Serious Fun as Non-Negotiable Culture

“Chiseled into our heads every year at our management meeting was Murphy’s reminder that we could make honest mistakes, or miss our budgets, but if we put the company, or ourselves, in disrepute, there was no second chance at Capital Cities.”

“Be sure to pick a business you enjoy. Do not go for the biggest buck, but go where you will be happiest, because if you are happy, you are successful And do yourself a favor, get yourself involved in your community. Put something back. When you do well, do some good also. You will feel better about yourself. As my father used to say, do not do anything that would cost you a good night’s sleep! And finally, in your business career, don’t do anything that is ethically questionable. You will lose more than you could ever gain.””

“The difference in the attitudes of those who were owners and those who only felt like employees was clear to him. “If you get a guy with some of his money in a company, he’s going to do better than people who are getting a salary and bonus based on the size of the company,” declared Joseph, delivering the Drexel exegesis. “. . . We wanted to finance companies of the future by picking guys who were going to be successful entrepreneurs, and our main discipline was getting them to have their money in the company. And we insisted on it.””

“In line with the Drexel tenet that people work best when they have an ownership stake, Perelman had made Drapkin a principal in this deal. In June ’85, the board of Pantry Pride had loaned Drapkin money to buy Pantry Pride convertible debentures. For a lawyer to become a principal in a deal with a client was a first at Skadden and a practice not followed at any other major New York law firm. It enraged some of Drapkin’s partners, but it was a measure of his new clout.”

“Having what we like to call ‘serious fun’ is at the core of ‘the Virgin way’ and that’s something for which I will never apologise. Being passionately engaged and enjoying every minute of what you do is an attitudinal thing – a spark – that cannot be mandated, trained, put in a job description or an employee manual. It’s something that’s either in a person’s DNA or not, and as such has to come from within.”

“As you will (I hope) understand, one of the keys to ‘the way’ we do things is nothing more complex than listening – listening intently to everyone who has an opinion to share, not just the self-professed experts. It’s also about learning from each other, from the marketplace and from the mistakes that must be made in order to get anywhere that is original and disruptive. And perhaps most importantly, it’s about having fun with a capital F while we’re doing it.”