14th October 2017 brought the privilege of seeing a boyhood hero in person.
I jumped on the 22 bus and headed down to San Francisco’s Castro Theater, to see Sir Richard Branson in conversation with Stacy Brown-Philpot, CEO of Task Rabbit.
I’ve heard Branson’s critics over the years.
But not for a while now. The attitude and character of CEOs and tycoons seems ever more polarized, and Branson emerges ever more as a “renaissance man” entrepreneur and leader.
And someone who knows how to live.
Growing up in similar part of the world to where Branson is from, I adored the vibe of walking into a Virgin record shop. A store that always felt cooler and more enticing than its competitors. The flagship store in Piccadilly Circus in London was a particular treat. Perhaps like you, I have never listened to more music than when I was a teenager. And, I have a snapshot memory of dinner in the nearby TGI Fridays restaurant with my great Aunt Muriel, having just bought a copy of Eddie Daniels’ 1989 album Blackwood. What makes us remember, huh?
I remember too the 1987 news footage of Branson’s edgy hot air balloon attempt that culminated in a very imperfect – and nearly deathly landing, his balloon basket being dragged across a field in Northern Ireland. (I enjoyed fact checking this memory, and stumbling on this BBC article).
Doing my undergraduate thesis on the airline industry, I learnt all about British Airways’ “dirty tricks” campaign waged against the start-up Virgin Atlantic.
I read Branson’s first biography Losing My Virginity, as a teenager, and learnt about him spending his twenties on a houseboat – as the entrepreneur-adventurer charted his own course in life in London building Virgin Records after an upbringing similar to mine. Except he was expelled from school…
And, looking back, I am admiring of that. It was all adventure for Branson. While building businesses.
Hero.
There is no other type I love more than those who build businesses for fun, just getting on with making a living in areas of interest.
Like another hero – Yvon Chouinard, who founded Patagonia and built its powerful tribe today in total reflection of his love of climbing and exploring in the great outdoors, of the value of conservation and being responsible and innovative in making something.
Both Branson and Chouinard have ended up with empires in the image of their own spirits and lives.
Not only was Branson creating businesses that customers mostly loved but he was fun, he was down-to-earth and he was cooly aloof of the effete English upper middle-class culture that he’d grown up in.
So, I was really moved to see Sir Richard sitting half-way across a room from me in the Mission district San Francisco – a culture very different from the lovely rural English communities in which Branson and I grew up.
Sir Richard has aged quite a bit from my boyhood perspective. All the boats rise on the tide, fun as it is to forget that. Yet he still comes across as so fit, so energetic, so happy, so straight-forward.
And while a staged interview has some sense of prepared formality, Branson dissolved that pretty quickly.
He touched on so many topics that resonated, all scribbled down in a notebook in my lap in the dark of a theater.
Casting thoughts on the business world today, Branson reminded how far we have come with companies speaking out about issues.
No surprise then to be reminded that night that Branson’s first venture was effectively activism. He launched a school magazine to rail against the Vietnam war.
And then he swung a punch at the lack of flexibility, and the silly presenteeism that defines work culture in America: “if a good employee wants to take a couple of months off to travel, why can’t they?”. I always think that the answer is that the management is neither good enough to organize (which is management) around a change like that, nor do Americans value living well.
Branson continued, then, to explain that companies should not question, but rather support, the kind of lives that good employees want to live around their work. At least if they want to keep them.
On managing people, he commented “praise your people, don’t criticize them. Inspire them, help them get details right.” He related work culture and environment to home life, too, stating that “how you feel at home and how you feel at work should be almost one and the same thing”.
Sir Richard dug in a little more on getting details right, in a metaphor that I loved: “Talk to customers, talk to staff, write notes. You run a company like you run your own private restaurant.”
So true. I had the life privilege of growing up in a restaurant business at full tilt. I learnt so much from nuances and nudges of observing Mum and Dad grinding through those years…in every role from kitchen porter to front-of-house…to bonding moments with an exhausted Dad with feet-up and socks off dissolving into the sofa and offering me a beer to reflect back on an evening on the floor.
It was refreshing to hear Branson remind us that on almost all metrics, the world today is a much better place than it was when he was a boy. Though they’re my tribe in one sense, I often tire of the “we’re doomed” head-hang of environmentalists.
Sidebar: this had me thinking of the important book that influenced awareness of our filters in life, when I was starting my Masters program on Environmental Management in Australia in 2002. Traveling with cousins along the Gold Coast before the course began, I was reading Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist. I have always thought that it is important to read contrarian viewpoints to those swilling around in your own goldfish bowl. And so I recently purchased The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Not because I am on ’that side’ — at least not in any instinct or belief – but I do want to hear their perspective and put myself in the shoes of the climate denying tribe to better communicate to them.
Back to the Castro Theater and Branson.
One questioner (isn’t there always one?*) launched into a long personal story that was hard to follow but started with the reference to her son’s neurological disorder.
Brilliantly, Sir Richard started to answer with a condolence relating to the story. He completely forgot the point of the question mid-sentence and turned to the Stacy – the interviewer – for support, laughing at himself.
“Stacy, can you help me with that”?
And – Stacy Brown-Philpot was all set to succinctly rephrase the 2-minute monologue into a sentence, a masterly turn of a tuned-in interviewer.
The most touching moment was Branson talking about his mother and father.
He retold the story that I read all those years ago, when I first read Losing Your Virginity as a teenager.
Relating to his spirit of “work it out”, Sir Richard tells the story of his mother dumping him at the side of the road as a 6 or 7-year old because he was fooling around in the car. She told him to get out and walk home. It was some three miles or so and he was of kindergarten age. Very cool, I say – loathing our age of adults smothering children in their worries. For more on that have a look at this book review of “When Did Parenting Become So Fearful?”.
And then Sir Richard launched into reflections on his father, in particular his unfailing optimism and good humor. He spoke of his father’s life as a military man and a barrister, and a man who – like Sir Richard – was not academic.
The influence of both of Branson’s parents was fascinating to hear and I had to go and look up more as to both, in particular enjoying the Telegraph obituary for Edward Branson and the tale of two sides to his advice:
“There was a time when I felt [Richard] ought to get a qualification, so I walked him up and down our lawn at home and said I would like him to qualify as a barrister. Later, I felt awful because I had said to him just what my father had said to me. So, the next weekend, I walked him up and down the lawn once again and told him to forget everything I’d said.”
Especially today.
Being in Branson’s company, hearing him tell stories of his adventuring, his influences, how he was invited by Nelson Mandela to help form a group called ‘The Elders’, and how that came about, how the British government sent him on a plane to negotiate a hostage release with Saddam Hussein. And hearing him speak of the kinds of organizations we need to improve the world today…
And I thought then to the simple wisdom of a recent conversation with a Mexican Lyft driver on the way to the airport at the end of a business trip in Arizona. I was trying to understand why plenty of Mexicans voted for Trump, despite his commentary on Mexicans and immigration and “the Wall”.
And the Lyft-driver reminded me of the almighty power of asking the right questions in life.
The driver told me that many Mexicans they liked Trump because he was a businessman. But, he added, they forgot to ask the more important question: “What kind of businessman”?