life.
‘Mr Richard.’ It was a woman from the village, dressed in a KwaZulu gown of bright reds and yellows. ‘I’ve heard you are a very generous man. Can you lend me money to buy a sewing machine?’
At this time Virgin Unite, our charitable foundation, was busy at work in the villages in and around the reserve. The villagers had been walking a long way to Sand River for water that was not particularly safe to drink. So the foundation had sunk boreholes to provide the villagers with a nearby source of clean water. It taught skills, helped with the school and built a medical clinic. It created play areas for kids, and huts from which the villagers could sell their goods to tourists.
The tourists were our business too. For nearly ten years, Ulusaba has been a magical place, especially loved by people who come here to rent our upmarket lodges, one perched on the summit of a granite outcrop with stunning eagle-eye views across the bush, the other a tree house overlooking the Mabrak riverbed, where many animals come to drink and frolic.
I’ve been asked for money hundreds of times over the last thirty years, but rarely with such directness. You’ve heard of the elevator pitch? This was the elephant-pool pitch.
She told me she was a talented seamstress but that she needed cash to buy a sewing machine to get her business going.
‘So how much do you need?’
‘Three hundred dollars would be enough,’ she explained. ‘And, what is more, I’ll repay it within three months and employ six people full-time.’ The woman’s determination and ambition were fantastic. So was her focus: she knew exactly what she wanted, and why. She got her $300.
And as I walked away I said to myself: That’s money I’ll probably never see again.
I wasn’t being cynical. I simply had experience of how the odds were stacked. At Ulusaba — which means ‘place of little fear’ — I had come to know many local people who were working on the game reserve and looking after our visitors. And believe me, they have big fears. Malaria, tuberculosis and HIV/Aids stalk their daily lives.
Three months later I was invited back to the village to open some of the community projects supported by Virgin Unite, including creches, orphans’ homes and an Aids-awareness clinic. When I got there, six women came up to me, and gave me a gift of the most exquisite cotton pillows and tribal clothes which they had made. And, to complete my surprise, they returned the $300.
But where was the original entrepreneurial seamstress? I asked.
‘Mr Richard, she is so sorry she can’t be here personally to see you. She is off to the market selling the products,’ they told me.
I’ve thought of her often since that day: a confident, direct, intelligent woman, using a sewing machine to better her own and others’ lives. Never mind
Since the mid-1970s, the economist Professor Muhammad Yunus has been saying much the same thing about the women of Bangladesh. But how do we foster entrepreneurism in communities that, whatever their potential, have virtually nothing?
Muhammad Yunus started his Grameen Bank as a practical economics project in 1976. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for pioneering an economic system in which small, low-interest loans are extended to people who are unable to obtain a loan from a traditional bank. Grameen’s rule of thumb is to keep the interest rate as close as possible to the prevailing market rate in the commercial banking sector rather than moneylenders’ exorbitant rates. It has transformed the lives of millions and the bank now has 2,400 branches, and 7.5 million borrowers. The default rates — at 2 per cent — are lower than those of any other banking system. Every year, 5 per cent of Grameen borrowers move out of poverty. His work has spawned a global movement.
Muhammad is a proponent of ‘social business’. He said in an interview with the
His view is that many of the problems of the world remain unresolved because capitalism is poorly understood and poorly practised. The issue, he says, is not in the capitalist system itself, but in the hash that people repeatedly make of it. He completely rejects the common view, that capitalism is all about the bottom line.
He says: ‘In this narrow interpretation we create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as religious, emotional, political dimensions… Everyday human beings are not one-dimensional entities, they are excitingly multidimensional and indeed very colourful.’
Muhammad thinks capitalism can — and should — enrich the whole person.
I’m not good at theory. Almost everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned by doing. However, Muhammad’s opinions excite me. They confirm a lot of the gut feelings I’ve developed about business over the years. And topping my list of gut feelings is this:
Later on, we’ll be returning to Virgin’s African adventures, and some of the wider political questions this story throws up. For now, though — since we have to start somewhere — let’s start at home. Let’s start with you. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your company were full of people like the seamstress who accosted me that day in Ulusaba? Think what you could achieve.
Well, there’s no reason why it can’t be, and in this chapter I’m going to tell you how Virgin tries to foster the entrepreneurial spirit at every level of its business.
First of all, take a cold, hard look at your present surroundings.
Are you really going to be able to empower the people around you? I ask because, for all I know, your workplace may be a sink of despair. And while we’ve had a few notable successes in this area, it is, I would say, superhumanly difficult to change a company’s existing culture.
Virgin learned this the hard way in 1996, when we acquired Euro Belgian Airlines and turned it into a cheap, cheerful, go-getting budget airline called Virgin Express. Well, that was what Virgin Express was supposed to become. We rebranded the airline and floated 49 per cent of its stock on the Brussels and NASDAQ stock markets. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, because we’d be in competition with solid low-cost airlines such as easyJet, Ryanair and Go, with all the benefits they had of being based in the UK. Not only that, we would be based in
Boy, was I wrong.
Our Brussels-based low-cost carrier was one of the toughest challenges we have faced. Debilitating European regulations on the thirty-five-hour working week and high fixed costs meant that there was little room for radical changes. This is a nightmare when you are trying to run a low-cost operation and arrange rosters and crew patterns. But if it was bad for us, imagine what it was like for the staff. They were cynical about the business, for the very good reason that there was no fun, no camaraderie and no real sense of ownership.
We set about changing all that — or tried to — and landed feet first in a can of worms: strict union regulations, tortuous pay negotiations, constant strike threats. I had to go in myself and try to sort it out, and it taxed my own legendary reserves of karma. The crucial lesson I learned was:
As life turned out, shortly after that diary entry we made Neil Burrows the CEO and he set about turning the business around with incredible hard work and great leadership. However, just as Neil had got the costs into line
