In Praise of Richard Branson
You’ve got to hand it to Richard Branson. He keeps on coming up with new ideas. The latest, Virgin Galactic, will send paying passengers into space. In an era in which high oil prices and a shrinking consumer economy are squeezing the conventional holiday industry, Sir Richard has his eye on government support for the space industry to create a whole new concept in tourism.
What I find astonishing abut Branson is his unfailing enthusiasm for seeking out new things and doing them his way. From his earliest days, when he apocryphally sold records from a phone box, he has created a phenomenally wide range of ventures, all branded in a way which appeared cool in the 1960s, although perhaps less so now.
Branson has not just been responsible for music stores, he has ventured into publishing, financial services (which he soon hopes to expand with the purchase of a network of RBS bank branches) broadcast media, air travel and rail services. Not to mention the things he has failed to pull off, like the attempt to win the contract to run the National Lottery, Virgin Clothes, Virgin Vodka; the list goes on.
Richard Branson has come in for a lot of stick over the years, much of it fuelled by nothing more than jealousy. His populist, self promoting style rankles with many people and his (somewhat misleading) anti-establishment image has upset many in the business world, notably British Airways.
But the point about Branson is that he is an entrepreneur, a creator of jobs and wealth, a man who thrives on putting ideas into practice. It is very easy for us to forget, in our contemporary corporate world that every business, no matter how hierarchical, sober or staid, was created by entrepreneurs; people who saw an idea, believed in it and went for it. They failed more frequently than they succeeded, that is in the nature of entrepreneurism. But without the failures there would have been no successes, and our economy and lives would have been the poorer for it.
As an economy we have always had a steady stream of entrepreneurs. Some have vanished as quickly as they arose (remember John DeLorean?). Very few have Richard Branson’s staying power. We need more like him.
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Tags: Entrepreneurism, Starting a Business, Virgin
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