The Virgin Way

[...]... opposed to just the stock price – serves to encourage everyone in the organisation to get into the habit of seeing what you look like from the outside in A domino benefit is that middle managers don’t want a senior officer to be the first to tell them how their part of the operation looks from the other side of the fence, especially if they’ve never troubled to set foot over there themselves! As an... look like is a good example of the Virgin way of taking advantage of family input Certainly the women in my life, my wife Joan and daughter Holly, have had their say but in this case the ‘family’ I am talking about is the extended Virgin family of companies, their employees and our fifty million or so customers around the world The Virgin Hotels input in question was not by way of any formal research but... they are newborn or toddlers they tend to get away with all kinds of stuff on the basis that they are just finding their feet and so they generally enjoy a higher forgiveness factor If companies survive this stage (many do not), like teenagers they then start to develop acne and other character blemishes while they get a little bit cocky and know-it-all After that there comes a more mature stage: they... leadership positions their resumes/CVs have to come into play, but they really should be judged equally on their vision for the future as on what they’ve achieved in the past If a company is to move forward, hiring clones of the previous incumbent will rarely generate much in the way of positive change No matter how good the previous person in the job might have been there is always room for improvement... little statues of the ‘Three Wise Monkeys’ – you may have seen them – that embody the proverbial principle of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’ Well, while there wasn’t a lot they could do about the ‘see no evil’ part, they went to great lengths to teach me to never think or speak badly of others They encouraged me to always look for the good in people instead of assuming the worst and trying... ready, one that they should be able to fix, and see how well they do and how pleasantly they go about it If they do it really well you might want to consider identifying yourself at the end of the call and praising their efforts If they get it hopelessly wrong you are better off taking the story to their supervisor so the failing can become a training subject Or for some real fun – play-act the part of... enforce the rules and regularly throw the said (heavy) book at anyone who dares to deviate from the corporate dogma Such people would not enjoy the Virgin way Along with all the top people from almost every company in the group, I attended a day-long review of the first cut of the research and as expected it was filled with some utterly fascinating takes on the inner workings of what makes Virgin tick... because they have never experienced anything like it, then they are likely to be overly guarded in their comments For a variety of reasons – and as the New Coke taste-test fiasco demonstrates – I have always had trouble accepting the validity of the kind of consumer feedback that is garnered from formal focus groups This is the kind where they all sit down in a room and pretend they don’t know they’re... of the daily routine and you’ll be looking at a company with a culture that works better than most – in every sense of the word HOW VIRGIN VIEWS VIRGIN Our top company, Virgin Management, recently conducted a major piece of research throughout all the Virgin Group companies around the globe, the purpose of which was to try and gain a clearer understanding of how our people define leadership in the Virgin. .. landing the job Ironically, the result tends to become one huge selffulfilling prophecy When they can’t find employment, statistics show that fifty per cent or more of exoffenders take the seemingly easy way out and resort to crime as the only way to support themselves, and then quickly end up back inside My good friend and Comic Relief creator Jane Tewson was the one who first drew my attention to the . what the other 93,467 authors have to say, but I doubt that few if any of them can have had a fraction of the fun I’ve had in the forty-plus years I have been leading the charge with the Virgin. because of the reefs surrounding it, no one has ever set foot, then the chances are that reading the same old charts as everyone else has used isn’t going to get you there either. And the readily. with my father Ted, even if the two of them didn’t always realise it at the time. There are many examples of this. Like one Sunday in church when I point-blank refused to sit next to the son of