordinary, everyday person to become entrepreneurs and change-makers to set up their own businesses, to seek their own fortune and be in control of their own lives, to say – screw business as usual, we can do it! We can turn things upside down and make a huge difference.
Throughout the book, the power of communications tools, from mobile phones to the internet, shows how ordinary people can speak out now, where before they didn’t have the means to allow them to do so; now, if they don’t like something about the way a business is run they’ll say so. As they did in the Arab Spring revolutions of early 2011, they’ll join protests, they’ll blog and tweet. No governments or businesses will be able to hide behind secrecy and jargon any longer. Ordinary people control their brands and their destinies.
Ordinary people have enormous power – let them unleash it. In this book I want to get a particular message over: learn what you can do and – as NIKE would say – just do it.
I know it can be done because, in my way, I did it myself. I was a fledgling entrepreneur when I was nine years old, and while my efforts were more miss than hit, with the occasional dose of ‘tough love’ my wonderful family encouraged me and believed in me; by the time I was fifteen I was well on the path to making my own way in life with my very first enterprise, a magazine for students.
When things don’t work they have to be fixed. In this book I go on to say that if business helped to break it then business must play a role in fixing it. But relax, prophesying doom and gloom is simply not my style. Instead I will attempt to describe how I think business can help fix things and create a more prosperous world for everyone. I happen to believe in business because I believe that business can be a force for good. By that I mean doing good is good for business.
Let me elaborate on the meaning of that statement. In a nutshell, I mean that by doing good – doing the right thing – businesses will prosper. Doing the right thing can be profitable, as will be made clear by some of the stories about people and organisations that are already doing it. It’s the core message of this book. I often say, ‘Have fun and the money will come.’ I still believe that, but now I am saying, ‘Do good, have fun and the money will come.’
Each chapter in this book will show examples of how all kinds of businesses, from commercial enterprises to those run by social entrepreneurs, can grow and thrive by doing the right thing – no matter what size they are.
A wise professor of economics once said, ‘Bet on people doing good things.’ I believe he was spot-on. People inherently want to do the right thing. It’s what makes us human.
The words ‘doing good’ mean many different things for different people. In this book ‘doing good’ means not damaging the environment, not just not polluting but undoing the pollution of the last couple of centuries since the Industrial Revolution. Restoring harmony with nature. But it is not all about doing less harm; our task is also to improve the lives of people and the planet through business. It means helping those less fortunate to build a way of earning a living so that they can live the life of dignity they – that all human beings – deserve. It’s a basic, absolutely essential right of every human being to be given the means to earn a living, to keep one’s self and family in food and shelter with one’s medical needs being met. It means reinventing how we live in the world to create a far more balanced, healthy and peaceful place. I believe that the revolutionary new form of Capitalism 24902 (don’t worry I will explain it later) described in this book will operate in such a socially responsible way that it will give poor people economic freedom and that new opportunities for entrepreneurship will arise.
Even as a child I had a strong sense of social responsibility and this has grown over the years so that today I spend as much time on using my entrepreneurial skills to help solve issues as on running the business. Virgin has a foundation, Virgin Unite, and we do a huge amount of work looking at new entrepreneurial approaches to issues. You’ll hear from some of the wonderful partners Unite works with throughout this book.
Describing my philanthropic methods somebody recently said: ‘Oh, Richard, well yes he does do things differently.’ I would like to think that they meant that I don’t donate cash willy-nilly, without questioning who is getting their hands on it and what they’re using it for. I run Virgin Unite just as I would any other business, making sure that our investments have the best possible social and environmental return. I also feel strongly that it’s not all about money – in fact often the money is the least important bit. It’s about people using their skills and figuring out ways to use the assets of their businesses to drive not only profits but a better world. Writing a cheque might impact hundreds of people’s lives; mobilising your whole business to drive change can impact millions of lives, and give a whole new life purpose to all the people who work in your company. It is this philosophy that is brought to life in this book through the stories of individuals who are taking a radically different path towards a new frontier for business, doing the right thing by people and by our planet and effecting change for the good.
As I write these words for this book here on my home of Necker Island, I sometimes wonder if I’m dreaming. At times my life does seem unreal; I’m sure I’ll wake up one day. Earlier this year I had a quite amazing week, one in which I experienced, quite literally, the depths and heights of this planet and of adventure and excitement. I am truly blessed and amazed at my good fortune. We launched the first Virgin submarine at the start of the week – it is designed to descend to the depths of the ocean – and by the end of the same week there I was flying in a Virgin America plane over San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in tandem with Virgin Galactic’s two spaceships.
Oh, and in the same week we also bought Pluto. No, not the cartoon dog, I actually mean the dwarf planet Pluto. On 1 April 2011 I called a press conference and, with a remarkably straight face, made this announcement: ‘Virgin has expanded into many territories over the years, but we have never had our own planet before. This could pave the way for a new age in space tourism.’ It took a few moments for the penny to drop!
The plane I flew into Virgin America’s new LEED Certified sustainable terminal at San Francisco’s International Airport was emblazoned with the tongue-in-cheek bumper sticker ‘My Other Ride is a Spaceship’. Many Virgin Galactic and Virgin America people had joined me on the flight, along with a group of young people from KIPP, Knowledge is Power Programme, which runs excellent public charter schools for low-income children, and students from Student Launch, our partners linked with the Spaceport in New Mexico, who were being mentored by Virgin America pilots and engineers. Both the young people and our staff have learned a tremendous amount from each other. Another group which joined us on the flight was some future astronauts who have worked with the teams from Virgin Galactic and Virgin Unite to start a not-for-profit initiative called Galactic Unite. On that one day alone they raised over $385,000 to support young people from low-income families and give them the chance to help encourage careers in maths, science, engineering and technology – including mentoring programmes with Virgin America engineers and pilots. All of our aviation businesses have also teamed up to focus on how we can minimise our carbon output, from innovative new approaches to weight reduction on the plane through to investing in new types of biofuels (more on this later). To me, this is a wonderful example of how this new Capitalism 24902 can work: driving change into the core of our businesses and partnering with our community and great front-line organisations to make change happen in everything we do.
I hope you will be as inspired as I’ve been while gathering the stories for this book. Each of us really can drive change and change is important, now more than ever. We would also love to hear from you about your own stories, as well as others who have inspired you. We’ve set up web, Twitter and Facebook discussion spaces that you’ll see mentioned at the end of each chapter. At the end of the book you will also find some great ways to get involved in helping radically change the way you view your business.
One word of warning however. Until you read the book and can explain its subject matter, you might want to think twice about leaving something entitled Screw Business as Usual lying around on your desk!
Happy reading …
‘I think fifteen years ago people started talking about corporate social responsibility and it was thin. It was a marketing strategy or something that the chairman said we had to do and people didn’t buy it. This time round to me it feels like it’s come from the grassroots up. It’s come from the fact that everyone who works in business is also a citizen. We read the newspapers, we watch the news, we go and watch An Inconvenient Truth, we are aware of what’s happening in the world. How can you then go about your day job and not care?’ – Richard Reed, Innocent Drinks
I HAVE ALWAYS loved the question, ‘How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?’ My answer to that would be ‘in my twenties’, although with her signature Glaswegian honesty, my lovely wife Joan would almost certainly add, ‘No, Richard, you just act like you’re in your twenties which is not the same thing.’ Well, believe it or not I am in my twenties, it’s just a question of the multiple that must be applied.
Contrary to many people of my age, however, I make a point of enjoying my birthdays and always attempt to do something to make them memorable. This year was no different. (You’re barking mad, says Joan, as I fly across the Pacific in a flimsy balloon, or hike in the Arctic Circle with a team of dogs.)
So there I was, one blustery day in August 2010, hoping nobody would notice that I was hobbling as I advanced with tender, bare feet, clutching my surf board, across a sharp shingle beach on the south coast of England. With my daughter, Holly, my son, Sam, my teenage nephew, Ivo, and other friends and family members – twelve in all – we were ready to kite-surf across the English Channel. The plan was to get a world record, and the man from The Guinness Book of Records was on hand to observe our attempt.
As dangerous enterprises go, kite-surfing a mere twenty-four miles from England to France didn’t seem too difficult, particularly given my past apparently reckless efforts to kill myself. (Joan was determined not to be there while she became a widow during some of my more outlandish enterprises over the years. Usually she’d just take herself off home.) The weather was windy but the sun was shining when we waded into the choppy grey sea off Dungeness. I was looking forward to the challenge. Kite-surfing is my favourite sport. Nothing beats that glorious sense of freedom and the adrenalin rush you get as you skim across waves, powered by a beautiful kite soaring overhead. I would have preferred breaking the record in the azure seas of the Caribbean but to paraphrase the late Evel Knievel a challenge has to be risky, to be fun – doesn’t it?
There was a force 6 gale blowing which was strong enough to give us a chance of getting the record. But, ten miles into our journey, that had turned into a force 7 or 8 and the small chase boats had to turn back. Although I believed the kiters could have made it without the chase boats, I felt it unwise to take nephews, nieces and kids across the busiest shipping lane in the world and we returned to land for the day. The next day the weather was worse, so while we waited for it to break we did a little sight-seeing around the ancient town of Rye where we were staying, with its cobbled streets, secret tunnels and the ghosts of smugglers.
The previous day we had provided refreshments on the beach at Dungeness for our family and friends and the local lifeboat crew. Shopping at Jempson’s, a small grocery store in Peasmarsh near Rye, I’d been interested to see that they had a section labelled ‘Local Heroes’. This displayed good locally grown and locally produced food, from seasonable vegetables, soft summer fruits, hand-picked on surrounding farms, to home-baked cakes, and cheeses, sausages, pickles and jams and English wines. They sold organic and they sold Fair Trade. What’s more, the prices were impressively modest, compared with city prices or those of the big chain stores. This family-run grocery business, I learned, bought direct from a distribution cooperative, from south coast farmers and other small suppliers and, without high transport costs, passed their saving on to the customer. Everyone gained. The store gained customer loyalty and the customers got fresh, wholesome produce at a decent price. I also learned that the company supported a handful of small charities, sponsored and selected by the staff.
In this rural market town I’d come across a good example of how business should be run in a responsible way that gives back to the community and does its best not to harm the planet. This growing sense of change is bubbling up around us. I considered our recent adventures on the beach. Many of us had been wearing warm water-ski clothing made by Finisterre, a small company based in Cornwall on the far west coast of England. Finisterre’s gear is ecologically and sustainably made from pure wool and the company is run along lines that reflect a social awareness. So in just a couple of days I had come across two classic models of successful companies that were doing well while doing good.
This is exactly what I am hoping to promote in this book: to find out why we need to change the way we do business, and how that might best be done. I have always tried to be socially aware and have always felt strongly that everyone should have the same chance to thrive in life, which is probably why all my businesses have always focused on giving everyone a ‘fair go’, as they say in Australia. After starting Student magazine while I was still at school, I went on to open a student advisory centre where young people could walk in off the street and get information to help with problems such as venereal disease, psychiatric problems, pregnancy issues and birth control. That centre evolved to provide free mental health support and it still exists in London, on Portobello Road, where it has provided a service for more than forty years. During the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1987 we also set up Mates, a company that produced condoms to be sold at a low price. Profits were ploughed back into building awareness about HIV/AIDS. We even got the BBC to run their first ever advertisements, a cheeky play on that nerve-wracking moment when a young man goes to buy condoms and is mortified at having to ask for them from the girl behind the counter. This is still one of my favourite campaigns as it really helped to build awareness, and was a good reminder for all of us that humour can often be a far better way to change behaviour than just trying to scare the hell out of people. If Martin Luther King’s famous quote, ‘I have a dream’ had been ‘I have a nightmare’ it would never have been so successful.
As Virgin expanded, so did our ideas for treating the people who worked for us well, and for considering the environment. We’ve always had at our core a focus on our people and making sure that they are empowered to make decisions and feel part of a company that stands for something beyond making money. I’ve always believed that by taking care of people in my companies the rest will take care of itself. This can be something simple like allowing people to job share or giving them the chance to run their own show. This has worked for us and has also built a pretty special group of people around the world who are not only passionate about Virgin, but also about making a difference in the world. The great thing is that many entrepreneurial enterprises and businesses all over the world are now doing this instinctively and people everywhere are realising that they truly can make a difference every day, no matter how small the scale. In fact, a good socially aware business doesn’t have to be big to make an impact – it just has to have the right people in place. There are many small-scale businesses around the world – from the townships of Johannesburg, to the villages of India, to rural cheesemakers in France, to organic vineyards in Australia, to llama knitwear cooperatives in Ecuador – that are all changing the way business is done for the better. There are also some large multinational corporations that are starting to radically transform themselves to be a force for good. The people in all these organisations – large and small – have the combined power of a hurricane to effect change. It should no longer be just about typical ‘corporate social responsibility’ (or that horrible acronym CSR) where the ‘responsibility’ bit is usually the realm of a small team buried in a basement office – now it should be about every single person in a business taking responsibility to make a difference in everything they do, at work and in their personal lives.
The great thing is that, with technology, we’ve also become far more aware not just of what is happening in our own neighbourhood, but of what is happening on the other side of the world. This technology has also smashed through the top-down approach and shifted the power to the people. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Pam Omidyar who, along with her husband Pierre, the founder of eBay, joined us in providing initial funding and support for a project you will hear about later on called The Elders. A couple of years ago I was travelling in Morocco with Pam and Pierre, and Pierre’s words about this new paradigm shift stuck with me. He said: ‘Long-term sustainable change happens if people discover their own power. The key is moving the centre of gravity in the decision-making, moving it closer to people in the community, in the field, and so forth – and away from a centrally directed, top-down approach. For the first time in human history, technology is enabling people to really maintain those rich connections with much larger numbers of people than ever before.’
There are names for this new approach to business – from Capitalism 2.0 to philanthrocapitalism. None of them has yet captured the essence or the enormity and potential of this exciting new shift we need to make. At a recent Virgin Unite event we had a bit of a brainstorming session and, after a drink or two and much debating, came up with the name that we now use to describe this new type of business: Capitalism 24902. OK it may sound a little bit like Beverly Hills 90210 but I assure you it is anything but. So, what on earth does that mean? Well, we started talking about how the name had to capture the new level of responsibility that each of us had for others in the global village and how this needed to be a movement that went beyond a handful of businesses or one country. When someone mentioned that the circumference of the earth is 24,902 miles, Capitalism 24902 was born! Very simple really, it does what it says on the tin – that every single business person has the responsibility for taking care of the people and planet that make up our global village, all 24,902 circumferential miles of it. For a long time I have been convinced that this is the way forward if the planet as we know it, and life as we know it, is to survive. I’m not just talking about the disaster facing people and the planet because of climate change; I’m addressing one of the underlying reasons why the climate is changing and a significant threat to humanity – our rapid depletion of our natural resources. In the next couple of decades we could soon end up without oil, minerals, water or fish. Sadly, we are, as I write, already seeing the worst drought in sixty years in eastern Africa, causing monumental suffering in countries like Somalia. Unless we move to Capitalism 24902 rapidly, we are certain to see more wars on a wider scale as people fight over land, food, water and fuel.
This book has been seven years in the making. It’s the story of my seven-year journey towards realising that, while business has been a great vehicle for growth in the world, neither Virgin nor many other businesses have been doing anywhere near enough to stop the downward spiral we all find ourselves in; and that in many cases, as demonstrated by the recent financial crises in the world, we have actually been causing that spiral to turn ever faster. We are all part of the problem: we waste, we squander and, to put it bluntly, we screw up. Natural resources are being exhausted faster than they can be replenished. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, many natural resources – such as oil, forests and minerals – can never be replenished. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. Capitalism as we know it, which essentially started around the time of the Industrial Revolution, has certainly created economic growth in the world and brought many wonderful benefits to people, but all this has come at a cost that is not reflected on the balance sheet. The focus on profit being king has caused significant negative, unintended consequences. For over a century and a half cheap labour, damaged lives, a destroyed planet and polluted seas were all irrelevant when set against the need for profit. But this is changing.
This is why a new kind of capitalism has slowly been gathering force in the last ten or twenty years. In the 1930s a back-to-the-land movement started; in the sixties and seventies, there was peace, love and brown rice and flower power. A modern green movement started in the eighties and early nineties, originating in Germany and Scandinavia, but it never grew sufficiently. Those movements focused on trying to fix pollution while turning to recycling and organic food as a healthy alternative. Lots of local little green cooperatives and organic smallholdings sprung into being. But few people allowed such developments to change their behaviour or stopped to ask, ‘How will we survive when we run out of everything?’ It’s only fairly recently that we’ve realised that on a geographical scale minerals and other natural resources are being depleted alarmingly quickly. Many scientists believe that in some areas this will happen in our lifetime.
James Lovelock is one of those scientists. He is someone who has for years been brave enough to stand up and warn us about the dangerous path we are on. I was having lunch at James’s home one day with my friend and colleague Will Whitehorn and he was saying that rather than thinking about how we can continue to live on our ‘host’, the earth, we are rapidly killing it, which will eventually lead to our own demise. James’s view is: ‘A billion could live off the earth; six billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.’
To understand why this depletion is taking place so rapidly, take a simple item that many people would probably struggle without – a laptop computer. The average laptop weighs about ten pounds, but it took more than ten pounds of raw materials to make. In fact, if you count everything processed and distilled into those ten pounds, your laptop weighs not ten pounds, not a hundred pounds, but a staggering 40,000 pounds. It contains minerals extracted from mines, using incredible quantities of fuel, itself the product of drilling and mining. Year after year, our laptops become lighter and more powerful – but the ways raw materials are extracted and refined and brought together to make a product aren’t much cleaner or more sophisticated today than they were forty years ago. This is changing.
William A McDonough has been a pioneer in working out how we reinvent the way we make things based on learning from our natural systems. I really clicked with his view that it’s not about doom and gloom and stopping growth; rather, it is about making different things in a much smarter way by listening to and learning from Mother Nature. I was lucky enough to have him as a guest on Necker for one of our initial Carbon War Room gatherings. He gave an inspiring talk and opened with these words: ‘Imagine a world in which all the things we make, use and consume provide nutrition for nature and industry – a world in which growth is good and human activity generates a delightful, restorative ecological footprint.’ All the guests sat mesmerised for the next hour as Bill took us through some work he was doing to show that urban architecture can combine the beauty of natural systems to make it far more effective, efficient and aesthetically beautiful, with zero impact on the environment. He showed us buildings that were alive with amazing vertical and roof farms, harvesting the sun for energy, fresh air and flowering plants everywhere. His strong belief is that the issue we’ve faced since the Industrial Revolution is one of design and that we have the opportunity to change this by learning from Mother Nature and her three billion years of research. I’ll share some stories about a few companies that are following this path later in the book.
Seven years ago, when my journey began, I thought I was doing reasonably well as an entrepreneur and as a caring human being. My business life was running smoothly and my personal life was very happy. I believe firmly in delegation and good people were running each of Virgin’s three hundred companies worldwide. These managers were so competent that on average it often took me just a few minutes each week on the phone, checking in with them. They could reach me at any time if there was a problem. I always try to see everyone during the course of a year. But, essentially, things were running so smoothly that on the whole I felt very comfortable spending more time on my beloved Necker.
But something was missing. As I grew older it seemed that I wasn’t making a big enough difference, particularly given my own incredible good fortune. I went from feeling content that things were going well in my life and in business, and satisfied that in many ways I was contributing to society, to realising that I hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of what needed to be done to help ensure the survival of the planet and life as we know it. I was also very aware that there was too much poverty in the world. Despite great affluence in some parts of the planet, in other parts people were still suffering and dying of famine and diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS. I had always wanted Virgin to be a strong role model of social entrepreneurship, but now I knew we would have to do more than lip service to help drive change and get everyone across all of our businesses to be part of that change.
Many good and very bright individuals are working hard, and have been doing so for some time, not only to warn people and governments that we can’t continue to deplete the world’s resources as if they are everlasting, but that we have to do something about it. But now everyone needs to add their voice and energy to stop the perfect storm building up ahead of us. All our combined voices and all our energy are needed if we’re to make a real difference. And I have come to realise that this effort is actually good for business. It makes people and businesses better off. The good news is, businesses that are taking this path are also starting to see the rewards, clearly demonstrated by some of the tracking being done by the global business tracking company FTSE: ‘Companies that consistently manage and measure their responsible business activities outperformed their FTSE 350 peers on total shareholder return in seven out of the last eight years.’
One of the people who helped crystallise the level of urgency and the scale of change that needs to happen was my good friend Peter Gabriel. Peter and I go back a long way, to when he was the front man in the band Genesis. Virgin signed Genesis in 1983, a couple of years before – with great sadness – I sold the label to EMI in order to raise capital for my fledgling airline. I’m pleased to say Peter and I remained friends. But during the years when I was working hard to develop Virgin as a worldwide company, Peter was marching to a different drumbeat. He became heavily involved with the peace movement. He was an early supporter of Amnesty International and pioneered and performed in all twenty-eight of their Human Rights Concerts. In 1986, he performed his hauntingly powerful song ‘Biko’ on the Amnesty Conspiracy of Hope tour. Steve Biko was a student leader who’d been involved with the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM). He’d coined the phrase ‘black is beautiful’ and ultimately gave his life to help stop the horrors of apartheid.
The song had – and still has – a huge impact, not least on Peter himself. He has called it a calling card, showing his willingness to be heavily involved in strong social issues. It led to his involvement with World Music. It was the concept of World Music that revived a long-held conviction in him that if the world could be seen as a global village people would connect more. But he always said that he still didn’t fully appreciate what a social entrepreneur was until about ten years ago – and, to be honest, neither did I. In the lyrics of ‘Biko’ were the words ‘business as usual’, a phrase that came to have deeper resonance for me.
My mother, Eve, has always believed passionately in giving people a chance in life. When we first started our foundation, Virgin Unite, she was on a plane within days to kick-start an initiative in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco to help young girls create their own grassroots businesses. When I was growing up, while I didn’t necessarily agree with the concept, she was firmly of the philosophy that happy and healthy children were the ones who were kept busy running errands and helping neighbours. In those days, just after the Second World War, helping the neighbours or the community wasn’t considered charity; it was normal behaviour. Charity did play a large part in everyone’s life and those without were helped by those with, but more often than not it wasn’t just a matter of dishing out money – our family wasn’t well off and pocket money was in short supply – it was performing a service. We happened to live in a small, close-knit village in Surrey where everyone knew everyone else’s business. My sisters were expected to help in the house, but if someone needed firewood chopped, a dog walked or a garden weeded, I was duly dispatched to perform that task. If I finished a job sooner than expected, I was sent off again to do something else. Lounging around in bed – even, in my case, with a badly damaged leg in plaster after a sports accident at school – was just not on.
My first conscious act of charity was when I took off my clothes and gave them to a tramp. It happened to be in busy Oxford Street in the middle of London when with my mother and sister we were all walking along trying to flog armfuls of the very first issue of Student magazine. I didn’t have a change of clothes handy, so I spent the rest of the day walking along a busy city pavement, wrapped in a scratchy blanket.
Mum shook her head despairingly, hiding a smile. ‘Oh dear, Ricky, what will you think of next? You’re not supposed to give your clothes away’ – while Dad chuckled, ‘Poor old tramp! All he wanted was some loose change and he got a set of infested clothes from you!’
At the time, I’d left Stowe when I was sixteen to start Student magazine (more on that later) and I and my friend and co-publisher, Jonny Holland-Gems were living in his parents’ scruffy basement just off Oxford Street, practically starving, and I well remember each time my mother dropped in with a ‘Red Cross’ picnic hamper, she’d say, ‘Have you washed recently?’ Meanwhile, upstairs, Jonny’s incredibly arty parents were entertaining the coolest people in London from most of the staff of Private Eye to the Garrick Club, many of whom wrote articles or granted us interviews. I’d never lived in London before, never dreamed any of this would be possible. For me, a shy only-just ex-schoolboy, it was mind-blowing.
Yes, it was 1967 – the Summer of Love – and Jonny and I were suddenly part of the glorious fun-filled Swinging Sixties. Unbelievably, Student opened doors we’d never imagined would open to us. Mick Jagger welcomed us into his home in Cheyne Walk – and I went weak at the knees when I saw Marianne Faithfull lounging in the living room, though she did very quickly vanish upstairs under our drooling gazes. We interviewed John Lennon and started by spouting some nonsense about TS Eliot and The Waste Land being like A Day in the Life to impress him, and he said with his flat Liverpool twang, ‘I don’t know about that. Not very hip on me culture, you know.’ But as well as interviewing icons, there were some incredible, iconic moments in the furore against the Vietnam War. I marched side by side through Central London with Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave (both of whom gave us good interviews) to protest the war outside the American Embassy; and campaigned with as much fervour to raise money for starving orphans in Biafra, which was really when the terrible plight of famine victims and wars were becoming more widely known to the public. Student magazine was developing a very high profile in a very short space of time. It was making waves. I was having huge amounts of fun, but my future as a campaigner for the less well-off and against unjustness was also being forged, right there in the streets of London in the magical flower power years and the fiery sixties when times were indeed a-changing.