the world a bit of a better place meet. This has always been important to me and really began when I was eighteen and opened up the Student Advisory Centre on Portobello Road, helping young people with sexual health. Forty years later, it has changed shape a bit, but it’s still there, and still in the same place offering counselling services.
When Aids first started to become a major issue in the mid-eighties we launched Mates condoms, combining our business and creative skills to get young people to wear a condom while still enjoying sex (well they certainly weren’t going to be stopped!). We decided that this was so important that we would make it a social business and all profits would be ploughed back into extending the safe-sex message. The team did a great job. We even got the BBC to run an advertising campaign for the first time in their history, which significantly raised awareness of the importance of safe sex across the UK — all in a cheeky Virgin way. Here in the Caribbean, the slogan goes: ‘No glove — no love’.
Several years ago, I realised that if Virgin really wanted to make a difference with some of the tougher issues facing humanity, we had to start pulling together everything we were doing. I knew that the only way this would work was if we put social responsibility at the core of what Virgin is. So we spent months talking with staff, customers and front-line organisations all over the world, and out of this we built a company philosophy of ‘doing what is best for people and the planet’ and created Virgin Unite. Virgin Unite has now become the entrepreneurial foundation of the group, working with our businesses and partners to develop new approaches to tackle the tough issues. It’s really about ideas and people — finding the best of both and then helping them to scale up. Our fundamental belief is that doing good is great for business. It’s not about the ‘golden charitable cheque’ but, rather, it’s about making sure that we leverage everything we have across our businesses — especially the wonderful entrepreneurial spirit of our people — to drive change.
We’ve had many impressive and influential people come and stay with us on Necker Island. But the visit of Bill and Melinda Gates at Easter in 2001 provided me with plenty of inspiration for what I should be doing in a philanthropic way.
It takes a bit of time to get to know Bill Gates. He’s cerebral and intense about all he does. This intensity made for an excellent game of tennis which ended in an honourable draw.
During his visit he spoke to me a great deal about the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which in 2008 had assets of $37.6 billion, making it the world’s largest charity and a force for immense good in troubled parts of the world. In 2006, the foundation handed out $1.54 billion in grants in three areas: global health, global education and programmes in America, including the creation of forty-three new high schools in New York City.
I wrote in my notebook: ‘
At that time, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had just overtaken, in the value of its trust fund, the Wellcome Trust — one of the UK’s long-established charities, which has funded research into human and animal health since 1936 and was spending ?650 million a year. Since then, the Foundation has grown dramatically and is now, by far, the largest charitable foundation in the world, alleviating poverty, disease and ignorance around the globe. Bill and Melinda have done such a brilliant job as ‘venture philanthropists’ that Warren Buffett, who pipped Gates in 2008 as the world’s richest man, handed over much of his substantial wealth for them to look after.
My wife Joan didn’t know what to make of Bill at first, though she warmed to him and enjoyed spending time with his wife, Melinda. Melinda was then in her late thirties, a charming and intelligent woman. She had amassed a huge amount of knowledge about malaria-carrying mosquitoes, tuberculosis, Aids and rotavirus, a severe form of diarrhoea that kills more than 500,000 infants a year. Effectively she was giving Bill a running personal tutorial on some of the key issues in global health. While Bill was interested in the actual microbiological science of vaccine research and finding a scientific solution, Melinda wanted to alleviate as much suffering as possible now.
I went sailing with Bill — discovering to my surprise that he used to race sailing boats — and he told me about the Microsoft Xbox, which he was about to launch on to the market to take on the Sony PlayStation. ‘It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever done,’ he said. But he was thoughtful, and I sensed that his mission in life was changing. He had achieved so much with Microsoft, building it to become one of the most powerful businesses on the planet. In little more than twenty years he had changed the face of the modern world. Now he was turning his formidable brain to solving some of the apparently intractable problems facing our Earth. He told me he went to see Nelson Mandela. ‘I said: 'Most people think you’re a saint. Tell me the truth. Did you hate the people who put you in prison?'’
‘Yes, I did,’ was the answer to Bill’s question. ‘For twelve years I lived off those people and I hated them. Then I realised they couldn’t take my mind or my heart away.’
Bill was astounded and said meeting Mandela was a seminal point in his life: ‘He taught me about living.’
That must have been quite a moment: the richest human in the world talks to the most revered human and acquires a new purpose and a challenge in his life. I think it may eventually go into the history books as a turning point — the start of something big.
In January 2008, Bill Gates was a guest at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in Switzerland. He said: ‘We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.’ He has called this idea ‘creative capitalism’, saying that by harnessing the basic factor that drives capitalism — self- interest — creative capitalism can enhance the interests of the giver
I agree. I think capitalism is a proven system: it works. But it has got a lot of faults. Breathtaking wealth goes to relatively few people. This would not matter so much, were it not for the fact that the very poorest in society are destitute, lacking even the basic amenities for survival. This being the case, an enormous responsibility falls on a successful business leader. Leaders need to reinvest their wealth by creating new jobs or by tackling the social problems of the world (ideally, both — which is what makes Muhammad Yunus’s microcredit movement so exciting).
History has thrown up no viable alternative to the free exchange of capital, goods and services, and the enterprise of law-abiding people. But capitalism as an ideology needs work and reform. Capitalism has to be more than the survival of the fittest.
My own fairly unexceptional view is that capitalism should pay far more attention to people and to the resources of this planet. I call it ‘Gaia capitalism’ for short, and as a tribute to the work of Professor James Lovelock, who has spent a lifetime tracing the life-sustaining connections between the living and non-living parts of the Earth. Human behaviour and human capital have to work with our planet.
More generally, entrepreneurs and wealth creators around the world must be a positive force for good. There is nothing unbusiness-like about sharing the benefits of your industry with happy, fulfilled people and a planet that is going to be there in all its glory for our children and grandchildren.
In 1997, while proposing a lottery scheme in Johannesburg, I called upon the world’s business community to run their companies more ethically — and, to get the ball rolling, to adopt a zero-tolerance approach to bribery. Perhaps the most unethical and dangerous abuse of a company’s financial muscle around the world is the use of bribes to secure contracts. If company directors bribe politicians they start a rot at the very top. Police, customs officers, tax officials and the judiciary will then start saying to themselves: if our bosses are accepting bribes, why shouldn’t we?
In my speech, I kept my definition of ethics simple. Business ethics interest me, and ethical questions are less complex than some academics on business courses make out. I said we should all pledge to do nothing that we’d regret reading about in the press. In the developed world, we’re extremely fortunate in having a free press. Being misquoted or misinterpreted can be frustrating, and a bad journalist can do a lot of damage, but set against the big picture, these are really just inconveniences. A free press is a society’s conscience. You may, for instance, be trying to discourage a competitor. A scheme is sitting on your desk that would undoubtedly work. But it rides
