The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (21 page)

Clearly the moral behind this story is that if you’re going to let others know – even as an April Fool’s joke – how you think your industry might look in the future then you had better make sure that your company has a plan already in place to get you there first. If you don’t, then the joke could very easily be on you!

ONE BAD TRICK DESERVES ANOTHER

There was another April stunt that most definitely did backfire on me even if a lot more of our people got a big kick out of it. I had decided to pull an April Fool’s trick on Ken Berry, one of my early partners in Virgin Records. On 31 March I invited Ken and his girlfriend to a late dinner at the Roof Gardens, the rooftop restaurant and club we own in the Kensington area of London. The plan was all set for some ‘hired hands’ to go and break into Ken’s apartment a few minutes after midnight (I play by the rules) and remove a bunch of things like some furniture, his TV and stereo equipment. We had some actors dressed up as policemen who were going to come in to ask questions and dust for fingerprints and eventually I’d yell ‘April Fool’, we’d all have a good laugh, bring the stuff back and it would be over. At least that was the plan. But as Robert Burns pointed out, ‘
The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley
’ and this one was about to go as ‘agley’ as it gets!

The problem started when, after I got tied up talking to someone else, I got back to our table about fifteen minutes after midnight to find that Ken and friend had left for home leaving a note saying, ‘
Thanks for dinner, see you tomorrow. Ken.’
I panicked because I knew they’d be home already and as such it was already too late for me to get there to stage-manage the prank. Not knowing what to do I headed for home and was greeted by my wife Joan (who wasn’t in on the joke because she would have totally disapproved of it) saying, ‘Richard, something awful has happened. Kenny’s flat’s been broken into and the police are there now. He called to ask if his girlfriend could spend the night with us as she’s too scared to stay in the flat.’ So I had no alternative but to call Ken and come clean, apologise profusely and arrange for all his stuff to be returned straightaway. His reaction was one of, ‘Well, Richard, I don’t really know if I can do anything because the police have filed the report already. But leave it with me and I’ll try to explain it to them.’ Feeling more than a little embarrassed at the whole screw-up, I was about to head for bed when the doorbell rang. Sensing this wasn’t good, I opened the door to find two very large London bobbies who seemed anything but amused at my antics and gruffly asked if I would accompany them to the station to ‘assist them with their enquiries’.

I was dressed for bed but they didn’t seem to care and hauled me off still in dressing gown and slippers. In the car they said nothing in response to my repeated whines of ‘This is all a terrible mistake’ and ‘Please, just call Mr Berry, he can explain that there was no robbery here.’ They remained inscrutable as they marched me into Harrow Road Police Station, took away my dressing gown cord – presumably so I wouldn’t hang myself – shoved me into a cell and departed without saying another word. It only got worse. A half hour later I was awoken from a fitful sleep by screams from the unseen occupant of the cell next to mine. It sounded like a beating was underway as I heard, ‘Please don’t hit me again. Honest, guv, I didn’t do nothing!’ It stopped soon after and I lay there the rest of the night feeling more than a little contrite and extremely sorry for myself.

Finally, around midday, the same two policemen arrived at the cell and without saying a word took me upstairs where they charged me with a dozen or more offences including wasting police time. They then handed me my dressing gown cord and told me I was free to leave. I still wasn’t too sure what had happened but as soon as I stepped out into the grey morning light the penny dropped with a resounding cheer: the cheer came from the assembled Virgin Records staff led by Kenny and the policemen standing outside the police station as they celebrated my release with my familiar cry of ‘April Fool!’ I’d been set up – big time!

If ever a joke backfired on me this had to be it. I later found that when Ken had told the police that the burglary was all a joke gone wrong by a friend of his, the officers in charge were not in the least amused. They at first wanted to charge me with either criminal mischief as well as wasting police time, but at Ken’s pleading (that’s his story at least) instead agreed they’d drop it on one condition: that Ken would support them in teaching his wayward friend ‘a lesson that he won’t soon forget’ by keeping him locked up in a cell until noon when April Fool’s Day officially ended. Needless to say Ken had agreed immediately, in all probability thinking it was an absolutely wonderful idea! And as for the whole beating thing in the next cell – that too had been staged by some of our people.

TO INFAMY AND BEYOND

I suppose after such a lesson most, dare I say, ‘normal’ people would have been traumatised at the mere mention of April Fool’s tricks forevermore. Unfortunately that is not how my brain is wired. If anything, I simply became more determined than ever to make a better job of future stunts – like the one we
almost
pulled off on 1 April 1989.

At the time I was thirty-six years old and very much into ballooning, which is what inspired me to come up with the idea for what is arguably my most elaborate April Fool’s stunt ever. I commissioned the creation of a custom-designed, hot-air flying saucer from my friend Don Cameron at Cameron Balloons and to my delight he came through with what was really a quite remarkable piece of equipment. Shaped like a classic comic-book flying saucer, our UFO came complete with rotating flashing strobe lights, which by night offset the eerie glow that was produced every time the hot-air burner was fired. The icing on the cake, though, had to be the ‘little person’ (I am told I’m not allowed to say ‘dwarf’) we hired to go along on the trip wearing a custom tailored little green Martian costume. Not to be outdone, I joined in the fun with a Captain Kirk-like sparkly silver space suit.


So while I played Captain Kirk, Don Cameron, one of the world’s top balloonists, came along to co-pilot his company’s brilliant handiwork. We took off from north London at around four in the morning, flew over the city and then found ourselves – with balloons you go where the prevailing winds choose to take you – heading down the M25 in the general direction of Gatwick Airport. For the three of us in the air, it was all plain sailing. What we didn’t know about, however, was the havoc we were creating 500 feet below us back on planet Earth!

Apparently we were spotted by some night-shift workers early in our flight and the ‘UFO sighting’ they called into their local police station had set a
War of the Worlds
repeat performance in motion. As radio stations excitedly speculated on the origins of the low-flying alien craft, with every mile we flew the furore on the ground grew crazier by the minute. Before long there were three police forces tracking us, and the army had been called out too. The busy M25 motorway, already slowed by a heavy morning fog, was now at a standstill as motorists stopped and got out of their cars to marvel at the mysterious UFO as it flew over them in the pre-dawn gloom.

By this stage we were getting a little too close to Gatwick Airport (London’s second busiest) for our liking and so decided it was time to call it quits. Despite the fog we managed to spot a level field and with strobe lights flashing and the burners glowing mysteriously in the gloom, Don brought us down without incident – or so we thought. Looking out of my little window in the ‘space capsule’, I remember thinking that this was like an eerie scene from a Steven Spielberg movie and it was right about then that I spied a line of police vehicles and army trucks surrounding the field. When Don landed us perfectly without a bump, a brave young bobby, truncheon drawn, started walking none too confidently in our direction.

It was ET time! We started our own fog machine before slowly lowering the ramp-like door and dispatching our little green ET to meet him. Without a second thought, the terrified policeman turned on his heels and ran as fast as I’ve ever seen anyone move. It was at this stage that I decided I’d better intercede before someone got hurt, so jumping onto planet Earth I welcomed its brave defenders with the universal peace declaration of ‘April Fool!’ The first reaction from the fleeing officer was one of utter relief but according to a report on the website Alien UFO Sightings, the policeman involved would later tell the press, ‘I have never been so scared in twenty years on the force.’
 His senior officers were not at all amused, however, and for the second time in my April Fools career I was threatened with charges of wasting police time but survived to fight again.

Needless to say I am not the only one who has indulged in some pretty wild April Fool’s stunts. Two of the better ones I heard about were ‘perpetrated’ upon Eric Schmidt when he was at Sun Microsystems. One time his friendly staff took apart his office and rebuilt it on a platform in the middle of a pond – complete with working telephone, which I thought a really nice touch. Another time they emptied out his office and replaced the furniture with a Volkswagen Beetle, which they’d taken apart and reassembled in order to get it through the office door. Eric’s subsequent employers at Google are also renowned for their own stunts such as ‘Google Nose’. On 1 April when pulling up the Google home page, visitors found a new tab that professed it would let them smell various things (strangely these included ‘a wet dog’) by putting their noses up close to the screen. No one I know would ever admit to being fooled by this prank but one can only imagine the gullible millions who must have sniffed their screens that morning!

One of the all-time April classics, however, has to be ‘Google TiSP’ (‘Toilet Internet Service Provider’) which on 1 April 2007 was featured on the Google search home page as, ‘
A fully functional end-to-end system that provides free in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.’
Google boasted that TiSP used ‘GFlush’ technology and it came with an eight-step installation kit for the ‘
quick, easy and largely sanitary process’.
Item #8 read, ‘
Congratulations, you’re online! (Please wash your hands before surfing
).’ Considering that in 2007 Google averaged 1.2 billion searches per day (in 2013 that number was up to 5.9) there’s little doubt that TiSP qualifies as the most viewed April Fool’s stunt in history. Absolutely brilliant stuff! And then there was the joint Virgin and Google (or ‘Virgle’ as we dubbed it) April Fool’s stunt that Larry Page and I dreamed up at the bar on Necker – but let’s save that for another day!

FUN IS INFECTIOUS

As you may have started to appreciate, like Google, Virgin takes the business of fun very seriously. I know that many unhappy souls will inevitably condemn stunts like these as being needless distractions and a waste of company time and effort with no tangible commercial benefits. How sad! If the workplace, where most adults spend almost half their waking weeks, cannot be an environment in which to enjoy some spontaneous good times, then what’s the point of it all? I have always believed that a sense of humour and the ability not to take oneself too seriously are critically important attributes for any healthy corporate culture. One highly tangible upside is seeing how much of a buzz our staff get from talking about ‘the crazy stuff we do at Virgin’ with friends. When those friends work at stuffed-shirt companies that would never in a million years consider such nutty antics, you just know that they’re thinking, ‘Wow, how do I get a job there?’ I don’t think it any coincidence that, like Google, we are snowed under with thousands of applications every time we have job openings or start a new company. Fun is infectious and, as Shawn Achor’s research can testify, it’s also good for the general well-being of the individual and their businesses – it has certainly worked for Virgin and Google!

Oh, and just in case you are wondering, as many did at the time we first broke the news, I should make it absolutely clear that Virgin Galactic is very much for real – if you care to check you will see the first announcement in 2004 was
not
made on 1 April. If you want to see one great company party, however, then you should watch out for the celebration we have in mind when SpaceShipTwo completes its first commercial flight. It has been a long time coming but I can assure you it will be one heck of a bash that will have been well worth the wait!

And for those of us on board that first Galactic flight, rather like the first transatlantic Virgin Atlantic flight some thirty years earlier, I am sure we will have to run some serious experiments on how well champagne sprays in a weightless environment – strictly for scientific purposes, of course. Cheers!

New skills for a new world

When I started out with what was to become Virgin more than four decades ago, I wanted to make people’s lives better. I know this can very easily sound like a load of unmitigated self-serving twaddle, but it’s true.

I felt then, and still do today, that business, every business, has enormous potential to be a force for good in the world. Companies can realise this potential by looking for ways to do things differently, and by putting our people and the planet right up there alongside growth, and profit as our
raison d’être
. And the amazing thing is that, contrary to popular perception, these are not opposing poles but are mutually reinforcing opportunities. Business doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where some win and others lose. When done properly, everybody stands to gain: companies, communities, and the beautiful planet on which we are privileged to live.

To achieve lasting progress we must identify, nurture and learn from the next generation of business leaders. Some of these rising stars are already ahead of the curve, especially in the way they weave together their social and entrepreneurial passions and I wish all of us in business could wise up to this fact and start doing more to encourage and support them. Businesses have a major role to play in tackling the world’s toughest challenges so to my mind it makes perfect sense to tap into the energy of the legions of up and coming young business leaders who are not afraid to start companies, challenge the status quo and see how their products and services can make a difference in the world.

TRAINING FOR SUCCESS

That’s what we had in mind when Virgin Unite was instrumental in opening the Branson Centres of Entrepreneurship in Johannesburg, South Africa and Montego Bay, Jamaica a few years back. And thank goodness we did! Now, hundreds of entrepreneurs later, we can point to countless success stories about start-ups that have given hope where there was none, created jobs, stimulated local economic growth, and reduced poverty.

Take, for instance, the story of Claire Reed, one of the budding entrepreneurs supported by the centre in Johannesburg. Her business Reel Gardening produces a patented pre-fertilised biodegradable ‘seed strip’ that makes growing food in a garden setting simple, easy and extremely productive. By reducing water wastage by eighty per cent in the germination phase, Reel Gardening is forging to the forefront of the fight against food insecurity in Africa. Since attending the Branson Centre, Claire, who lives by the perhaps clichéd but still apt motto of ‘Better to teach a man to fish than give a man a fish’, has created numerous jobs for previously unemployed single mothers in the production of the seed tape. She has also provided training at some 150 school and community gardens, thus enabling countless others to take control of their food security and employment.

Over in the West Indies, another Jamaican Branson Centre alumna Robyn Fox has developed three distinct, but closely interwoven businesses: the Mount Edge Guest House; the ‘Europe in the Summer’ (or EITS as in eats!) Café, ‘offering European and Jamaican flair using the farm-to-table concept’; and Food Basket Farm, a weekly delivery service for fresh, locally grown, pesticide-free produce. Robyn now has a steady stream of customers throughout the year and has identified opportunities to expand her operations further afield as well as how to educate others in the community about farming methods, hospitality and tourism. As Robyn tells it, ‘Among so many other things during my time at the Branson Centre I was introduced to the opportunities that are to be found in harnessing the power of the local community. We hire only locals in the businesses, we grow almost all our food locally and we embrace the community at every turn whether it’s fish fries with our guests or local “Rasta” drummers playing for them. It adds so much more satisfaction knowing that we are not just running a healthy business but that its impact on the community has been nothing but positive.’

STUDENT ENTREPRENEURS

Claire and Robyn’s stories are all the more encouraging considering the similar socio-economic challenges that South Africa and Jamaica both face – looking at the bigger picture, however, they are merely a drop-in-the-bucket. So, why not work to take entrepreneurship and leadership to a whole new level?

Let’s start in our schools. Having dropped out of school at sixteen, I’ve always felt that the UK’s education system never really caught on to the idea that entrepreneurship can and should be nurtured at an early age. This may have improved slightly over the years but it certainly still has a very long way to go. Today’s teenagers are tomorrow’s leaders and with very few exceptions they are bursting with natural inquisitiveness, drive and spirit that schools need to learn to harness and channel rather than tame. Our educational systems need to give young people the opportunity to plug into curriculums that encourage them to rise to their full potential, take risks, embrace failure, and challenge the established norms wherever and whenever they can. The leaders of tomorrow will be so much more effective if they are taught to retain and refine that childlike curiosity for the unknown, rather than having it ‘schooled’ out of them, as seems still to be the case today in so many schools and universities.

Secondary education should be encouraged to place greater emphasis on developing emotional intelligence, critical thinking, and real-life problem-solving skills – algebra and calculus don’t cut it – all of which are key traits of successful entrepreneurs and indeed successful adults in any walk of life. One of the problems facing any such classroom revolution is that schoolteachers tend to teach the things they themselves were taught in school, and entrepreneurship was almost certainly not one of them. In fact, when I went to school the only ‘job’ teachers ever talked about was teaching, presumably because that was all they had ever wanted to do – they too, however, were likely victims of the same phenomenon at the hands of their own teachers. Career guidance counselling was not that big back then!

So how exactly can entrepreneurship be wedged into school curriculums? For one, we should encourage schools to bring in entrepreneurs of all ages to talk to pupils about their own personal journeys. There is no greater inspiration than hearing about someone’s first-hand experiences – warts and all. Not just the glowing tales of ‘How I made it big’ but all of the seemingly insurmountable challenges, near-misses and failures, which are every bit as valuable as the success stories. We should also support more small business challenges and competitions in schools and universities. Wonderful models exist for such things in programmes such as ‘Young Enterprise’ in the UK and ‘Junior Achievement’ (JA) in the USA.

Young Enterprise and Virgin Money have collaborated on a wonderful competition aimed at primary school children (ages five to eleven) called ‘The Fiver Challenge’. Participating children or groups are pledged five pounds to set up a ‘mini-business’ and have thirty days to make as much profit as they can while engaging with their local communities. At the end of the month each group’s earnings are tallied up, pledges repaid and the kids decide how they want to use any profits – maybe a day out, books for school or a donation to their favourite charity – the choice is entirely theirs. The purpose of the challenge, however, is not about the winnings so much as introducing young minds to the concepts of risk taking, team working, problem solving and in short – that money is not just for spending!

In the US, not-for-profit JA distributes a classroom-based teaching module entitled ‘Be Entrepreneurial’. The seven-part programme introduces students to the essential elements of such things as writing a practical business plan and then challenges them to start an entrepreneurial venture while still in school. As per their website, JA students learn about ‘
Advertising, business plans, competitive advantages, customer demographics, entrepreneurial spirit, ethical dilemma, ethics, financing, franchising, long- vs. short-term consequences, market needs, marketing, non-profit businesses, stakeholders, product development, profit, social entrepreneurship, social responsibility’
and of course, roll all these together and they are essentially learning how to become well-rounded leaders!

I don’t think any one of those words or phrases ever crossed the lips of one of my teachers when I was in school. Okay, ‘that was then’, you say – but the real problem is that I don’t believe they are terribly common in today’s schools either – certainly not before university level. But we shouldn’t fall into the trap of blaming everything on the schools. One way or the other we could all do a better job of promoting activities outside of the classroom that support the entrepreneurial experience. It is certainly encouraging to learn that, at last count, 150 countries now celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week and that more and more business schools are offering courses on how to become an entrepreneur.

Consider my own story. When I was in school, my friends and I saw a need for young people to have their own voice on the bigger issues of the day. So we started a magazine for students, aptly titled
Student
. We were attempting to change the world and run a business all at the same time. As you will have read, we made all kinds of mistakes big and small along the way, and although we didn’t always realise it at the time, these inevitably turned into valuable learning experiences. But the factor that most contributed to our early success was the support we got from our families and friends – at the time our schools didn’t even pretend to understand what we were up to.
Student
soon led to other, bigger endeavours that benefited greatly from the life lessons that we gleaned from this first entrepreneurial venture and I have often thought how much less daunting the experience might have been had we had the support of the school system and local businesses. Having access to a study course like the above Junior Achievement programme might have made all the difference in the world. I say ‘might’ rather than ‘would’ only because, given my teenage disaffection with just about anything taught in a classroom, the chances are I might just have decided that this ‘entrepreneurship thing’ was not for me. We will never know!

A PIONEERING TALE

Several Virgin companies have been making concerted efforts to support burgeoning entrepreneurs. For example, working closely with Virgin Unite, Virgin Media decided it had all the tools to offer meaningful online assistance and so in 2010 launched VirginMediaPioneers.com. This has spawned an incredible online community of enterprising young people using videos and blogging to help young entrepreneurs share their ideas and experiences. The Pioneers programme also has real (live) people there for participants to talk to, network with, collaborate with and get tips from. The online video channel Pioneers TV brings it all to life with Pioneers’ spotlights and behind-the-scenes insights into all kind of industries. In the real world there are also free events for training and face-to-face networking as well as contests and competitions that will help entrepreneurs get experience and build their profiles. I have been thrilled to take part in several events where I’ve had the opportunity to sit down with some of our Pioneers and let them pitch their projects and discuss their hopes, aspirations and fears.

One of the more amazing tales of success that we use to inspire Virgin Media Pioneers is that of Londoner Jamal Edwards who now frequently attends VMP events to share his experiences. His story began when at age fifteen his mother gave him a digital video camera for Christmas. He started filming clips of his friends rapping and posting them on the newly emergent YouTube. When people started to follow Jamal, he next started poaching interviews with rap artists outside clubs and adding them to his YouTube content. Seeing the niche he was filling, at sixteen he launched his YouTube-hosted SB.TV online music channel. Jamal was on his way. Now, at just twenty-two, his millions of followers have translated to millions in the bank and Jamal has become a youth broadcast sensation. He is accredited with giving several new stars like Ed Sheeran their starts on SB.TV and I have to say that looking at Jamal’s emergence on the scene gives me some déjà vu shivers, as in so many ways it’s like a digital era remix of my roots with
Student
magazine and Virgin Records. Go get ’em, Jamal, you are an inspiration to millions of young entrepreneurs!

HOW GOVERNMENTS CAN HELP – SERIOUSLY!

Unfortunately Jamal’s amazing story is very much the exception to the rule. While support from schools and families is critical, governments need to contribute as well in supporting young entrepreneurs and future job creators who, as I did at age sixteen, decide that academic pursuits aren’t really the best path for them. Determined to dig deeper into exactly these issues, in 2011 Virgin Media Pioneers (VMP) conducted an extensive survey of young entrepreneurs and their responses confirmed the usual problems: young people are still held back by a lack of support, a lack of practical training and the often impossible task of sourcing start-up capital.

Drawing on these findings and working with a number of youth issues experts and groups, VMP issued a comprehensive report calling for corporations to find tangible ways to support start-ups, such as freeing up unused office space and providing mentors who would volunteer their time to assist aspiring young entrepreneurs. At the same time I suggested to the government that it should seriously reconsider the way it invests in young people. The argument was really very simple: why should a university-bound student be able to borrow (in the UK) around £30,000 to get a degree in business but then when he or she is ready to take their new-found entrepreneurial skills to market, struggle to raise a measly £5,000 or £10,000 to launch their shoestring start-up? Or, in the event that halfway through their planned time at university a student stumbles on a ‘must do, Eureka moment’ opportunity and wants to seize the moment – why shouldn’t there be a way for them to parlay the balance of their student loan into a start-up loan? I further boldly suggested that the British government could address this scenario and in so doing unlock huge economic benefits. The recommendation was for the existing Student Loans Company, which administers tuition fees, be reinvented as a new ‘Youth Investment Company’. Under the new, broader-based business model it would continue to administer student loans, but would also have the remit to make new or crossover loans available to young entrepreneurs on the same favourable terms.