The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (9 page)

In recognition of outstanding performance I occasionally like to surprise employees (and their significant others) by saying thank you in somewhat grander style than a note in the mail and invite them to stay with us on Necker Island for a few days. One time in 1997 we entertained an entire twenty-plus Virgin Atlantic crew that had performed in exemplary fashion when faced with an emergency landing at Heathrow. One landing gear had failed to extend properly but our captain made what was described as a textbook landing – it maybe helped that Tim Barnby, the captain in command in question, was also a former aerobatic champion! Anyway, as much as the crew will always remember the frightening experience on the airplane, I am sure they will also treasure the few days we enjoyed on Necker together. But as the old saying goes, ‘It’s the thought that counts’ – taking the time to make the gesture is much more important than its size. So if you don’t have a private island to share with your people, try something like giving them a surprise day off, take them out for lunch or give away those seats you have for a sporting event that you probably weren’t going to use anyway. At the very least, walk over there, shake their hand and say a heartfelt ‘thank you’.

So whether communicating via the written or the spoken word, try and make ‘keep it simple stupid’ your mantra and while you’re at it you should also work on adding a third ‘S’ for ‘short’. If you can rigorously adhere to the K-I-S-S-S principle in all your communications, you will not only have much better informed and more engaged employees, shareholders and customers but you will also save yourself and your company a lot of heartache.

Mission misstatements

At some time or another, particularly in the early days of every start-up company, it is almost inevitable that some investor or job applicant is going to ask, ‘So, what is your company’s mission statement?’ It’s the kind of question some people think is impressive to ask in an interview, although I beg to differ.

In fact, I will be totally up front and admit that I have never been a fan of corporate mission statements, many of which I find to be utterly blah truisms and anything but inspirational. With very few exceptions they are something that have next to no bearing or influence on a company or its employees and in many cases can in fact become a bit of a laughing stock. After all, if you work for the XYZ Widget Company, do you really need to be told that,
‘The mission of XYZ Widgets is to make the world’s best widgets while consistently delivering excellent customer service’?
Frankly, if that’s the best the company can come up with, they’d be better off working without the thing! Rather than inspiring one’s people, such ho-hum statements only serve to draw a reaction of ‘Why do they waste their time producing stuff like this?’

Before anyone even tries to come up with a mission statement, however, there is the little matter of actually considering your company’s commitment and ability to live up to it. If neither of these conditions is present then there’s no point in trying to ‘put lipstick on the pig’ by means of a fanciful, pie-in-the-sky mission statement. When a business puts out some highfalutin mission statement that draws a roll of the eyes and a ‘Yeah right!’ reaction from every employee who reads it, then clearly the time and effort would be better spent righting the problem instead of writing the cover-up. The classic example of a major disconnect in this regard was evident in 2001 when the Enron Corporation went bankrupt, destroying the lives and savings of hundreds of thousands of employees and investors. At the time of its demise Enron proudly sported the specious mission statement:
‘Respect, Integrity, Communication and Excellence.’
Maybe the less said the better!

IT’S ALL LATIN TO ME

My first contact with anything approaching mission statements was as a boy growing up in England. At the time my greatest real-life hero was the Second World War Royal Air Force fighter pilot Douglas Bader. After seeing the movie
Reach for the Sky
(several times), which told the legless Bader’s incredibly heroic story, I remember asking my father about the RAF motto of ‘
Per Ardua ad Astra’.
When Dad told me that it meant, ‘Through Adversity to the Stars’, my impressionable young brain seized on to it as the most inspirational thing I’d ever heard. There was something incredibly compelling about the notion of battling one’s way to the stars no matter how difficult the challenge. Much to the astonishment of my pals, I remember barrelling along on my bike and bellowing ‘Per Ardua ad Astra’ to the heavens – probably in much the same way as today’s kids might use the wonderful
Toy Story
character Buzz Lightyear’s mantra of ‘To Infinity and Beyond!’ Something I know the Virgin Galactic crew think is really pretty cool.

A few years later, at Stowe School, I came across my second mission statement of sorts in the school’s motto of ‘
Persto et Praesto’.
As every new student had to learn on day one, this means ‘I Stand Firm and I Stand First’. I need hardly point out how much silly giggling the first half of this motto generated among a group of pubescent schoolboys, but nevertheless it was an excellent mission statement for young ‘Stowics’ to take forward into adult life – and although I may have forgotten most things from school, this still resonates with me.

It was also at Stowe where an English master, displaying zero sensitivity towards my dyslexia, once told me that I had ‘the attention span of a gnat’. He then amused himself further by adding, ‘But there again, Mr Branson, I’m probably being grossly unfair to the average gnat.’ It wasn’t long after this that the same teacher was utterly taken aback to find me totally engrossed in Ernest Hemingway’s classic,
The Old Man and the Sea
. What I am sure attracted me to Hemingway was his crisp, punchy writing style with its short, easy-to-digest sentences; a technique that almost certainly stemmed from his days as a journalist. One way or the other it certainly seemed to work well with my limited attention span. In fact, one of the only pieces of prose I have ever committed to memory was a whole short story often attributed to Hemingway. Okay, maybe this is a bit of a reach, as it was after all only six words long, but it does support the point that shorter is more memorable. 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.’

Had he told this same story in even twenty words, I doubt it could have been anywhere near as poignant as it is in six, and I for one certainly wouldn’t still be talking about it fifty years after I first read it.

Inspired by the recollection of this mini-classic, I recently ran a contest on my blog soliciting my online ‘followers’ (sorry but something about that term always sounds so incredibly pompous) to write a short story. And, being the generous soul that I am, I even gave contestants one more word than Hemingway had to play with: they were given seven days to write a seven-word story with the winner getting a pair of tickets on a (very short) flight on one of our Virgin airlines.

The level of response we received was incredible. Quite a few of them were brilliant but regrettably not suited for reprinting in a book that might be read by children. There were also a lot of really fun ones like LC Moningka’s wonderful, ‘The vegetarian butcher entered. The chicken cheered’
– you can just see it happening! The winner, however, came from Sarrah (sic) who, like Hemingway before her, chose to tug at the emotions with the tragic, ‘Holding hands, they laughed. Watching, I cried.’ Sob!

While inventing these ultra-short stories makes for a really fun dinner party game, you can also try it on your mission statement writing team. ‘Okay, now please go back to the drawing board and reduce this 560-word mission statement to just ten!’ When they’ve picked themselves up off the floor you can always back down and show your conciliatory side by saying, ‘Okay what the heck – I’ll give you twenty-five!’ In all seriousness, though, it’s not just mission statements: the PowerPoint culture in which we live has got completely out of hand. The hours that people take putting the things together with all kinds of charts, graphics and illustrations would be much better spent boiling the presentation down to its essence that they could put on two rather than thirty-two slides. So practising what I preach, let me summarise in seven words:
‘Keeping it short goes a long
way.’

CRIMINAL NEGLECT

There is a lot to be said for the sheer simplicity of these old heraldic mottoes. Of course, the practical reality that they had to fit across the bottom of a coat of arms ensured they were always concise and punchy. While Hemingway’s six words may be pushing it, brevity is certainly a key to a good mission statement. As such, Twitter’s 140-character template is a good place to start drafting that inspirational message. Not only will a long drawn-out diatribe fail to inspire and motivate employees (if they ever even read it) but, as one UK police chief recently discovered, it may also attract a lot of attention for quite the wrong reasons. The UK’s Warwickshire Police outsourced the job of coming up with a new mission statement and the result was so outstanding that the piece was soon nominated for a national award. Unfortunately however the UK's infamous ‘Golden Bull Award’ exists to recognize ‘excellence in gobbledygook’ and as the nominating committee pointed out, not only was the rambling 1,200-word epistle filled with buzzwords and jargon but, somewhat surprisingly, the word ‘crime’ was conspicuous by its absence.

ONE MISSION FITS ALL

Another pet peeve of mine with mission statements is their tendency to be totally interchangeable between competing companies, with no differentiating characteristics whatsoever. For example, pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers has (or at least had) a mission statement that reads,
‘To discover, develop and deliver innovative medicines that help patients prevail over serious diseases.’
Well, you certainly can’t argue with that. At the same time, however, couldn’t the identical mission statement be claimed as their own by just about every drug company on the planet? Just swap out Bristol-Myers for Pfizer or Bayer and before you know it you have a ‘one-sentence-fits-all’ industry-wide mission statement, but not something that is unique to any single player.

At the opposite end of the scale is the company that tries too hard, only to fail by dint of what I’d describe as ‘flowery waffle’. An example of this would be,
‘Yahoo powers and delights our communities of users, advertisers and publishers – all of us united in creating indispensable experiences, and fuelled by trust.’
Sounds wonderful, but what does it actually mean? Whoever writes the mission statements at Yahoo would have done better to listen to their own CEO Marissa Mayer, who in a recent speech said, ‘Yahoo is about making the world’s daily habits more inspiring and entertaining.’ Far from perfect but at least it would be a step in the right direction.

Writing an effective mission statement is not an easy task but, as my late dad used to love to say, ‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ One of the primary roles of a mission statement has to be explaining the core purpose of a company and outlining expectations for internal and external clients alike. Finding the right tone, content, balance and length – ideally somewhere closer to a motto than an employee handbook – can be a daunting task. I have seen an amazing number of mission statements that might start out on the right track but then succeed in blowing the whole thing by saying stuff like, ‘
We must provide services and products that consistently match our customers’ expectations.’
Are they serious? While the whole subject of defining ‘expectations’ can be a tricky one, why would any right-minded company strive to merely ‘meet’ customer expectations? Shouldn’t they be pulling out all the stops to
exceed
them
each and every time they interact with a customer?

AN ACTIVE MISSION

An example of precisely this latter approach can be found at Virgin Active, our international chain of health and fitness clubs. Powered by the inspirational leadership of Matthew Bucknall and his incredible team all around the world, Active is one of our greater success stories in the way it has managed to encapsulate all the very best things the Virgin brand stands for. In other words, every Active club is a living, breathing mission statement for the customer service excellence the Virgin brand delivers in all its many incarnations. And as statements go, living up to it every day is a lot more important than writing even the cleverest words and then locking them away in a drawer.

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.’
Feeding off the back of this, Matthew and team put together a document they dubbed ‘The Guide’. This is not some kind of employee manual to take home and forget, it is very much a (dare I say) active working document that is designed to inspire new and existing Virgin Active employees to dive into the deep end and totally immerse themselves in the brand expectation pool. It does talk to a few slightly airy objectives like enriching people’s lives through ‘
activeness
’ (a word coined by Matthew and team) but it’s the ‘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

So rather than hitting new employees up with an ill-conceived blah mission statement like ‘
Virgin Active is committed to providing the greatest health and fitness club experience to every member every day’,
The Guide is a smorgasbord of bite-sized, easy to digest and very pragmatic mini-mission statements that also act as calls to action. 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.’

The simple fact is that as important as a good business plan and a clearly defined corporate mission might be, both are worthless unless they are woven into the fabric of your people’s daily lives. For this to happen it takes strong leaders at every level of the organisation who recognise that one of their key roles is to continually reinforce the importance of remaining faithful to the corporate creed. To put it differently, a well-written ‘mission statement’ can be a helpful management tool but only if it can be used to lock in a high level of ‘mission commitment’ from the staff and is reinforced by senior management at every opportunity.