Just Good Business!

If you’ve watched the Pirates of the Caribbean series, you’d remember, in the third part, Lord Cutler Beckett murmuring his favourite line, “Nothing personal Jack, it’s just good business…” as he goes about executing his evil plans to control the seas. Richard Branson’s “Screw Business As Usual” reminded me of the memorable dialogue — not because the book endorses the idea, but because it strictly opposes it. What the glamorous and flamboyant magnate wants to tell the world through his book is that all business is indeed personal — it’s not just about making profit, it’s about making a difference.
He quotes Ray Anderson: “For those who think business exists to make a profit, I suggest they think again. Business makes a profit to exist. Surely it must exist for some higher, nobler purpose than that.”
Through the countless examples of big and small entrepreneurs that his book is strewn with — along with his own, of course — Branson wants to make people believe that “doing good is good for business”.
The book has a preface that compels you to turn the pages — it begins with the fire at Necker Island that completely razed his house to the ground. That wouldn’t be news for you, if you’ve followed the life of the adventure-loving billionaire. But he’s used the incident to subtly remind us “how unimportant ‘stuff’ is” compared to people. Which really sets the tone for the rest of his book, talking about the ‘stuff’ that really matters — the creatures (people as well as animals) living on the 24,902 miles that make up the earth’s circumference. And that, as you come to know, is what gave rise to Capitalism 24902 — doing business in a way that you can contribute to making lives better. As Branson says, people want opportunities, not charity.
And there is information here that would shock you: in the US (of all places!) almost two million young people — some less than 12 years of age —experience homelessness every year. Then there are stories that you would marvel at, such as that of Gyanesh from Bihar who is creating electricity from rice husk for 30,000 rural homes at $2 a month, or that of Adam Balon and Richard Reed, founders of Innocent Drinks. When they created their first smoothie, they were working at Virgin Cola but wanted to start their own enterprise. Unable to decide whether to quit their jobs for this, they took their smoothies to an open air jazz festival, put two waste bins labelled ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in front of their stall, and put a sign above the bins that read: ‘Should we give up our jobs to make these smoothies’! (By the end of the day, the ‘yes’ bin was overflowing.) The book is topped up with dollops of the billionaire’s trademark humour, which brings the text to life. As he cleverly says, “humour can often be a far better way to change behaviour than just trying to scare the hell out of people. If Martin Luther King’s famous quote, ‘I have a dream’ had been ‘I have a nightmare’ it would never have been so successful.”