Business & Management Lessons From Sir Richard Branson By Larry Olmsted

For anyone not familiar with Branson, his credentials are many and varied, starting with the fact that despite cracking the Forbes list of the world’s richest, he is one billionaire who never went to business school, making the title somewhat dubious, but it fits with the irreverent nature of his previous business tomes, Screw It, Let’s Do It; Business Stripped Bare; Reach for the Skies; and Screw Business As Usual, along with his autobiography, Losing My Virginity.

Branson is an anomaly, even among his dive-into-business-and-education-be-damned peers like famous Harvard dropout Bill Gates. For starters, he’s dyslexic, which never seemed to slow him down a beat – he began his entrepreneurial career at 16. He’s also prolific, not just in writing books with sexy titles, but also in business: his Virgin Group has literally hundreds of entities, quite diverse. He brought back the golden age of air travel and made money on it with his Virgin Atlantic airline, complete with Mad Men-style upstairs bars in the 747s and massages in the airport lounges. He has launched several more airlines, a mobile phone company (which he sold for well over a billion dollars), a cola, an entertainment content company, and a hotel group. He scored hugely in music, both on the production and retail sides with Virgin Records (the Sex Pistols were signed to his label early on) and he famously donned a white wedding gown to promote Virgin Brides, something you would be unlikely to have seen Mitt Romney doing for Bain Capital. Virgin Brides was one of his several business flops, but measured against the homeruns he’s still way ahead. He’s also an innovator – with Virgin Galactic he basically inventedspace tourism, something I covered here before (there were other one off space efforts but nothing even remotely mass market or ongoing like this).

Branson does far more than wear dresses: he has participated personally in several adrenaline laced record setting and exploratory endeavors, including smashing the mark for fastest sea crossing of the Atlantic, the fastest crossing of the English Channel by amphibious vehicle (a car/boat he drove while wearing a tuxedo), and was the first to cross the Pacific by hot air balloon. On the basis of these undertakings I first interviewed him years ago for my book about record setting, Getting Into Guinness, found him fascinating, and have kept an interested eye on him ever since – plus I just plain love flying Virgin.