The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (20 page)

When David finally made the less than compelling pitch to Phil of, ‘How’d you like to consider a new job where you’ll earn no tips and work highly irregular hours?’ he laughed it off as some kind of a joke. A few days later, however, after some coaxing by David, he came around and said he’d do it. As suspected, Phil Cain’s people skills were an instant fit for the airport customer service agent role and quickly led to a supervisor’s job. Next it was onwards and upwards to duty manager and eventually he became an exemplary airport manager, working for twenty years or so at a number of Virgin Atlantic gateways around the world. I used to see Phil quite often at Newark and one day couldn’t resist asking how David had talked him into giving up the bar job and coming to work for us. His response was, ‘Well, to be honest, Richard, he didn’t.’ Then with a wink he confided that as a (then) single guy, it had really been the thought of all those attractive flight attendants getting off our flights every night that had swayed his decision!

Whatever his motivation – and I can’t fault him on that one – countless thousands of others like Phil Cain bring their own personal brands of passion to work with them every day all around our companies. They also bring along their knowledge, vitality, enthusiasm and vision (collectively known as ‘passion’) to either give birth to a dream of their own or more often to contribute to the efforts of a team of like-minded Virgin family members.

Fancy dress and April fools

There was once a popular saying that ‘everybody loves a good party’ and it may still be true but there just don’t seem to be nearly as many of them as there used to be. Or perhaps I’m just not getting invited like I used to be!

Everything that’s really worthwhile in life usually involves some degree of risk and in all we do at Virgin we have always revelled in taking on the seemingly impossible rather than shying away and playing it safe. This applies as much to having a good time as to business, and we have never had any qualms about kicking back and enjoying a fun party with our people. I have always believed that the benefits of letting your staff have the occasional blast at an after-hours get-together is a hugely important ingredient in the mix that makes for a family atmosphere and a fun-loving, free-spirited corporate culture. It also goes a long way to tearing down any semblance of hierarchy when you’ve seen the CFO doing the limbo with a bottle of beer in her hand.

From the very beginning the Virgin companies have grown up on the back of some of the biggest and heartiest parties known to (almost) civilised man. For years our annual summer staff parties at the Manor, our former recording studio in the Oxfordshire countryside, were the stuff of local legend. They started out on a fairly controlled basis with a single day’s get-together for all the Virgin UK staff and their families. We’d set up big tents in case it rained – which it seldom ever seemed to do – and had loads of food and drink, live bands, face-painters, bouncy castles and pony rides for the kids (and a few adult children) and a great time was always had by all. One of the highlights of the event for everyone, except possibly me, became my annual version of a tightrope walk. This involved me, often with a drink in both hands to help my stability – at least that’s my story – gingerly wobbling my way across about the seventy-five-foot ridge atop the biggest marquee, with the assembled crowd loudly cheering me on – or more probably off! I honestly have no recollection as to how this custom got started, which probably explains it, but I think it was either the tent owners, my life insurance company or sobriety that eventually brought the practice to an end.

As the business started to grow by leaps and bounds – when Virgin Atlantic arrived on the scene we probably doubled our group headcount within twelve months – it began to make the big annual bash a logistical and practical challenge. In the final analysis the mega parties were killed by their success, as they simply grew too big to handle. The last one was over a whole weekend and we (and the local police who were charged with handling the traffic jams) estimated something like 60,000 people showed up. This included a lot of spouses and children of employees, which was never the case in the earlier days when most people were single with no inhibitions about having a wild time – something far less likely to happen in front of spouses and kids.

AIR PLAY

If the Manor parties could have made it into the
Guinness Book of World Records
so too could the 1984 inaugural flight of Virgin Atlantic. Not because of any particular aviation achievement but rather for the greatest amount of champagne ever consumed in a single flight between London and New York. Not since Wilbur and Orville kicked the whole thing off can anyone have come close. It was one huge transatlantic party from the moment the seat-belt sign went off until it came on again for landing in Newark. The late TV personality and journalist David Frost, who was one of our celebrity guests on the trip, was renowned for commuting across the Atlantic almost every other day. Just before landing I remember him saying to me, ‘You know, Richard, I’ve probably flown across the pond a thousand times but that’s the first trip I’ve ever made standing up all the way with a drink in my hand!’

The other little-known fact about that inaugural flight into New York is that the very first passenger that Virgin Atlantic landed in the USA was an illegal immigrant. When the aircraft door opened at Newark, we were met by a bevy of local officials at the end of the jetway, all of whom I suspect were more than a little curious to see what this rock-and-roll airline actually looked like. There had been stories all week on New York City radio stations about how Boy George would be flying the airplane, that we would likely be met by drug-sniffing dogs and all sorts of nonsense. While the cabin crew were doing their document handover, I was anxiously looking for David Tait who ran our US operation, hoping that, as planned, he’d managed to beat us across the Atlantic that morning on Concorde. When I finally spied him and caught his eye, I very deliberately mouthed the words, ‘I – don’t – have – my – passport.’ Knowing my penchant for pulling pranks on people, David laughed out loud and shouted back, ‘Yeah, right! Of course you don’t, Richard. Nice try, though!’

The unfortunate thing was that it was true. In the desperate rush to get to Gatwick Airport that morning I had dashed out leaving my passport on the kitchen counter. When the inflight supervisor laughingly told David it was actually true (he believed her but not me), he managed to quickly square it away with the head of immigration who fortunately happened to be standing right there. I remember thinking how incredibly impressed these senior federal officials must have been when the chairman of the new airline has to beg to be allowed into the country without any documents. Things didn’t get much better for me in the next hour when, at the welcome reception the city threw for us at the airport, I mistook the Mayor of Newark for one of the caterers and asked him if there was any chance they could find some more shrimp! Oh well, I suppose we all have our off days!

Our three airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America and Virgin Australia, still turn almost every new route launch into an excuse for a party (or three) and all of the companies in the group still love to party at every possible opportunity. The days of the mega-parties at the Manor may be a thing of the past but generally we have reverted to the original smaller more intimate roots and settings in which everyone gets a chance to glimpse an ‘other side’ to the people they work with – including myself, whenever I can work an invitation.

ROCKING THE ROCK

In January 2012, Virgin Money finally acquired Northern Rock, the British high-street bank that had been nationalised four years earlier, and we had a lot to celebrate. After their brief spell of working for the government, Northern Rock’s 2,000 or so employees were clearly excited about joining the Virgin family. They didn’t have to wait long to get a taste of their new corporate culture when Jayne-Anne Gadhia, CEO of Virgin Money, and I hosted a huge street party inside Northern Rock’s headquarters in Newcastle upon Tyne, at which everyone got an opportunity to behave in very ‘unbankerlike’ ways! It was kind of an initiation by friendly fire for all the former Northern Rock people who I don’t think had ever seen their previous bosses loosen their ties, let alone their purse-strings for a bank-sponsored megabash.

By the end of the night I must have shaken a thousand hands and my fingers were literally numb from the process. Jayne-Anne and I posed for scores of group photographs and the bank’s staff even got to rub shoulders with some true local heroes in the form of several Newcastle United football stars who we’d invited to join in the festivities. Virgin Money had just agreed to be a kit sponsor for the Magpies, Newcastle’s Premiership pride and joy, and it would seem the energy from the party must have rubbed off on the players. A couple of days later, in front of a packed home crowd, while wearing their new Virgin Money logo shirts for the first time, they managed to pull off a spectacular 3–0 upset victory over champions Manchester United – all very much to Jayne-Anne’s confusion as she is a life-long Manchester United fan. So you see, there’s nothing like a good party to get everyone’s juices flowing! Though I must confess that, being conscious of the fact that several of our businesses, Northern Rock (now Virgin Money) included, do a huge amount of business in Manchester as well, I thought it only prudent to tweet, ‘Okay, I accept we’re jammy bastards!’ Anyway, all in all we got off to a memorable start with our new banker friends and it has kept on getting better ever since.

We had another great party not so long ago to celebrate the opening of the Virgin Group’s new corporate headquarters in London. We held it on the rooftop of the new building – it was a fancy-dress affair with everyone coming dressed as pirates and buccaneers. We had flaming torches and a Caribbean steel band, plus lots of Red Stripe beer and rum-based cocktails. I showed up with Joan and my two kids, who also brought their new spouses along to make it truly a family affair. At one point in the festivities, surrounded by hundreds of dancing Virgin staff, I looked down from our rooftop perch and realised that behind a clump of trees I could just about see the houseboat that was my home and office when we started the company over forty years earlier. When we had staff parties on the
Duende
(which I still own), we maxed out at only twenty or thirty people, but the bonhomie we generated was no different to the present day with ten times that number on the roof of an office tower. As silly as dressing up as Captain Morgan the pirate or walking along the top of a tent might sound, I have always believed that parties have been an essential part of the Virgin way and, political correctness be damned, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

WHAT’S FIRST – A HAPPY CHICKEN OR A HAPPY EGG?

For most people the assumption seems to be that the more money you have in the bank the happier you’ll be – that success has some straight-line correlation with happiness. ‘If I work harder I’ll be more successful and if I’m more successful I’ll be happier.’ While nobody is likely to argue that being penniless might not detract from one’s
joie de vivre
, according to recent research, happiness actually fuels success, not the other way around.

Shawn Achor’s fascinating book
The Happiness Advantage
is based on a decade of positive psychology and neuroscience research at Harvard University and Fortune 500 companies. His book reveals that when we are more positive our brains are ‘more engaged, more energised, creative, motivated, healthier, resilient and productive’ – a pretty compelling list! His conclusion is that ninety per cent of one’s happiness is generated from within, not by external factors like fat bank accounts and expensive possessions. The book cites the power of positivity in the present and how we can rewire our brains in as little as twenty-one days by way of things such as starting each day with a ‘random act of kindness’ like sending at least one email praising someone, or writing down three new things each day for which we are grateful. Such actions get one’s dopamine flowing, which, in simple terms, makes you feel better about yourself and, well, the better you feel the better you perform. So, having fun and enjoying the work experience at every turn is not just the Virgin way but it is also scientifically proven to work to everyone’s benefit. I just wish I’d read Shawn’s book forty years ago, as it would have greatly helped in my annual attempts to vindicate the excessive party bills with a succession of tightwad CFOs around the group!

APRIL – COME SHE WILL

While staff parties are all about having a big get-together and lots of collective fun as often as possible, I have to admit to also taking a somewhat different and more selfish delight in having a devilishly good time just once a year – on April Fool’s Day. In fact, anyone who knows me well will usually make their best efforts to stay well clear of me between midnight and noon on 1 April – which in case you weren’t aware of the ‘official fool rules’ are the hours between which any tricks have to be played out. So if anyone ever tries to pull a stunt on you after noon you should call them out for foul play.

When I was a boy I used to pull all the usual April Fool’s pranks on my parents and sisters, like tying bedroom doorknobs together across a hallway so neither occupant could open their doors. Unlike a lot of kids who quickly grow out of April Fool’s tricks, however, quite the opposite happened with me. Ever the contrarian, in my case the older I got the more demonic and elaborate my tricks became. In time they also became a fun annual vehicle for me to draw attention to the Virgin brand – sometimes with the most amazing results.

For example, in 1986 I decided it would be fun to put one over on the music industry. So we hatched a fiendish plot and on 31 March I gave an exclusive interview to
Music Week
, then the UK’s biggest music industry trade publication. I told them that for years Virgin had been secretly developing a giant computer, on which we had stored every music track we could lay our hands on. This revolutionary device would be called Music Box, and music lovers would be able to use it as a source from which, for a small fee, they could download any individual song or album they wanted. Much to my surprise and delight, they swallowed it hook line and sinker and so the following day, in their 1 April edition, the shocking headline blared
‘Branson’s Bombshell: The End of the Industry.
’
 Surprisingly oblivious to the 1 April dateline on the article, all kinds of music business senior executives called throughout the morning to beg, threaten and plead with me not to go ahead with such a crazy scheme. With all of them I just kind of muttered half-apologies, saying I would make another statement later in the day – which of course came at lunchtime, when I announced that the whole story had been an April Fool’s joke. That afternoon I got a lot more calls from music industry types with comments that I am afraid I will not be able to repeat!

It was many years later when I ran into Steve Jobs at some event or another that he told me that he too had read the bogus Music Box story and been utterly taken in by it. At the time he had just been edged out of Apple and founded NeXT but he said he’d never forgotten my spoof and at the time thought that, joke or no joke, there was definitely something to be said for our Music Box idea. So while we will never know for sure, since that chance conversation I have always been haunted with the thought that my April Fool’s idea might well have inadvertently helped trigger the birth of iTunes and the iPod – which ironically were to become the death knell for our Virgin Megastores and a game-changer for the music industry in general.