The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson Read Free Book Online Page A

of the most frequently mentioned was ‘accessibility’. Clearly there’s little value to being a great listener if people can’t get to you – or worse, if you can’t get to them. Visiting your staff in their ‘natural habitat’ as often as is practicably possible is huge for you and for them. I often find this to be one of the biggest gaps in the make-up of otherwise very accomplished leaders. They are all busy-busy people, with big important things to do, big important people to meet and big decisions to make and big . . . well, you get the picture! To close this top priority circuit, though, making the commitment every week to spend some quality time with your most important assets – your people – is every bit as critical as any other entry in your diary. A tall order, perhaps, but it is a discipline that, if you can pull it off, brings huge paybacks on multiple levels, often in the most remote places where you probably never imagined you had levels of influence.
    I have always enjoyed a bit of an unfair advantage when it comes to my appreciation of the need to visit one’s employees in their own workplaces. It is almost certainly a by-product of the fact that I have never really worked from anything remotely resembling the conventional perception of an office. I started out in a church crypt before moving to Duende , a houseboat in London’s Little Venice, on which I also lived with my wife and newborn daughter. Next I inhabited what would usually have been the living rooms of our various family homes and then in recent years I have moved into a rattan chair or a hammock on Necker Island. I can put my hand on my heart and say I have never sat in the corner office!
    At one point my hectic business activities, the perpetually ringing phones, the battery of assistants and constant stream of visitors totally overwhelmed our family home in London’s Holland Park. It got so bad that sometimes my young kids were the ones opening the front door to all kinds of high-flying visitors coming to meet me in my ‘office’. It finally got so silly that my wife Joan quite rightly declared, ‘Richard – enough is enough!’ and insisted that I find an office somewhere else. Much as I empathised with her annoyance, I really didn’t want to uproot all my business stuff, so we came up with a rather ingenious compromise. We purchased an almost identical house just two doors up the street and moved the family into that one, while my office clutter and I stayed put. It was tough for a while, but I eventually got used to the grind of my four times a day 100-foot commute – only twice a day if I didn’t go home for lunch. Now of course Joan and I have settled on our beloved and utterly glorious Necker Island in the British Virgin Islands. Necker is such a fabulous spot that of all the home-offices I have ever had it is possibly the hardest to spend time away from. Despite that I still manage to spend more than half my time on the road, or perhaps more accurately in the air: according to my diaries, in 2013 I was travelling an average of seventeen days a month.
    So as you can see my unfair advantage comes from the fact that since the very early days at Virgin, whenever I’ve wanted to see the people I work with, I have always been obliged to go to them. Even when the Virgin Group’s head offices were located in London’s Notting Hill Gate, a stone’s throw from my Holland Park home, I still steadfastly refused to accept a dedicated office there. When a well-meaning Trevor Abbott (at the time the most senior director at Virgin Group) once suggested they really should set up an office there for me saying, ‘It’ll just be somewhere for you to hang your hat when you come in, Richard’, I was quick to (politely) point out that as I never wear a hat it wouldn’t be necessary.
    Trevor’s well-meaning gesture might also have been intended to give me somewhere else to set myself down other than in his office when I came in