well,
Many people reading this book will be affluent. If you don’t feel affluent right now, take a minute and think: the very fact that you could afford this book, or afford the time to take it out of the library — the very fact that you are able to read at all — marks you out as one of world history’s richest and most privileged people. There’s not that many of us, and we haven’t been affluent for very long, and so we’re not very good at it yet. Affluence makes us lazy. It makes us complacent. It smothers us in cotton wool. If your job’s well paid, who can blame you if you’re not willing to take a risk and, say, set up your own company?
The vast majority are very happy with this arrangement, and good for them. But if you want swashbuckling action in your life, become an entrepreneur and give it a go. Learn the art of trying to set up your own business. Which is the same as saying, learn the art of making mistakes and learning lessons.
Because if you want to be an entrepreneur and you
People have a fear of failure, and while this is perfectly reasonable, it’s also very odd. Because it seems to me that it’s through making mistakes that we learn how to do things. Watch a musician practise sometime. Watch a baby figure out how to walk. Listen to a toddler speak. Skills like walking and talking and playing music emerge gradually, steadily, from a blizzard of (often pretty funny) mistakes. I think this is true of
Now, I grant you that you may hit a limit, beyond which you
In my home country, the British education system has a lot to do with our fear of failure. I think it concentrates exclusively on academic achievement and downplays the other contributions people can make to society. I’ve huge admiration for scientists and engineers; whereas they are given due respect in Germany, the United States and Japan, in British society they tend to get a raw deal.
As someone who never went to university, perhaps I’ve a radical view of education. I am committed to excellence and expertise in business but I believe we need to show young people the value of wealth creation too. I think some university degrees could be finished more quickly — I’ve never understood why some courses have only two or three lectures per week, and why students are left to their own devices much of the time without much direction from tutors, lecturers and professors, who now spend most of their energy, it seems to me, chasing funding grants. But one thing is apparent to me: we still need a good deal more entrepreneurial thinking in our universities and colleges.
One of my greatest entrepreneurial heroes was Sir Freddie Laker. Freddie, who died in February 2006, aged eighty-three, lived his life to the limits. He was a tremendous person: a man of magic and mirth. He lit up a room and he was the ultimate salesman. An ex-colleague and close friend, David Tait, said he could sell a glass of water to a drowning man. Freddie was a huge inspiration and supporter of Virgin Atlantic and he was the godfather of cheap international air travel.
The first Skytrain flights took off from Gatwick to New York in September 1977. Although Freddie’s airline was no-frills, the ticket prices were unbelievable. It was only ?59 single to get to America — a third of the price of any of the other carriers. He made ?1 million profit in the first year — and I was one of his regular customers as we expanded our Virgin Records business in America.
Skytrain were carrying one in seven transatlantic passengers — and Freddie was knighted in 1978. Then in 1982, the company went into receivership with debts of ?264 million. He had borrowed heavily to buy fifteen new planes just as the pound plunged in value against the dollar, but worse than that, the major airlines had conspired against him, offering cheaper fares to undercut him. The airlines also threatened the airframe manufacturers, telling them not to sell to Freddie. His airline collapsed — with passengers still in the air.
In 1983, the liquidators Touche Ross started an anti-trust action in the United States, claiming $1 billion from ten major airlines — including British Airways, PanAm, TWA, and Lufthansa — who had got together to plot Freddie’s downfall. The defendants settled out of court, negotiating a reported ?35 million payment to Freddie’s creditors — while he reluctantly accepted ?6 million in compensation and retired to the Bahamas.
Three days before the collapse, in typical style, he said: ‘I’m flying high — I couldn’t be more confident about the future.’ And David Tait recalls sitting next to Freddie as they flew out of Gatwick airport on an Air Florida flight ten days after the collapse. Below, jammed in wing tip to wing tip in the Laker hangar, sat Freddie’s life’s work, a forlorn cluster of grounded DC-10s still emblazoned with the Skytrain logo. But Freddie turned to his distraught partner and said: ‘Don’t worry, mate, it’ll all work out just fine.’
His company was bust. Yet four-times married Freddie still knew that there was much more to life. He enjoyed reminiscing with me over a Pusser’s rum and orange on his yacht in the Bahamas, and he relished a pint and a laugh with his friends.
It was on another Air Florida flight that he met an off-duty Eastern Airlines stewardess called Jacqueline Harvey. It was love at first sight — or first flight — and Jacquie made Freddie’s last twenty years a lot more fun, erasing any memories of his airline’s failure.
It was his business sayings that were so memorable for me.
‘Only a fool never changes his mind.’
‘Don’t bring me your problems — bring me the solutions.’
And his most famous one: ‘Sue the bastards.’ Litigation lawyers the world over still celebrate that one! But it was about the best advice I got when I had to take on British Airways after their dirty tricks campaign against Virgin Atlantic in the late 1980s.
Freddie was never afraid of failure. He succeeded in life — and always gave it a go. That’s why we named one of our planes the
7. Social Responsibility
Over the years, we’ve watched billions of dollars go into development aid and emergency relief. Yet, unbelievably, we still have well over 16,000 people dying every day from preventable and treatable diseases like Aids and TB, half the planet still lives on less than $2 per day, one billion people have no access to drinking water, and the list goes on and on. The fact that these problems persist is not due to lack of hard work and commitment from the social and environmental sectors; nevertheless, without normal market forces and businesses ensuring that the best ideas can be fully realised and communicated, what we end up with is a market of good intentions.
Through my travels over the last couple of decades, I’ve started to realise that the only way we are going to drive the scale of the change we need in the world is if we pull together some very unlikely partnerships with businesses, charities, governments, NGOs and entrepreneurial people on to the front lines. More often than not, the people most affected know the answers — we just need to listen to them. None of us can do it alone; we all have to put aside our differences and revolutionise the way we work together to ensure that we leave this world in good shape for at least the ‘next seven generations’, as is the philosophy of the indigenous people we are working with in Canada.
In this last chapter, I want to tell you about Virgin’s adventures in the territory where business and making
