Other highlights (27)
“But why do you think I have all those companies? They almost certainly wouldn’t be there had I not repeatedly dug my heels in and refused to spend my time on things I recognised as just not right for me.’”
“My approach to sailing around Necker is perhaps a pretty good analogy for my view on leadership in business. If your vision is to reach a distant beach where, because of the reefs surrounding it, no one has ever set foot, then the chances are that reading the same old charts as everyone else has used isn’t going to get you there either.”
“However, pushing the envelope and zagging when everyone else zigs is something that just seems to be part of my DNA, and to date it has worked pretty well for me – most of the time, at least.”
“‘Having a great time while building a highly diversified global business with an extended family of simply wonderful people’,”
“Sometimes, though, the power of the unspoken word can be a frighteningly powerful thing and my father’s studied silence with me 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 me feel more guilt-ridden and miserable than if he had berated me in front of her.”
“We lived just around the corner from a sweet shop and I’d been using my ill-gotten gains to buy chocolate, with Cadbury’s fruit and nut being my particular favourite. One day, though, I’d taken a much bigger ‘loan’ than usual from Dad’s wardrobe bank and promptly done my part to boost Cadbury’s shareholder value. The ‘old lady’ who owned the shop, who at the time was probably all of forty years old, quickly smelled a rat. She said nothing to me, but the next time I was in her shop in the company of my father she staggered me by blurting 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. He’s becoming quite my best customer – so I do hope he isn’t stealing it.’ I remember her words like it were yesterday and thinking, ‘Did she really have to put that zinger on the end?’ But then, just as I was thinking, ‘Oops, I’m really in for it now!’ my dad staggered me 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?’ I was even more surprised when, after we’d marched out of the shop, he never said another word about it.”
“taught me a life-lesson on the power of forgiveness and giving people a second chance.”
“Michael O’Leary, CEO of the Irish airline Ryanair, once described his ideal customer as ‘someone with a pulse and a credit card’ and in the same ‘Lunch with the Financial Times’ interview referred to the British Airports Authority as the ‘Evil Empire’ and the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority as a bunch of ‘cretins and twerps’. While nobody can question Ryanair’s incredible financial success (last time I checked the low-cost carrier had built a market cap of over $13 billion), being voted Europe’s ‘least liked’ airline by TripAdvisor subscribers is something that would not sit well with me no matter how good the bottom line looks.”
“was a lesson that stuck, and to this day I frequently have people say things to me like ‘I really don’t know how you could be so pleasant with those people’ or ‘If I were you I’d have been really angry about what they just did’, when in fact I had just bottled up my emotions.”
“From a leadership perspective, shepherding a company through each of these various stages of growth is not that different to bringing up a child. Just as raising a toddler is very different to keeping a teenager on track and the skill sets may change a little as the company gets older, the fundamentals of parenting and corporate leadership are very closely intertwined.”
“‘Ricky, as I’m sure you’ll agree, that wasn’t really one of your better performances out there this afternoon. In future just remember one thing: you’re guaranteed to miss every shot you don’t take.’”
“As is often the case, with the best will in the world, one can simply get too wrapped up in the creative process and forget to step back and see how whatever you’re working on is going to look from the customer’s perspective.”
“said, I am a huge believer in the old customer service mantra of, ‘First to know, first to handle.’ If someone can fix a problem on the spot it saves all kinds of angst for the customer plus time and expense for the company – just as importantly, an on-the-spot resolution more often than not will also keep a customer in the fold.”
“When I was hands-on CEO at Virgin Atlantic I did something similar with our staff. I’d write them a letter every month with an update on how things were going and – before cell phones and email – gave them my home address and home phone number if they wanted to get in touch with me. And, as with the Florida hotel manager, on the rare occasions they did I was always delighted to hear what they had to say.”
“John makes it part of his routine to do what the Australians call ‘going walkabout’ around the company. When he does this, one of many things that make the NBO different is John’s habit of not just saying ‘Hi, how are you?’ but instead taking the time to get into deep impromptu discussions with all level of employees and, importantly, acting on their feedback rather than telling them he’ll ‘consider it’ and moving on.”
“Anyway when John raised the subject in front of all the airline heads I was probably expected to be the one to quickly put this Qantas interloper in his place and say something like, ‘Sorry, but that is one area where we cannot go.’ On the contrary, other than John, I think I was the only one in the room who thought it made sense and so said, ‘Screw it, if that’s what you think you need then let’s do it.’ The result was a very different-looking sideways rendition of the logo that, in all honesty, some love and some don’t, but the updated treatment freshened up the brand and got us lots of media and consumer attention in the process.”
“As with John in Australia three years earlier, Craig’s hiring may have been a surprise to a few people who had thought Steve Ridgway’s successor (Steve had been Virgin Atlantic’s CEO for twelve years) was probably going to come from within the airline. Again, though, like in Australia, we opted to take someone from a big legacy carrier – it wasn’t the first time we went fishing at American, having hired David Cush from there to head up Virgin America some years earlier.”
“So don’t spend all your time obsessing over what the competition is up to – divert some of that energy to looking in the mirror to see how you appear to your employees, your competition and your customers.”
“‘Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.’ Colin Powell”
“The key to this statement by Colin Powell is that great leaders are not just simplifiers but that they can communicate to their entire audience in terms that are universally understood.”
“French mathematician Blaise Pascal summed up this conundrum when he famously wrote, ‘I am sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.’”
“some wonderfully helpful advice on speechmaking that has served me well over the years. It takes practice, but it can be done. Close out your mind to the fact that you’re on a stage with hundreds of people staring at you and instead imagine yourself in any personal comfort-zone like your dining room at home where you’re telling a story to a group of friends over dinner.”
“Sir Winston Churchill – how can you not love someone who, in a 1948 House of Commons speech, could say, ‘For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.’ Somewhat ironically, his words have been ‘massaged’ by history and the reinvented quote most often attributed to the great man is now, ‘History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.’”
“‘A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.’”
“Take this advice to heart. Even highly gifted speakers like Churchill would never push an audience into listening to him for more than twenty-five minutes or so. Extending a presentation beyond thirty minutes is really stretching the attention span of any audience.”
“Twain addressed this perfectly in 1899 when, speaking at a dinner given in his honour at London’s Whitefriars Club, he said: ‘But impromptu speaking – that is a difficult thing. I used to do it in this way. I used to begin about a week ahead, and write out my impromptu speech and get it by heart.’”
“Twain spoke about a rightly timed pause being every bit as critical and effective as choosing the right words. ‘The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.’”
