Game Changer: Anita Roddick – Business as Unusual

Anita Roddick spoke yesterday at Said Business School as part of Oxford Entrepreneur’s Game Changers series.

In a very different occasion to Alan Sugar’s appearance earlier this term, she gave a polished empassionated talk, as might be expected, as this event appeared to be part of her latest book tour.

She started by very fairly turning on the OE’s obsession with the term ‘entrepreneur’. Describing herself as an activist and agitator, she talked of the media’s unbounded obsession with the phrase, the success of which only seems to be measured by profit alone. People were confusing entrepreneurship with opportunism, and success was inflated and depressing.

Challenge Everything

Dame Anita is trying to help the World enter a new era where money is not the end. An entrepreneur, as she sees them, should be more of a social change agent than a business person; following a calling, not a career. They should be like a crazy person and believe the idea so passionately that they talk about it in the present tense; they will it into existence with the zealousness of a religious convert. She admitted that she has learnt a lot from Quaker business models.

The four key things are:
1) Idea
2) Self
3) Money is necessary to make it happen, but should not be the motivator; it is more about freedom [although not as we learnt later in her case with Body Shop's public floatation]
4) INTEGRITY

Critical is the belief that anything is possible; essentially patholigically creative; vomitting ideas.

Bravely she dismissed society’s love of business schools, which she saw as being controlling and obsessed with the status quo. What she wanted was a marketplace for feedback and ideas. Her idea: being twenty times bigger is not a goal; being better by being values-led is. This is why the Body Shop, for her at least, was a conduit for areas and issues she believed in.

Talking about the Body Shop, she told us of its beginnings: her husband, Gordon, was about to leave to travel through America on a donkey, and founding the business was a way of securing financial well-being for her family. The first shop was in Brighton, in an out of the way location, but drew a committed customer-base: it had to, as it was on a road full of undertakers (apparently). Her early — and continued — success is in part due to her uncoventional, inexpensive, eye-catching marketing techniques, what she describes as guerilla marketing. She saw standard marketing as ineffective: we are all nowadays very over-marketed too, and thus have become very cynical. However, working with NGOs she was able to target an idealistic sort of consumer. She described the best marketing as the one that your competitions is either unwilling or unable to follow.

“We were searching for employees but people turned up instead.”

But it is clear that her consumers are not the most important people in all this to her. It’s her employees. She expressed sadness that businesses are no longer about job creation, only wealth creation. The Body Shop seems to be a conduit not just for her, but she thinks that it’s critical to empower her employees; nothing being more motivating as the chance to express their idealism.

Then it came down to her leadership style.

Leadership is Communication

There is no more powerful an institution than business; so it has to assume a moral leadership. It’s most effective tool is communication, integral to which is the language of leadership: community involvement and social justice. Activism, she claimed, is the price we pay for being on this planet.

UPDATE: The Independent on Sunday has an interesting profile of Dame Anita in light of l’Oreal’s rumoured bid for the Body Shop.
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