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Richard Branson extract, from Movers and Shakers, The People
Executive Summary:
- The prime movers and shakers are the business people who created mighty companies, built great fortunes innovated with new products, services, methods and markets
- They make their own rules, and seldom obey anybody else’s, which is one of their most important qualities
- The most successful retailer Sam Walton of Wal-Mart expressed this perfectly in principles distributed to his staff. The last rule was “Break all Rules”. Walton wanted people to act and think more like entrepreneurs than hired hands, where the entrepreneur usually works in a context where nothing is fixed
About this book
• Movers and Shakers offers concise and colourful overviews of the theories behind, and the practice of, successful international business
• The book is divided into two sections: section one focusing on the management thinkers. This contains 45 summaries of the lives, careers, and impact of the world’s most influential management gurus and writers from Peter Druker to Tom Peters, Richard Branson to Machiavelli
• Section two is dedicated to profiles of business giants, which make up a highly selective gallery of some of the world’s most effective leaders and entrepreneurs
Key Points
• The urge of the entrepreneur is for power rather than money. The power in not political, but economic, control of the market and domination of it’s sales. Of course huge money flows from the power
• Entrepreneurs instinctively understand what combination of revenues and costs will yield the greatest and fasting-growing rewards and they exploit that combination with ruthless zeal
• The difference between the paid executive and the fortune building entrepreneurs is the latter does not pause to worry about work-life balance. Their lives are their work. Their sub-ordination to the prime objective is basic, and the urge to succeed carries genius through all obstacles and setbacks – like the early bankruptcy of Henry Ford I – a man of narrow intellect, but broad vision who embraced new concepts as revolutionary as the assembly line.
The Richard Branson story
• Swashbuckling Richard Branson has brought a welcome sense of fun and adventure to some traditionally staid business sectors with his many-tentacled Virgin Group. As a boy, he thought he could make a better fist of running his school than the headmaster, ran an abortive budgerigar-breeding business, and published a magazine entitled Student.
• A mail-order record business was followed by record stores, then a record label, and then an airline. It may seem like an improbable sequence, but Branson swiftly realised that a good brand could be stretched, with care, to encompass anything from condoms to clothes, personal finance to trains.
• By 2000 the value of Branson’s unwieldy empire collected under the Virgin Group banner was estimated at some $1.8 billion by Forbes magazine.
Background and Rise
• Branson took little interest in academic studies, and only slightly more in sport. But he had a sense of confidence and self-belief. This was evident from his assertion that, despite failing his elementary maths test three times, he could make a better job of running the school than the headmaster. He actually dispatched a memo to the headmaster outlining how, in his view, the school rules might be improved, including the suggestion: ‘Allow sixth-formers to drink two pints of beer a day.’
• He was never to profit from his suggestion, since he dropped out of school at 16, keen to make his way in the world of business. His headmaster commented at the time that Branson would end up either a millionaire or behind bars. Fortunately, it was the former, although a skirmish with HM Customs and Excise meant it was a near-run thing.
Conclusions
• Richard Branson, the clown prince of UK entrepreneurs, has appeared in some faintly ridiculous garbs during his time in charge of the Virgin Group. At times the onlooker is tempted to demand, ‘Will the real Richard Branson please stand up?’ But the Branson persona is the secret of his success. Whether by design or by good luck, Branson has become a national institution in the United Kingdom.
• He appears as an anti-establishment, slightly hip, relaxed businessman willing to challenge the complacent established corporate orthodoxy. He is the consumer’s champion offering a value and Virgin-quality choice where no choice previously existed. At pains to point out where the consumer is getting ripped off, he steps in and provides a Virgin alternative. Of course, Branson’s creations make money just like traditional businesses. It’s just that somehow the British seem happy to give their money to Branson; they actively want to fill the coffers of their avuncular friend.
• When the big corporates such as British Airways or Barclays Bank first saw Branson dressed as Biggles or decked out in bridalwear, no doubt they laughed — until they realised that he had mugged them of their market share. They’re not.
Careers