747s with more economical Airbus A340S.
This patience extends to his negotiating style, too. During the same recession, Branson was under huge pressure from his bankers to sell parts of the Virgin empire in order to reduce the mountain of debt he took on at the end of the 1980s. Yet he took more than a year to sell Virgin Music Group – and succeeded, like a carpet dealer in an Oriental bazaar, in persuading potential buyers that he neither needed nor especially wanted to sell. This strategy was rewarded in the astounding price that Thorn-EMI eventually paid in cash and assumed debt for the company: £560m, or almost $1bn at the prevailing exchange rate.
In the speeches that he is increasingly often asked to give, Branson is fond of pointing out that while conventional business analysis puts the interests of a company’s shareholders first, followed by those of its customers and then its employees, he takes the opposite approach. For him, it is Virgin’s employees who take top priority, particularly those who deal face to face with members of the public. If they are happy in their work, he hopes, then they will perform well – and in doing so they will satisfy his customers. Branson believes that the interests of Virgin’s shareholders (which in effect means himself and his family) can be safely left behind, on the assumption that a company that pleases its customers will prosper itself.
Fame has brought Branson an array of rich and powerful friends, and an ability to arrange a meeting with almost anyone he wants in politics or business. When his libel action against British Airways was settled in the High Court, the Princess of Wales sent him a handwritten note of congratulation on a card headed ‘Kensington Palace’ bearing a monogram of a capital D with a coronet above it. ‘Dear Richard,’ it read. ‘Hurray! Love from Diana. X.’ The friendship was cemented a few months later, when Diana agreed to preside over the launching ceremony of the airline’s first new Airbus. Her light-hearted appearance, which came only a few days after an announcement that she intended to retire from most of her public duties, put Branson and his company on the front page of newspapers all around the world.
Yet Branson himself is the opposite of elitist, and his company is one of the least hierarchical one could come across. To the annoyance of his senior managers, Branson seems to pay as much attention to a chat with a clerk in the airline’s post-room as to a memorandum from his marketing director. Letters from his staff are always read first; when Branson travels on his own airline, he spends about half his hours on board talking to the cabin crew, and he travels into town at the other end not in a private limousine to a hotel at the city centre, but in the crew bus to the airport motel where those who will be flying back the following morning spend the night. Until he became an airline owner, and thus acquired the right to travel first-class for free on other airlines, Branson used always to fly economy class.
Richard Branson may work his secretaries hard, but he resists the temptation, to which many other company chairmen have succumbed, of ordering them around as if they were servants. He will ask for a mug of tea during a meeting at Holland Park as hesitantly as if he were a guest in someone else’s house. Until recently, he used to dial his own telephone calls; he only stopped doing so when a growing number of people at the other end refused to talk to him because they thought he was only a practical joker pretending to be Richard Branson. (Given that Branson used to specialize in telephoning his friends and pretending to be other people, that is richly ironic.) It is no coincidence that Penni Pike, Branson’s senior personal assistant, has worked for him in the same job since 1977.
He manages and motivates his staff by example. Branson is hugely energetic. He needs his eight hours’ sleep a night, but is nevertheless able to put in very long hours without rest – keeping himself awake where necessary by snatching naps during the course of the day or en route between one meeting and the next. He travels by air on average once a week. Dozens of the present and former Virgin employees interviewed in the course of the research for this book have been influenced by his almost blind determination. Where others would try to put an idea into practice but then give up when obstacles appear to make it impossible, Branson takes it as an article of faith that there is a way around – if only it can be found. Sometimes, of course, he is wrong; but surprisingly often, the extra effort pays off with success – and others begin to imitate the Branson technique. The most extreme example of this approach was the establishment of Virgin Atlantic; by dint of extreme effort from a team of a dozen or so people, the airline was up and flying within four months of the day on which Branson first started discussing the idea.
While many businesses suffer from a ‘Not Invented Here’ syndrome – a resistance to ideas that come from other organizations – Branson has no shame in picking up suggestions wherever he finds them. All day long, he carries around with him a black A4 notebook – standard issue, bought from the Rymans stationery chain – into which he jots not merely ideas that might be put to use in his businesses, but also names and telephone numbers, notes on conversations, and lists of tasks to carry out. Richard Branson’s daily to-do list usually contains thirty items or so; the idea is that by numbering them, he can attend to the most important first and thus make best use of his time. Such is the respect he is held in by his employees that many senior staff in the different Virgin companies now carry the same notebooks with them, and can be seen scribbling down thoughts and notes of conversations in exactly the same way. Like the rest of Branson’s life, the notebook is resolutely low-tech. He neither types nor uses a computer, and he acquired a mobile phone for the first time only in late 1993.
As well as a second house in Holland Park, two doors down from the one that he uses as his office, Branson owns a villa in Minorca, a country house in Oxfordshire surrounded by fields and a large pond, and a private island in the Caribbean. There is a swimming-pool in the basement at Holland Park. The Oxfordshire house, his weekend retreat, has its own cricket pitch; Branson flew in a pair of Balinese craftsmen to build a cricket pavilion in the style of a traditional temple, complete with carved wooden doors and a roof of thatched rice straw. Necker Island, part of the British Virgin Islands, now belongs to the company rather than to Branson personally; it boasts a house large enough for twenty or more, a chef brought over from the Michelin-starred Manoir aux Quat’Saisons restaurant (in which Branson happens to own a controlling stake), and an extensive cellar that includes vintage clarets and burgundies as well as lighter whites suitable for quaffing on the beach.
Yet Branson seems oddly detached from the outward details of his life. It does not bother him that paint is flaking off the back of his house in Holland Park, or that the swimming-pool filter no longer works. He owns a Range Rover because he was given it by the buyer of the Virgin Atlantic Challenger II, the speedboat that broke the Atlantic speed record; but he is perfectly willing to allow his two children, both of primary-school age, to drive it around his fields in the country. He has always eschewed the ostentatiously high living of the music industry, particularly the chairman of one record company who makes a point of parking a spanking new Rolls-Royce or Bentley outside the front door of his offices. Since he married his second wife, Joan Templeman, Branson has supplemented his trademark collection of sweaters with more expensive casual jackets and shirts. Yet he often succeeds nevertheless in looking as though he picked the clothes he is wearing out of the cupboard at random in the dark – and he specializes in wearing brown shoes that look as though they were on special offer at Woolworths.
Nor does he have expensive gastronomic tastes. While many of his top managers have become connoisseurs of food and wine, Branson is the first to admit that he is unable to appreciate the finer points of the Quat’Saisons cuisine on his private island. He used to make it a rule never to spend more than £15 on a bottle, and was scandalized when colleagues wanted to spend company money tasting good vintages in restaurants.
Most rich men of Richard Branson’s age start to collect things as a way of finding a use for the millions they have amassed. The pond in the grounds of his Oxfordshire house duly contains a number of rare species of duck and goose from around the world, their wings carefully clipped to prevent them from flying away. Branson takes pleasure in strolling around the pond pointing out the bright colours on the plumage of each one – but cannot quite remember which is which. He is fond of telling
