Richard Branson

"“At Forbes, we speak with many billionaires about how they earn, spend, and give away their money. There is a particular kind of billionaire who uses part of their fortune on adventures and explorations. For example, I’m thinking of Richard Branson’s record-breaking hot air balloon journey from Morocco to Hawaii and Jeff Bezos’ deep-sea expedition to find the engine from the Apollo 11 space rocket,” writes Upbin in one of the few longer interviews conducted with Frederik Paulsen. Upbin argues that none of the world’s super-rich can match Frederik Paulsen’s level when it comes to exploration. Paulsen was in New York at the time to receive an honorary award from the prestigious and eccentric adventure club The Explorers Club, where he is a member. The culinary dinner at the Waldorf Astoria consisted of goat eye martini, pickled bull penis, and roasted cockroaches from Madagascar."

"At Musk’s home one day, Payne walked into the bedroom. “The room was literally filled with books—biographies or stories about business luminaries and how they succeeded,” Payne said, “In fact, I remember sitting there and at the top of this stack was a book about Richard Branson. It kind of clicked to me that Elon was prepping himself and studying to be a famous entrepreneur. He had some superordinate goal that was driving him.”"

"Richard Branson has entered more than 100 different businesses through a process he calls “organic expansion.”"

"At Musk’s home one day, Payne walked into the bedroom. “The room was literally filled with books—biographies or stories about business luminaries and how they succeeded,” Payne said, “In fact, I remember sitting there and at the top of this stack was a book about Richard Branson. It kind of clicked to me that Elon was prepping himself and studying to be a famous entrepreneur. He had some superordinate goal that was driving him.”"

"here are a few everyday words and phrases that I strongly suggest using as often as possible. The first consists of seven little words that I sincerely believe might constitute one of the most powerful sentences a business leader can utter: ‘I’m not sure – what do you think?’"

"When a leader displays the self-confidence to effectively say, ‘Hey, I can’t be expected to have all the answers, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject’, it not only has a very humanising effect, but it also tells the employees that their opinions are respected and considered to be of value."

"‘Ipsum Sine Timore, Consectetur’"

"‘Let me get back to you on that’ When you truly don’t know the answer to a question, rather than making something up and possibly looking foolish in the process, this is absolutely the correct response, but only if you take a note of the question and then make certain that you do indeed get back to them with an answer in a timely manner. Even better, make a commitment that, ‘I will get back to you by X date.’"

"‘We’ve had better years’ This kind of negative half-statement is yet another often-heard cop-out of a comment. People want the truth, not some sugar-coated version of it. ‘Unfortunately last year was a bad one’ followed by an honest explanation as to what is going to be done to learn from it and ensure next year will be better is a much more positive approach."

"‘That’s certainly different!’ A statement such as this could be anything from a ringing endorsement to a stinging condemnation or even an admission of ‘I have no idea what the heck this is all about’. Differences, like ‘change’, can be good or bad and for every company that differentiates itself by its excellence there’s at least one other that achieves it by mediocrity."

"The story goes, that in the 1920s colleagues of Hemingway’s bet him that he couldn’t tell a complete story in just six words. They had to pay up on the bet after they read what some consider to be his finest work. What he wrote was the heartrending: ‘For sale, baby shoes, never used.’"

"‘Leadership is the ability to hide your panic from others.’ Lao Tzu (sixth-century Chinese philosopher)"

"Virgin Active set out with an extremely simple business plan that doubled as a mission statement of sorts. It read, ‘We want to create the first global comprehensive consumer-led branded health and fitness facility – readily accessible to a wide socio-demographic group at a price consumers are willing and able to pay.’"

"‘Thou Shalt’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not’ sections that really delineate the gospel to which Active employees aspire. The ‘Thou Shalt’ section implores Active’s people to: • Be genuine • Be yourself • Give your full attention • Find common ground • Try to remember faces • Be empathetic and remember everyone’s different • Share what you know • Notice how you’re coming across • Build up relationships • Have fun The ‘Thou Shalt Not’ list is shorter but asks staff not to: • Fob people off • Force the fun • Act unnaturally, or talk like it’s scripted • Interrupt • Be elitist • Be too busy • Take it personally if people don’t want to chat"

"‘Per Ardua ad Astra’. When Dad told me that it meant, ‘Through Adversity to the Stars’,"

"It also manages to keep it very real by saying things like, ‘As much as we like to think we’re a pretty great company, and we want you to love coming to work every day, we can’t expect you and our members to love us unconditionally. We’ve got to earn it.’"

"Virgin Group were ever to adopt such a motto, then something along the lines of ‘Ipsum Sine Timore, Consectetur’ would look incredibly impressive on a scroll right below our familiar red Virgin logo. Loosely translated from the Latin this means ‘Screw It, Let’s Do It’ and, as mission statements go, that’s about as real as it gets!"

"‘That’s not a bad idea’ Any use of double negatives such as this is an open invitation to mass confusion within the audience. Add the word ‘maybe’ and it gets even more problematic. The take-away from anyone hearing the CEO saying such a thing can vary from, ‘He loves it – let’s push ahead with the project’ to a diametrically opposed ‘He hates it – he specifically avoided saying it was a good idea.’ So, be definitive. If you approve or disapprove of something be assertive and make your position absolutely clear, making sure you explain why."

"‘You’re not going to like this but . . . ’ Avoid any such negativity whenever possible. Rather than immediately sowing a seed of doubt with the audience it’s far better to say something like, ‘This may be a tough nut to crack but I’m sure we’ll get it done.’"

"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.’"

"‘A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.’"

"Twain’s other statement on the subject of speaking that made me feel a lot better about my qualms was, ‘There are only two types of speakers in the world: 1. The nervous and 2. Liars.’"

"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."

"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."

"Churchill is universally recognised as one of the greatest orators of all time, but he only achieved this status on the back of a lot of hard work: he claimed that he averaged an hour’s preparation for every minute of a speech."

"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.’"

"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."

"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.’"

"‘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."

"I have always found it to be one of the more intriguing idiosyncrasies of the human condition that a problem that is handled quickly and effectively will almost always serve to generate more long-term customer loyalty than when the original service was delivered satisfactorily."

"I have always found that having senior people who demonstrably care enough to pay attention to customer-focused nitty-gritty details – as opposed to just the stock price – serves to encourage everyone in the organisation to get into the habit of seeing what you look like from the outside in. A domino benefit is that middle managers don’t want a senior officer to be the first to tell them how their part of the operation looks from the other side of the fence, especially if they’ve never troubled to set foot over there themselves!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"‘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.’"

"When they tackled the US marketing team as to whether they had asked for approval, the response was a no-nonsense, ‘No, of course not. We decided this was one of those occasions when it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.’ When I found out about it, all I could do was smile and do a lame ‘Ooh baby!’ impression of Austin Powers."

"‘To a Louse’, in which he wrote, ‘O would some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as others see us’. Simply stated this does of course mean, ‘If only we had the power to see ourselves in the same way that others see us.’ Of all the mantras one might adopt in life, this is surely one of the better ones and for anyone in a leadership role it should be an essential part of the checks and balances that are built into a company’s standard operating procedures. I suppose the corporate version of Burns’ famous line would read something like, ‘Always try to look at what we are doing from the customer’s perspective.’"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I have always viewed the maturation of companies as being very much like that of young people. When they are newborn or toddlers they tend to get away with all kinds of stuff on the basis that they are just finding their feet and so they generally enjoy a higher forgiveness factor. If companies survive this stage (many do not), like teenagers they then start to develop acne and other character blemishes while they get a little bit cocky and know-it-all. After that there comes a more mature stage: they have hopefully learned from their mistakes and settled down, but this period is filled with very different kinds of risks, with complacency possibly being the biggest. And once a company reaches the mid-life crisis stage it easily gets lazy, overweight, set in its ways and, like adults, can spend more time looking in the rear-view mirror than forging new ways forward and trying to see what’s around the next corner."

"They encouraged me to always look for the good in people instead of assuming the worst and trying to find fault. If they ever heard me gossiping or talking someone down they would have me go and look at myself in a mirror for five minutes, the idea being that I should see how such behaviour reflected badly on me."

"taught me a life-lesson on the power of forgiveness and giving people a second chance."

"‘Having a great time while building a highly diversified global business with an extended family of simply wonderful people’,"

"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."

"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."

"What I do believe to be an essential, however, particularly for anyone with entrepreneurial aspirations, is an unfettered willingness to trust their instincts and to follow their own star, even if at times it might appear to be leading them towards the edge of the precipice."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.’"

"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."

"The legendary entrepreneur and billionaire Richard Branson put it succinctly: "The lesson I have learned from all this is that no goal is out of reach, and even the impossible can become possible for people with vision and self-belief.""