Title: Screw Business as Usual
Author: Richard Branson
Publisher: Penguin Portfolio; 384 pages
Richard Branson has an enormous head, both anatomically—his dome is sizable—and figuratively: His ego arguably has no rival in contemporary capitalism. Shameless name-dropper though he is, stories he tells about other people often end with a story about Richard Branson. One gets the sense that his professional life has been an extended circus act designed to generate publicity for his Virgin (VMED) empire and to keep from getting bored. To list only a few of Branson’s stunts, he has jumped off a hotel wearing a tuxedo, driven a tank through Times Square, kite-surfed with a nude woman on his back (in front of cameras, of course), and dressed as a bride. He might be the richest clown on earth.
As prose, Screw Business As Usual is clunky and repetitive. Even as a publicity ploy, it’s inelegant: Each chapter ends with a list of Virgin’s philanthropic Web addresses, Twitter handles, and Facebook pages. But as a manifesto from a compassionate one-percenter, Branson’s book is a well-timed call for a more ethical way of doing business.
If we take him at his printed word—and his past success with Virgin demands that we at least trust his business instincts—Branson’s endorsement of socially responsible business practices could catch the attention of even the most profit-driven corporate titans.
Screw Business As Usual is in many ways a coming-of-age tale. Branson describes the book as “the story of my seven-year journey towards realizing that, while business has been a great vehicle for growth in the world, neither Virgin nor many other businesses have been doing anywhere near enough to stop the downward spiral we all find ourselves in.”
After a few drinks, we’re told, Branson came up with a name for his new way of thinking: “Capitalism 24902.” One could have expected a man with such a keen sense of branding to come up with a catchier slogan, or at least one not so reminiscent of Jason Priestley. But true to narcissistic form, Branson decreed that existing buzzwords for progressive capitalism—Capitalism 2.0, philanthrocapitalism—simply weren’t equal to his planetary ambition. “Every single business person has the responsibility for taking care of the people and planet that make up our global village, all 24,902 circumferential miles of it.”
Screw Business As Usual inspires when its author casts himself as corporate arbiter, spotlighting companies that already abide by his Capitalism 24902 principles. Salesforce.com (CRM), he notes, gives away 1 percent of its time, product, and equity (yes, equity) to charity. GroFin, started by Shell, incubates small businesses in Africa. Kimberly-Clark (KMB), the company that makes Kleenex and Huggies, is throwing money at developing tubeless toilet paper rolls. And General Electric’s (GE) $5 billion spent on developing clean-tech products in its ecomagination business ended up generating more than $70 billion in revenue.
Somewhat surprisingly, Branson singles out Wal-Mart Stores (WMT), “unquestionably the five thousand pound gorilla in the room,” as a model of corporate benevolence and rhymes off some compelling evidence.
Wal-Mart wouldn’t be doing all this if it weren’t beneficial to Wal-Mart; pushing sustainability efforts, for example, can help lower operating expenses. The gist of Branson’s new worldview, as he puts it, is that “doing good really is good for business.” With this book, Branson hopes to ditch the wedding dress and rebrand himself as an éminence grise of ethical capitalism. Unlike some Branson stunts, this one may benefit people other than him.
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