Business Stripped Bare

by Richard Branson

  The Environmental War Room will be a unique combination of entrepreneurial muscle, the best possible data and the power to mobilise resources and inspire innovation. Representatives from big business and finance will work alongside representatives from 'green' organisations with whom they may previously have been at odds. It will be a collection of 'best of class' thinking, brought together for the good of all – and it will be truly global. The plan is to have a small, indepedent team that works closely with partners to ensure we don't duplicate, but instead connect the dots on what is already happening, provide reliable information and help speed up the solutions.

  The war room will identify all the best (and in some cases radical) ideas, map who is doing what, track and prioritise the impact of existing solutions on carbon reduction and the conservation of ecological systems. It will provide analyses of all the data collected, and identify and prioritise the best options.

  Leadership is paramount here. During the questions and answers at the UN conference, the journalists were intrigued to find out who would lead our troops into battle – and I was asked several times about Al Gore. I deflected the questions because we were still considering who we should appoint – I acknowledged he would be a great person to lead us in such a battle, but I wasn't sure how he might take it. We need a Winston Churchill or a Franklin D. Roosevelt figure – someone with the respect, stature and voice to assert their authority.

  So just as Virgin Unite is now in the process of setting up a war room to tackle disease in sub-Saharan Africa, they are also in the process of creating a war room to tackle carbon.

  Should we fail to find a technological solution then we must start to prepare the world for the consequences of a five-degree rise in temperature and look at ways of mitigating the worst effects. The war room must find radical ideas and win the global community's backing, as happened when CFC gases were banned worldwide to deal with the hole in the ozone layer.

  At the session in New York, I introduced one idea as an example. 'It is now widely accepted that rising sea levels, as a result of global warming, will destroy hundreds of thousands of homes in coastal towns all over the world and displace millions of the world's population. But what if today we start planning to create massive inland lakes in Africa, Asia, Australia, North Canada and South America, using fresh water from rivers that would otherwise have gone into the sea? These inland seas can be created as sea levels start to rise with the aim of keeping sea levels as they are at present. They will also – as water – have an added benefit in helping to cool the Earth down. They will help create more rain in desert regions, which in turn will create more trees – which in turn will absorb more carbon.'

  The Environmental War Room would be able to place a cost on such large ideas, negotiating compensation 'costs' with individual countries. But I stressed that the United Nations would need to work in partnership with the war room to ensure implementation happens. I had prepared a quote from Sir Winston Churchill, who created his famous War Room in London, during the Second World War. 'One ought never to turn one's back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!'

  In March 2008, at the suggestion of Richard Stromback, a former professional hockey player who struck gold as a clean-technology entrepreneur, we decided to have a small gathering of people who were addressing the issue to see how we might be able to join forces. Richard, the chief executive of Ecology Coatings, the Climate Group and Virgin Unite invited a group of like-minded business people and former political figures to the event to consider further opportunities. Larry Page, from Google, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal, Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, and Tony Blair – the former British prime minister, now working as a Middle East peace envoy – were among those attending.

  In America, the 'clean tech' business boom has already begun, not only in Silicon Valley and the rest of California, but also in and around Boston, around Albuquerque, New Mexico, and near Austin, Texas. Already energy investments are the third largest component of all US venture capital funds, and by far the fastest growing segment. The number of companies and individuals to watch in this sector is now large, with companies like Odersun, Solyndra, Clipper Windpower and Enphase Energy moving very fast.

  Shai Agassi, the former president of SAP's product and technology group, is out on his own now as the founder of Better Place of Palo Alto; he has been trying to create the infrastructure to operate a countrywide fleet of electric vehicles in Israel.

  Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal and now a space entrepreneur, talked about his Tesla Motors, a Silicon Valley company that makes electric sports cars retailing for $100,000. (Larry has ordered one, but I'm holding off for the moment as I rarely even use a car now.) Hunt Ramsbottom, chief executive of the synthetic fuel technology company Rentech, talked about his plans to make biofuels for aeroplanes, while William McDonough showed us designs for a building in Abu Dhabi with solar panels built into the windows, and a Wal-Mart distribution centre with an energy-friendly grass roof.

  Then Tony Blair said something that chimed with me – and made me more determined than ever to pursue the war room. He said governments are too busy firefighting to truly make a difference. 'It is frightening with the day-to-day hustle and bustle of government how little time is spent on the major issues such as carbon,' he told us. For example, the UK's environment minister would come in for a meeting with him for perhaps two hours a month if he was lucky. The Cabinet would work out some short-term project and say: 'OK, let's do this or that.'

  If this is typical, then there is a truly desperate need for the Environmental War Room – and I see the green entrepreneurial community playing a central role in its operations.

  To run a business ethically, you have to consider the effect of your operations on others. You would never tolerate bribery; by the same token, you must not tolerate casual damage to the environment.

  It took me a while to realise this. I was half afraid to look the problem of climate change in the eye. It daunted me. I thought it was too big for me – too big for anyone. And so I tried to persuade myself that it didn't exist.

  Like one that, on a lonesome road Doth walk in fear and dread, And having once turned round walks on, And turns no more his head; Because he knows, a frightful fiend Doth close behind him tread.

  But unlike the outlook of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, business is about facing up to realities. Real problems – even ones as gigantic as climate change – are never as frightening as the spectres in our minds. We can do something about global warming. We just have to lose our fear of it. We have been frozen in horror and denial for too long. We have to act.

  No one is asking you to save the planet. Just dream up and work on a couple of good ideas. No one expects you to find a global solution to everything. Just make a difference where you can. Local solutions have a value in themselves, and some can be scaled up, so it doesn't matter how modest your budget, you can and will make a difference.

  That's the good news.

  Now comes the frightening bit.

  If you don't do this, then you will almost certainly go out of business, if not next year, then in five years' time, or ten or twenty. The climate is changing and the population is rocketing. As a consequence the price of everything is fluctuating. The insurance market is in chaos. Unpredictable, unexpected shortages are disturbing production. Changing weather patterns are imperilling whole populations and disrupting the economies of entire nations. And it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

  You'll recall that when I was describing our development of biofuels and spacecraft, I said that there was no such thing as an overnight success in a new market: that Virgin's early emergence in these sectors was the consequence of years of reading and research.

  The sector we might as well call 'responses to
climate change' is not a sector we can choose whether or not to do business in. It's a sector that now embraces all of us, whether we like it or not. Big or small, we have to do business in this area because our failure to do so will ruin us.

  If you're not ahead of the game, if you're not researching the solutions to problems that may affect your business a decade from now, then you run the serious risk that you will haemorrhage and fail.

  But why look at this through the gloomy end of the telescope? The reverse is equally true: make a success of yourself in this sector, and you will find yourself turning something that advantages everyone into a handsome profit for your company.

  With that profit, you can then dream up and experiment with bigger and bigger scale solutions. Addressing climate change is good business; and I guarantee that once you bite the bullet and start work in this sector, you won't want to stop.

  HIV/Aids and climate change are issues that I have a personal passion for and that make sense for the Virgin Group to get behind. We are working on other social and environmental investments, but the one thing all of our efforts in this area have in common is that they leverage Virgin's biggest asset – the entrepreneurial spirit of our people. This spirit, coupled with the right partners and great ideas, can truly help us make a difference, help communities thrive and help our planet.

  If we want a world that we can be proud to leave to the next seven generations, every business needs to look at how they can drive change in every aspect of their operations. One last point: don't forget to listen – as some of the best ideas will come from your staff, customers and people on the front lines!

  If you ever fancy joining us as a partner in any of our endeavours to make the world a better place, please contact us at Virgin Unite: www.virginunite.com.

  Epilogue

  Success

  If I hadn't badly damaged my knee as a teenager I would likely have been a sportsman. If I hadn't been dyslexic I wouldn't have left school at sixteen and created a magazine, which means I wouldn't have ended up running Student, which means Virgin Records would never have been born, which means . . .

  There are different paths that you can take in this life, and choosing the correct path is supremely important. And as if that weren't pressure enough, it's no good choosing not to choose, because that approach to life absolutely guarantees failure.

  I don't think there is enough attention and help given to young people in life to set them in the right direction. All young people deserve wise counsel. They need someone who can show them a future. They need to be able to work out what they can do with their lives, how they can enjoy their lives, how they can pay for it and how they can take responsibility for their actions.

  I think it's a shame that we teach children everything about the world, but we don't teach them how to take part in the world, how to realise an idea, how to measure the consequences of their actions, how to take a knock, or how to share their success. What kind of world have we built, that people can use the phrase 'it's just business' without challenge or contradiction?

  Entrepreneurship is business's beating heart. Entrepreneurship isn't about capital; it's about ideas. A great deal of entrepreneurship can be taught, and we desperately need to teach it, as we confront the huge global challenges of the twenty-first century.

  Entrepreneurship is also about excellence – not excellence measured in awards, or other people's approval, but the sort one achieves for oneself, by exploring what the world has to offer. I wrote to someone recently who, like me, is dyslexic. I said that it is important to look for one's strengths – to try to excel at what you're good at.

  What you're bad at actually doesn't interest people, and it certainly shouldn't interest you. However accomplished you become in life, the things you are bad at will always outnumber the things you're good at. So don't let your limits knock your self-confidence. Put them to one side and push yourself towards your strengths.

  This, I think, is sound advice for the young. For those of you who've left youth behind, my advice would be: reread the paragraph above, adding exclamation marks after every sentence.

  Because, in business, you always have a choice, and you always have an obligation to choose. With the right attitude, business will keep your mind eternally young, because business is always changing, changes always bring opportunities, and you can never hide from the changes that are round the corner.

  In entrepreneurial business, a conservative mindset will hamstring you, defensiveness will weaken you and a failure to face facts will kill you. Entrepreneurial business favours the open mind. It favours people whose optimism drives them to prepare for many possible futures, pretty much purely for the joy of doing so. It favours people with a humane and engaged view of the world; people who can imagine themselves into the skin of their customers, their workers and the people who are affected by their operations. Business favours people who, when they see a problem or an injustice, try to do something about it. It favours pragmatists over perfectionists, adventurers over fantasists.

  Done well and in the right spirit, business will also bring you success – whatever that is.

  Indeed, how do you measure who's truly successful? My list of the world's most successful people includes Sir Freddie Laker – hardly an obvious choice, to go by the headlines, the rich lists and all the other paraphernalia of business celebrity. So let's strip this particular business bare once and for all: when we talk about success, what are we really talking about?

  Are we talking about money? As a measure of success, money's a crude one at best. People are always inquisitive about how wealthy other people are. It's a fascinating subject and one that produces endless reams of copy and discussion. But the reality is that wealth is like a running stream of water. During some seasons the flow of money is a torrent and you're inundated with cash. The next moment, you've put money in to develop a business and your cash flow dries up overnight leaving a barren riverbed.

  So even the more well-researched rich lists have to take a bit of a potshot when arriving at their figures. There have been times I was almost bankrupt, and I was very glad to see my name in the Sunday Times Rich List, because I thought it would assuage the bank manager. (The figures were often wildly off the mark both ways – but I wasn't complaining.) In the last few years things have gone well for the Virgin Group. In 2008, it had a reach of nearly £12 billion.

  And me? I'm rich. There – I said it. It's quite an American thing to talk about wealth. In Britain we're still sort of slightly embarrassed about it, and I think that's a good thing. When I go to a party I see people, not bank statements, and I'd like to think that when people get chatting to me they feel the same. To be perfectly honest I hated the word 'billionaire' going into the title of that show I did for Fox. It was a great title, but it wasn't my style at all. Money's only interesting for what it lets you do. On paper, if I was to sell up my shareholdings in the companies tomorrow, I would have considerable wealth. But where would be the fun in that?

  If money's a poor guide to success in life, celebrity is worse. The media likes to personalise and simplify matters – and that's understandable. It's much easier to talk about Steve Jobs at Apple, Bill Gates at Microsoft or Richard Branson at Virgin, but that doesn't really acknowledge that there's a legion of senior people doing significant jobs and making major decisions every day. Everyone wants to make business 'simple' and that's one of my constant goals, but in reality there are certain complexities about running a media company, a space-tourism business or an airline. And the financial implications of running a global business across many jurisdictions require a substantial level of expert knowledge in accountancy, taxation and legal affairs, not forgetting the IT, marketing and HR functions too. I've never met a CEO who had all of those skills. Of course, the figurehead at the top does make significant strategic decisions but this is based on the work and capabilities of other people within the business. We all still have the same number of hours in the working week. In successful
businesses, working hard is never confined to one or two people – you'll usually find a strong work ethic runs right through the company.

  If neither money nor celebrity really encapsulate what success is about, what about personal power? I've been asked what happens if Richard Branson's own balloon bursts: isn't the Virgin Group far too reliant on one individual? I have jokingly replied that during our spell running Virgin Records, we always found that when a major rock-music artist died the records sales went through the roof.