The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership Read Online Free Page A

Australia and it certainly opened my eyes to the problem ex-prisoners have re-entering society, something about which I had never given a moment’s thought.
    While down under I also met with an inspiring group of leaders from The Toll Group, Australia’s largest transportation company. I learned how they had been trying to do their bit to improve the lot of recently released prisoners and had hired almost 500 of them over the previous decade – a number that represents about ten per cent of the company’s workforce. The truly inspirational part of what they told me, though, was that not one of their former inmates had, to the best of their knowledge, ever reoffended!
    I have since constantly encouraged all of the Virgin companies around the world to work hard at following Toll’s example. In the UK we have been cooperating closely with the charity Working Chance, which since 2007 has taken the lead in working to place female ex-prisoners back into gainful employment thereby breaking the cycle that can turn one little mistake or bad decision into a life sentence, whether in or out of prison. Last time I checked, Working Chance had placed almost 200 female ex-prisoners with Pret a Manger, Sainsbury’s and a variety of Virgin companies like Virgin Trains and Virgin Management.
    Perhaps the biggest irony here is that in 1971, but for the good graces of a British magistrate, I might well have had a prison record myself. I was caught red-handed by Customs and Excise officers in the act of ingeniously (or so my naïve teenage self had thought) ‘manipulating’ purchase taxes on the export and import of record albums. It was only by way of my parents generously posting the family home as collateral for my bail and then my fully paying off the hefty fine I’d been given that I managed to avoid being stuck with a criminal record. Had I actually done time and been branded as an ex-con, then the chances are very real that Virgin might never have happened and the tens of thousands of jobs we have created would never have existed. Had I gone to jail for my stupid teenage error of judgement I would have been the same person as the one who (luckily) did not end up behind bars, but I would almost certainly have been stigmatised by society and almost certainly have led a very different life as a result.
    SPEAK NO EVIL
    In our living room at home my mum and dad used to have one of those peculiar little statues of the ‘Three Wise Monkeys’ – you may have seen them – that embody the proverbial principle of ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil’. Well, while there wasn’t a lot they could do about the ‘see no evil’ part, they went to great lengths to teach me to never think or speak badly of others.
    They encouraged me to always look for the good in people instead of assuming the worst and trying to find fault. If they ever heard me gossiping or talking someone down they would have me go and look at myself in a mirror for five minutes, the idea being that I should see how such behaviour reflected badly on me. I was also taught that fits of pique or any outward displays of anger or rudeness never serve any useful purpose and if anything play only to your disadvantage. It was a lesson that stuck, and to this day I frequently have people say things to me like ‘I really don’t know how you could be so pleasant with those people’ or ‘If I were you I’d have been really angry about what they just did’, when in fact I had just bottled up my emotions. The thing my parents didn’t make any effort to teach me was how to keep my obvious delight at something under wraps, the downside of which is that it doesn’t help my poker game very much.
    Whether we like it or not, however, we are all very much the product of our upbringing and our environment. After my little church incident, had my father handled the moment differently and put me across his knee, I would probably still remember the spanking but would have long