The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (3 page)

Sadly, the person that the record shop man named happened to be someone we considered to be one of our brighter young A & R people and, much as I dislike these kinds of confrontation, on this occasion I had no option but to haul him into the office and repeat what I had just been told. The poor guy went bright red and was clearly horribly embarrassed but he made no attempt to deny or defend his actions, opting instead to simply apologise profusely and say there was really no excuse for his behaviour. Rather than firing him on the spot, however, as he had every right to expect, on the spur of the moment I opted instead to tell him that although he had let himself and the company down very badly we were going to give him a second chance. The look of stunned amazement on his face said it all, and from that day on he worked his socks off for us and went on to have a stellar career, personally discovering some of Virgin Records’ most successful artists along the way – Boy George being just one of them.

When it comes to needing a second chance, however, nobody needs it more than ex-prisoners who are looking to restart their lives after they have served their time. The sad thing is that if they are honest and tick the ‘criminal record’ box on an employment application form they’ll seldom get an interview, let alone a shot at landing the job. Ironically, the result tends to become one huge self-fulfilling prophecy. When they can’t find employment, statistics show that fifty per cent or more of ex-offenders take the seemingly easy way out and resort to crime as the only way to support themselves, and then quickly end up back inside.

My good friend and Comic Relief creator Jane Tewson was the one who first drew my attention to the sad plight of ex-cons. In the process, Jane even succeeded in doing something I have worked long and hard at avoiding – she had me put behind bars. Actually, it wasn’t the first time, but we don’t need to go into that right now! Suffice it to say that Jane encouraged me to see first-hand the challenges prisoners face when attempting to re-enter the workforce by voluntarily spending a day in jail with them. In late 2009, I duly served my day in a high-security prison in Melbourne, Australia and it certainly opened my eyes to the problem ex-prisoners have re-entering society, something about which I had never given a moment’s thought.

While down under I also met with an inspiring group of leaders from The Toll Group, Australia’s largest transportation company. I learned how they had been trying to do their bit to improve the lot of recently released prisoners and had hired almost 500 of them over the previous decade – a number that represents about ten per cent of the company’s workforce. The truly inspirational part of what they told me, though, was that not one of their former inmates had, to the best of their knowledge, ever reoffended!

I have since constantly encouraged all of the Virgin companies around the world to work hard at following Toll’s example. In the UK we have been cooperating closely with the charity Working Chance, which since 2007 has taken the lead in working to place female ex-prisoners back into gainful employment thereby breaking the cycle that can turn one little mistake or bad decision into a life sentence, whether in or out of prison. Last time I checked, Working Chance had placed almost 200 female ex-prisoners with Pret a Manger, Sainsbury’s and a variety of Virgin companies like Virgin Trains and Virgin Management.

Perhaps the biggest irony here is that in 1971, but for the good graces of a British magistrate, I might well have had a prison record myself. I was caught red-handed by Customs and Excise officers in the act of ingeniously (or so my naïve teenage self had thought) ‘manipulating’ purchase taxes on the export and import of record albums. It was only by way of my parents generously posting the family home as collateral for my bail and then my fully paying off the hefty fine I’d been given that I managed to avoid being stuck with a criminal record. Had I actually done time and been branded as an ex-con, then the chances are very real that Virgin might never have happened and the tens of thousands of jobs we have created would never have existed. Had I gone to jail for my stupid teenage error of judgement I would have been the same person as the one who (luckily) did not end up behind bars, but I would almost certainly have been stigmatised by society and almost certainly have led a
very
different life as a result.

SPEAK NO EVIL

In our living room at home my mum and dad used to have one of those peculiar little statues of the ‘Three Wise Monkeys’ – you may have seen them – that embody the proverbial principle of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. Well, while there wasn’t a lot they could do about the ‘see no evil’ part, they went to great lengths to teach me to never think or speak badly of others.

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. I was also taught that fits of pique or any outward displays of anger or rudeness never serve any useful purpose and if anything play only to your disadvantage. It 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. The thing my parents didn’t make any effort to teach me was how to keep my obvious delight at something under wraps, the downside of which is that it doesn’t help my poker game very much.

Whether we like it or not, however, we are all very much the product of our upbringing and our environment. After my little church incident, had my father handled the moment differently and put me across his knee, I would probably still remember the spanking but would have long forgotten what it was for! The importance of the leadership lessons we absorb from our parents and in due course pass along to our own children and those with whom we work cannot be understated.

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.

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 was reminded of this fact when I recently overheard a friend of mine, who has three incredibly rambunctious young sons, playfully threaten his youngest, eleven-year-old, Charlie that if the going ever got tough, on the basis of last in, first out, he’d be the first one to be let go. I laughed out loud, but it was the boy’s immediate response that really struck home with me. With a big impish smile, he looked his father right in the eye and retorted, ‘But Dad, why would you do that? If you think about it I am much cheaper to keep because I don’t eat nearly as much as my older brothers do.’

The inescapable fact is that learning and leadership are two-way streets and even the oldest and wisest block can pick up a lot from the most junior of chips. Sadly, my father and best friend Ted Branson passed away in early 2010 at the grand old age of ninety-three, leaving a huge hole in his family’s lives. He certainly left his mark on me and but for his wisdom and restraint on more than one occasion, those marks could quite deservedly have made sitting down a very painful process!

Having given my mum the chance to chime in earlier, I am also going to let her have the last word – something she always enjoys! I very much doubt that she will remember saying it, but I certainly have never forgotten the sage advice my mother gave me after a school cricket match. I loved cricket and was generally pretty good at it, but this had been a game in which I had an uncharacteristically timid outing with the bat and before I’d contributed a single run I was clean bowled without so much as a ‘wave of the English Willow’! Driving home afterwards Mum surprised me with her cricketing wisdom when she said, ‘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.’

It was years later before I realised she had probably been talking about a lot more than just cricket!

Listen – it makes you sound smarter

When I was a boy my parents never let me spend my time watching television. I well remember one time when my mum turned the TV off and asserted that it was going to be ‘the death of conversation’, which immediately provoked a twenty-minute argument with her TV-starved son. After we’d agreed to disagree, Mum couldn’t resist getting the last word in: ‘You see, if you’d been watching TV we wouldn’t just have enjoyed that interesting discussion.’

And, while I may not have appreciated it at the time, as usual, my mother was absolutely correct. Although I may have been denied access to the small screen, I did get to watch my fair share of stuff on the big screen where I was (and still am) a big fan of Westerns, especially those starring the late great John Wayne. Despite all the memorable visual moments in Wayne’s films it was one line that has stuck with me from the movie
Big Jake
: ‘
You’re short on ears and long on mouth.’
Even without the classic John Wayne drawl, it is such a great way to describe one of the most common human failings – listening too little and talking too much – that I have been borrowing it ever since.

L-I-S-T-E-N

One thing I do remember from an English class at school was when a teacher pointed out that if you want to play anagrams with the above letters they also form the word SILENT. As an ardent Scrabble fan and being a little more tuned in than usual that day, I recall precociously pointing out that the letters could also spell ENLIST. This led to a class discussion, which has clearly stuck with me: if more of us could ‘enlist’ the art of remaining ‘silent’ in order to ‘listen’ we would, in one fell swoop, dramatically improve our ability to learn and get a lot more out of our time at school.

Maybe the class discussion was too little too late for me as within a year or so of that English class I had left Stowe in order to launch
Student
, my own magazine, and soon found myself putting that teacher’s words into practice. I remember as if it were yesterday, interviewing novelist John le Carré whose 1963 breakthrough novel
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
was an instant bestseller. I was as nervous as a kitten as I frantically scribbled down notes on his responses to my carefully prepared list of questions. I often carried a big old reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder, although it was more to give me the appearance of being a professional than anything else as half the time it never worked. That was when I took up what was to become a lifetime habit: I began capturing my thoughts, observations and just about anything of interest that someone said or did in my hard-backed lined notebooks.

In the forty-odd years that I have been in business – wow, just writing that makes me suddenly feel ancient – those now hundreds of notebooks have served me incredibly well. And I am not talking about just their day-to-day aide-memoire uses, but in four major lawsuits with British Airways, G-Tech, T-Mobile and most recently with our run-in with the UK Department for Transport on the West Coast train franchise renewal. Listening is a wonderful skill, but given that the average human brain tends to store a very small percentage of what, at the time, may seem like insignificant statements and ideas, those books fill in a lot of what otherwise would be blank spaces in my memory bank. Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening. Please write this down right now so you don’t forget it!

Unfortunately, as leadership skills go, listening gets a bit of a ‘bum rap’ – that may also have been a John Wayne line. It’s such a seemingly passive thing that many people misguidedly see it as almost a sign of weakness – as in ‘Did you notice Harry hardly said a word in the meeting, I wonder what his problem is?’ Such a viewpoint is almost certainly fuelled by the historical association between great leaders and great orators being powerful people. Ask a Brit of my generation whom they would consider to be history’s greatest leader and like me they’d probably name wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill. Ask for a speech and they’d almost certainly reference his 1940 ‘this was their finest hour’ broadcast. Had I grown up in the US, the chances are that I would probably put John F. Kennedy on the same pedestal and perhaps justify the choice by referencing his famous ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ speech.

Don’t get me wrong, both these men were iconic leaders and the importance of having the ability to express one’s thoughts in an articulate and compelling manner is a tremendous asset – and certainly in our video clip/sound-bite driven world, a lot more newsworthy than being a great listener; news footage that features ‘and here we see the president listening intently as only he can’ is hardly going to move the opinion polls! Oratorical excellence, however, is just one of a compendium of leadership skills and not the be-all and end-all that some would believe it to be. Apart from anything else, the majority of world leaders and captains of industry don’t actually write their own speeches – Churchill being one highly notable exception to this rule – so it is dangerous to judge them by words that are not their own but rather the work of highly paid speech writers. Winston Churchill was, however, renowned for his ability to sit down and listen to anyone and everyone, and his view on the importance of listening is evidenced by another quote often attributed to him,
‘
Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen
.’

Could it be that his skills as a listener might have been one of the things that made him such a great writer and speaker? I would venture to submit that it is no small coincidence.

LISTENING IS NOT HEARING

If there were ever a dead giveaway that somebody is not listening to a word of what you’re saying, it’s when they repeatedly use the annoying phrase, ‘I hear you, I hear you.’ Unfortunately, hearing is not listening. On a recent long-haul flight I could most assuredly hear the infant a few seats behind me that cried incessantly for the whole night, but I didn’t care to listen to it. I can hear the wind in the trees but I don’t take as much time as I should to listen to that either. And I don’t believe it’s entirely a matter of semantics. When someone says, ‘I heard every word he said’, in a strictly literal sense they may be telling the truth, but fifty per cent of the time they could probably just as truthfully add, ‘although I didn’t absorb one iota of it.’ Paradoxically, while I have always prided myself on being a good listener, I may have had an unfair advantage on most people. Having grown up with dyslexia I learned very early in life that if I wanted to take anything in then I had to force myself to listen intently. Not only that, but in order to have any chance of remembering what I was listening to, I also had to make the effort to take copious handwritten notes: a habit that I still diligently practise to this day.

As an adult in business I have used this lesson to great advantage. I’ve also discovered that, as an adjunct to listening to what people have to say, my now infamous and utterly low-tech notebook is one of the most powerful tools I have in my bag of business tricks. Apart from helping me remember little things I want to bring up with one of our airlines, like ‘Add cold – not hot towel service’ as I am travelling, more importantly I can’t begin to count the number of times when referring to my notebooks has given me a clearly unexpected advantage on much bigger issues. A typical situation would be when someone says, ‘Well, Richard, as I recall when we last spoke in early March, we agreed to get a draft proposal to you by the end of April’, and they are totally discombobulated by a response of, ‘Well, no, at least not according to my notes of our last conversation. At 3.15 p.m. on 7 February you promised you were going to have the complete business plan to us by 31 March at the latest.’ Nailed! I even had someone once suggest that I had been illegally recording my phone conversations with him – like some kind of a Nixon White House tapes deal – but shut him down by saying, ‘Yes, I do record a lot conversations but with a pen and a notebook!’

I suspect that over the years ‘Richard’s thing about taking notes’ has become legend around the Virgin family of companies as I always detect a much higher percentage of note-takers at internal meetings than with outside parties. For example, I recently had a day-long series of meetings on Necker with a group of about twenty senior people and I couldn’t help but observe that our own people seemed to be the only ones taking any serious notes. I don’t know if the senior executives present were accustomed to having an assistant to take the minutes, or if they somehow felt it was beneath them to take notes – or maybe they all felt they had photographic memories – but I was distinctly unimpressed. One of the outside executives did peck away at his iPad on a regular basis, but based on the semi-furtive way he went about doing it, rather than taking notes I suspected he was responding to emails or playing Words With Friends.

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but the all-too-common practice of texting or emailing under the boardroom table in the middle of a meeting is something that I find extremely irritating and downright disrespectful to everyone else in the room. I am not a big fan of lengthy meetings at the best of times, but is it really asking too much to have someone’s undivided attention for an hour without them having to constantly demonstrate their self-perceived indispensability by electronically tuning out every few minutes? I think not.

Since my children were little, I have always kept notes on the funny things that they have said over the years. I always suspected these would come in handy some day and when twice in the last couple of years I’ve had to prepare speeches for their weddings it turned out I was correct. One of the best ones came from a five- or six-year-old Holly when she triumphantly announced, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I know what sex is! And you and Mummy have done it twice.’ Another time, Holly hysterically expressed her frustration at something by loudly proclaiming, ‘I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I want, but I want it.’

But back to the business world and another story I like to cite as to the benefits of listening combined with note-taking that goes back to a speech I delivered in Greece about twenty years ago – I honestly can’t remember what the occasion was other than the fact we did have some short-lived airline activities in the country. In any case, I couldn’t help but notice one very bright young man in the audience who kept asking me excellent, mostly aviation-related and clearly very well-prepared questions. In fact, over the course of the day he must have asked about 50 per cent of all the questions and 90 per cent of the really good ones! Not only did he ask good questions, but he listened intently to my responses and wasn’t afraid to zing me back with a tough follow-up when my response fell short of fully addressing his question. He was clearly an excellent listener and given my ‘thing’ about it, I was equally impressed by his ferocious note-taking. At the end of the day I asked one of the organisers if they happened to know the name of the young man who had so dominated the Q&A sessions – I had it in my mind that maybe he was someone who could work for us some day. Their response was one of, ‘Oh yes, we most certainly know him!’ and they proceeded to tell me that Stelios Haji-Ioannou was the scion of a wealthy Cypriot shipping family, and clearly not someone who was looking for a job. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before his name was all over the news in the UK as the founder of easyJet, a low-cost European airline that would go on to be a huge success: in fact I believe that, by passengers carried, they are now the largest UK-based airline. I like to use this story as a light-hearted example of the incredible benefits that can accrue from listening intently and taking notes when I am speaking – something that will invariably draw a chorus of groans from our people who have heard the line one too many times. But, all joking aside, listening and taking notes are clearly habits that have served Stelios well . . . oops, correction, make that Sir Stelios; he was knighted by the Queen in 2006 for ‘services to entrepreneurship’ – and note-taking.

I can’t promise knighthoods for everyone, but if you’re still not convinced let me suggest you try a self-imposed crash course in listening more and talking less and I promise you will be amazed at the immediate benefits you’ll observe.

SAY LESS – CONTRIBUTE MORE

While the late Nelson Mandela was a man of innumerable talents, one that always impressed me the most about him was his unfailing willingness to listen to what others had to say. Even during his long years in prison he took time to listen to what his jailers had to say about life, so much so that he made them the first people he publicly forgave when he was released. Whenever I spent time with Madiba I was amazed at his ability to make you feel like the only and most important person in the room through his desire to hear what you had to say and, of course, his willingness to act on those things he believed in. Few other people could have galvanised the formation of the Elders in the way that Madiba did and yet few people were better qualified to appreciate the critical role the ability to listen plays in diplomacy, business and life in general.

Another remarkable human being and listener par excellence is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who as a close friend of Nelson Mandela’s was a founding member of the Elders and chaired the group from 2007 until 2013. Seldom in history has a nation put more faith in the healing power of listening than post-apartheid South Africa did with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). President Mandela named Desmond Tutu to chair the historic commission’s work, the primary focus of which was on those who had suffered human rights abuses as a result of apartheid between 1960 and 1994. As stated in the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act the TRC was convened in order to address ‘a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not retaliation, a need for
Ubuntu
[human kindness] but not for victimisation’.