The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (7 page)

In Australia we most certainly shook the industry a little by hiring John Borghetti to take over from the airline’s outgoing founder Brett Godfrey. As a thirty-six-year veteran of Qantas, Australia’s dominant carrier, John had quite literally started in the mailroom and worked his way up to the second highest position in the company. When he came to us he was more than a little bit bummed because he had just been passed over for the top job there. In my opinion this was a huge mistake on Qantas’s part, but we remain eternally grateful to them for letting someone like John escape their clutches. So much so, in fact, that after we’d had John on board for a couple of months I was sorely tempted to send Qantas’s chairman a ‘thank you for the wonderful gift’ note, but managed to resist the urge.

My first meeting with John to discuss the possibilities of joining us was in Singapore after the F1 Grand Prix and I have to confess I was incredibly impressed. I’d been extremely doubtful that a career (thirty-six years is a long time in any one place) big airline guy could ever be a good fit at our somewhat funky little Australian operation but he proved that I was way off the mark. John came totally prepared with strategies for everything he thought needed to be done to take Virgin to new heights and was clearly our man. While all the dating books say you should never get into a relationship with anyone who’s on the rebound from a failed marriage, I felt there was a lot more than a revenge motive in John. Yes, he was angry, and justifiably so, that he hadn’t been offered the top job at Qantas after spending his entire career there, but it was as if he was desperately seeking an outlet for all the things he hadn’t been able to get done while at his former employer. When I asked him why he had not put a particularly smart initiative he’d suggested in place while he was at Qantas, he simply replied, ‘Because I wasn’t the CEO and didn’t have the board’s support. Here I already get the feeling that’s not going to be a problem.’

Suffice it to say that if we had a cloning machine and the ability to replicate our best and brightest Virgin leaders, John would be one of the first ones we pushed in there. He is a highly strategic thinker and yet he also has outstanding people skills, which is a must-have for any CEO in a Virgin company. One big bonus, of course, is that he certainly knows how to read the mind of our biggest competitor in Australia – on a couple of occasions I have been convinced that he knew what they were going to do next before they did – I suppose thirty-six years in one place will do that for you. But equally importantly he had been carefully observing everything that had been going on at Virgin Blue (later Virgin Australia) and had a competitor’s perspective on how we were not quite as smart as we thought we were in a few areas. In other words, he brought that all-important ability to ‘see ourselves as others see us’ and to act accordingly upon a few minor course corrections.

It has also brought with it a new energy that the staff has named the ‘NBO’ – the ‘New Borghetti Order’. John makes it part of his routine to do what the Australians call ‘going walkabout’ around the company. When he does this, one of many things that make the NBO different is John’s habit of not just saying ‘Hi, how are you?’ but instead taking the time to get into deep impromptu discussions with all level of employees and, importantly, acting on their feedback rather than telling them he’ll ‘consider it’ and moving on.

One interesting observation John made right up front was that he felt we had maybe been too intent on driving the brand as opposed to the business. Having observed what we were doing for years through the eyes of a competitor, he told me – and I wrote it down in my notebook – that he felt the brand image we had developed was ‘misrepresenting some of the airline’s richest qualities’. By this he meant that the kind of ‘party central, super-laid-back’ image that Virgin Blue had developed in Australia had led to a lot of potential customers – particularly older, more straight-laced business flyers – failing to see us as a serious-enough player to be deserving of their business. Funnily enough, this was exactly the same identity crisis we’d once had to confront at Virgin Atlantic many years earlier when we were initially perceived as the ‘rock and roll airline’.

Conversely, John also – quite bravely I thought – expressed his thinking that our aircraft liveries (fuselage paint jobs) needed a little bit of tweaking for the Aussie market. He felt that Virgin Atlantic and Virgin America’s applications of the Virgin logo were overly conservative and that they needed something a little more contemporary. I say ‘bravely’ because for many years in Virgin the logo was sacrosanct and something that should not be tampered with under any circumstances.

Anyway when John raised the subject in front of all the airline heads I was probably expected to be the one to quickly put this Qantas interloper in his place and say something like, ‘Sorry, but that is one area where we cannot go.’ On the contrary, other than John, I think I was the only one in the room who thought it made sense and so said, ‘Screw it, if that’s what you think you need then let’s do it.’ The result was a very different-looking sideways rendition of the logo that, in all honesty, some love and some don’t, but the updated treatment freshened up the brand and got us lots of media and consumer attention in the process.

But just to show that nothing is truly sacred, another more outlandish ‘modification’ of the Virgin Atlantic brand was to be seen in Los Angeles when the airline sponsored a big joint promotion with the 1999 Austin Powers’ movie
The Spy Who Shagged Me
: billboards all over LA featured ‘Virgin Shaglantic’ and a variety of somewhat bawdy one-liners from the Mike Myers’ character. When, after the fact, the ‘logo police’ (as the group’s custodians of the brand are affectionately known) in London found out about this mangling of one of our biggest brand names, they were suitably appalled. When they tackled the US marketing team as to whether they had asked for approval, the response was a no-nonsense, ‘No, of course not. We decided this was one of those occasions when it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.’ When I found out about it, all I could do was smile and do a lame ‘Ooh baby!’ impression of Austin Powers.

Back in Australia, though, there are still a couple of things on which John Borghetti and I have not completely come to terms as yet. First of all he expressed a concern that we spent too much time and money on staff parties – that’s one that I think we will win him over on after he’s been to a few more of them. The other one is his proclivity for tie wearing – something borne out of all those years at stuffy old Qantas, I’m sure. This is another part of the ‘Virginisation’ process that I am confident will also get sorted out in time: so far I think I have only snipped off a couple of his expensive silk ties with my ever-ready scissors. With other chronic tie-wearing cases such as John, I’ve found it can sometimes take as many as three or four ‘tiectomies’ before they are completely cured of the habit.

Our second ‘imported’ airline CEO is Craig Kreeger at Virgin Atlantic who, like John in Australia, joined us after a very long time at a legacy airline. In Craig’s case he put in twenty-seven years at American Airlines, but despite this it appears he won’t be too difficult to ‘untie’. I met Craig for the first time when he came to Necker Island as the last stop on the selection process bandwagon. When I asked him what his greatest concern was about coming to work for Virgin he surprised me by saying, ‘Well, to be perfectly honest, Richard, probably knowing what to pack to come down here to meet you. I figured that I wouldn’t need a tie but after that I hadn’t got a clue as to what the dress code was going to be!’ I think Craig must be the first person ever to have worried about ‘dress code’ when meeting me, and I am sure it will never again be a problem for him.

As with John in Australia three years earlier, Craig’s hiring may have been a surprise to a few people who had thought Steve Ridgway’s successor (Steve had been Virgin Atlantic’s CEO for twelve years) was probably going to come from within the airline. Again, though, like in Australia, we opted to take someone from a big legacy carrier – it wasn’t the first time we went fishing at American, having hired David Cush from there to head up Virgin America some years earlier. From the get-go I was impressed with Craig’s easy-going manner and one part of his CV also jumped off the page: his role at American several years earlier in London had included putting together American Airlines’ big alliance with British Airways. As we were just about to announce that Delta Air Lines had acquired the 49 per cent stake in Virgin Atlantic that Singapore Airlines had held for a number of years, we needed someone to mastermind that new relationship on our behalf. Singapore had always been a very passive partner, but the Delta relationship was going to be very different and maximising on every ounce of the many transatlantic synergies the new relationship would present was going to be critical to the on-going growth and profitability of the airline we had built from scratch in 1984.

So Craig was our man and while at the time of writing he is still relatively new to the job he is already making his mark and has established a highly comprehensive two-year plan against which everyone can measure their own and the company’s progress. Both John and Craig are demonstrating my long-held belief that everything can always be improved upon and often only someone who has seen your operation from the outside in can bring the required perspective and willingness to upset even a pretty sturdy applecart.

So don’t spend all your time obsessing over what the competition is up to – divert some of that energy to looking in the mirror to see how you appear to your employees, your competition and your customers. And you shouldn’t wait until the tyres start falling off before you get out there and kick them; do it while the going’s good if you want to keep it that way. Getting into the habit of looking at your business from the outside in will tell you a lot about how long those good results are likely to continue – or not!

Simplicity wins every time

‘Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt to offer a solution everybody can understand.’

Colin Powell

The key to this statement by Colin Powell is that great leaders are not just simplifiers but that they can communicate to their entire audience in terms that are universally understood. You can’t always be listening to your people as sometimes they need to be listening to you. Whether he falls into the ‘great leader’ category or not may be debatable, but one of Powell’s contemporaries, former US president Bill Clinton, is certainly a good example of a politician with a gift for delivering understandable, no-nonsense messages. In fact, after Clinton had delivered a masterful address at a 2012 Obama election campaign event, I had to chuckle when I heard the White House incumbent jokingly say that maybe he should appoint Clinton as ‘the Secretary of Explaining Stuff’.

KISS is an acronym for ‘Keep it simple stupid’ that is believed to have originated in the US Navy in the sixties. It was directed at system designers in recognition of the fact that most battle systems work better when kept as simple as possible, whereas complexity builds in nothing but problems. Unfortunately, however, the KISS principle is something to which a lot of business leaders and politicians do not seem to subscribe.

In my own case, having grown up facing the challenges that come with dyslexia, simplicity in communications has always been more of a necessity than a nicety for me. But whether in our professional or private lives, developing the art of simple clear speech is something that every one of us, and everyone with whom we associate, can only benefit. For some people, like Bill Clinton, the ‘gift of the gab’ comes with an innately intelligent and concise delivery; for others, however, it can be anything but concise and frequently utterly unintelligible.

One such aggravating example is to be found in BBC Television’s brilliant comedy series,
Yes, Prime Minister
. I don’t watch much television, but this show
has long been a favourite of mine – it was reportedly also one of the late prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s few ‘must watch’ TV programmes. There is one wonderful character in the show, Sir Humphrey, who is the absolute antithesis of everything KISS stands for. Paradoxically, my old English teacher at Stowe School would probably have described Sir Humphrey as ‘the quintessence of verbosity and polysyllabic pomposity’, which we always joked would have been a fair description of that particular teacher as well! In simpler terms, however, Sir Humphrey is a perfect caricature of the kind of person who loves to talk at great length but does so without actually saying anything remotely intelligible.

In case you’re not familiar with
Yes, Prime Minister,
here is a snippet of Sir Humphrey at his best – or perhaps more accurately – at his worst.

‘Questions of administrative policy can cause confusion between the policy of administration and the administration of policy, especially when responsibility for the administration of the policy of administration conflicts with responsibility for the policy of the administration of policy.’

SHORT AND SNAPPY WINS EVERY TIME

Whenever I run into a real-life Sir Humphrey, it’s all I can do to prevent myself from grabbing them by the collar and yelling, ‘Life’s too short! Get to the point, will you.’ When the person in question happens to be a revered diplomat or captain of industry such an ‘in your face’ approach isn’t always the smartest way to go. But you can take steps to avoid falling into similar bad habits yourself, and in my own case this has meant trying my best to live by the simple old mantra of, ‘Say what you mean and mean what you say’ – and preferably in as few well-chosen words as possible. There are a lot of Sir Humphrey types in business who mistakenly feel they have to assert their authority by continually interjecting with some kind of a comment on anything and everything that’s being discussed, when the fact is that if they don’t have anything intelligent to add to the debate they’d come across as much smarter by shutting up and saying nothing.

When going into print, the art of distilling one’s thoughts into as few words as possible is something that takes practice as well as that often rare commodity of time. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal summed up this conundrum when he famously wrote,
‘I am sorry this letter is so long, I didn’t have time to make it shorter.’
Twitter wasn’t an electronic option when Pascal was around, but with its 140-character limit, tweets have become the champion of economy in words and, as a man of few words, I must say that I love it. In anything I write I now make a conscious effort to condense the point I want to make into a Twitter-like format. Even if I only manage to get it down to a couple of hundred characters, I can still count on getting my message across much more effectively than if it were ten times the length.

So, a word of advice here to anyone writing an initial pitch document or for that matter any written communication – and certainly if it’s coming in my direction – anything longer than a ‘one pager’ is way too long. In fact, even an email that is longer than a couple of hundred words is not going to hold my or many other people’s attention. There are only so many hours in a day and nobody has the time to wade through long, Sir Humphrey-like missives. My friend Larry Page of Google told me that his colleagues all know that sending him anything that is much longer than a tweet exponentially increases the likelihood that he will never find time to read it. Capturing someone’s attention in writing is like the process of mooring an ocean liner. First the thin lightweight rope (the tweet) gets tossed to the dockhand, this leads to a larger stronger line (the email) that eventually pulls in the big heavy mooring hawser (the full presentation). Try throwing out the heavy line first and, like a five-page email, it will likely sink without a trace.

I LOATHE MAKING SPEECHES

Coming from someone who does a lot of it, such a statement must come as a surprise, but it’s almost as true today as it was when I first spoke in public fifty-odd years ago. I remember being scared half to death when I had to stand up in front of my school to make a speech. It was a contest where we had to memorise a fairly short speech and present it to the school. If you stumbled at any point you were ‘gonged’ and that was it. You were out. I had actually worked very hard at getting it down pat and despite my sheer terror I managed to start out quite well but a couple of minutes into it my mind momentarily blacked out. Within a split second the G-O-N-G brought me back to reality. I still break out in a cold sweat just thinking back to the excruciating experience.

Quite apart from the nervousness, the simple fact of the matter is that I have never particularly enjoyed public speaking and as with everything else in my life that I don’t enjoy doing I didn’t do it terribly well. Over the years I have become much more comfortable as a speaker but it still makes me nervous. It is some comfort that I am not on my own with this, as the fear of public speaking – or ‘glossophobia’ as it is clinically known – is right up there with the fear of flying as one of the most common human fears.

One inescapable reality of business life is that the more successful you become and the higher up the corporate ladder you climb, the more frequent the requirement for you to step up to the microphone. Unlike in government circles, where the ability to deliver a great stump speech gets a lot of otherwise distinctly mediocre politicos elected, in the private sector, as helpful a talent as it may be, I doubt that too many people ever got hired or promoted strictly on the basis of their public-speaking abilities. The other sad irony is that while teleprompters are a wonderful crutch for those really big speeches – with a teleprompter, a few beta-blockers and the ability to read, just about anyone can turn in a reasonably respectable performance – those little glass screens are not something you can easily swing with smaller audiences. The more intimate atmosphere that is found with groups of fewer than a hundred makes for a much higher incidence of interruptions and questions – which are not a good idea with a teleprompter!

And a word of warning: over-reliance on technology can be dangerous in lots of ways but never more so than when it is a teleprompter and you are standing in front of an audience. Things break! I always make a point of having a printed version of my presentation at hand just in case there are problems. I have, however, seen several people over the years that clearly had not rehearsed their speeches sufficiently well to be able to wing it when they experienced technical problems with their electronic scripts – something that
Transformers
director Michael Bay clearly didn’t do at a Consumer Electronics Show press event for Samsung. When his teleprompter went on the blink mid-presentation, he looked flustered, stopped speaking mid-sentence, said something to the effect that ‘the type is all off’ then turned on his heel and walked off the stage, never to return! He later apologised with the understatement that ‘I guess live shows aren’t my thing.’

I remember the very first time I used a teleprompter being asked by the technician if I was familiar with them and, not wishing to appear a novice, I nodded and made like I was an old hand – which turned out to be a big mistake. Within a few minutes of starting my speech, I found myself talking faster and faster in a frantic effort to keep up with the darn thing. It was only after I finished and the same technician who had run the teleprompter said, ‘Wow, you’re a fast talker! I had trouble keeping up with you,’ that I figured it out. His job was to run the teleprompter at my speed of talking – not vice versa.

Having seen that I was a very nervous speaker, the late Gavin Maxwell, author of
Ring of Bright Water
and other successful novels, gave me some wonderfully helpful advice on speechmaking that has served me well over the years. It takes practice, but it can be done. Close out your mind to the fact that you’re on a stage with hundreds of people staring at you and instead imagine yourself in any personal comfort-zone like your dining room at home where you’re telling a story to a group of friends over dinner. I know it sounds a little corny but try it – it has certainly worked for me.

I am a huge fan of Sir Winston Churchill – how can you not love someone who, in a 1948 House of Commons speech, could say, ‘
For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history.’
Somewhat ironically, his words have been ‘massaged’ by history and the reinvented quote most often attributed to the great man is now, ‘
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.’
One way or the other it is an approach that I may well decide to follow myself some day! Churchill is universally recognised as one of the greatest orators of all time, but he only achieved this status on the back of a lot of hard work: he claimed that he averaged an hour’s preparation for every minute of a speech. Few if any are better equipped to give advice on the subject of public speaking as these two classic, funny but right-on-target quotes serve to illustrate – my absolute favourite being the following quote which is often attributed to him:

‘A good speech should be like a woman’s skirt: long enough to cover the subject and short enough to create interest.’

Take this advice to heart. Even highly gifted speakers like Churchill would never push an audience into listening to him for more than twenty-five minutes or so. Extending a presentation beyond thirty minutes is really stretching the attention span of any audience.

I put Mark Twain right up there with Ernest Hemingway as one of my favourite American authors. Twain was also a highly acclaimed public speaker who, like Churchill, seemed to enjoy speaking about speaking. He was obviously aware of the common misperception that to be a great speechmaker you have to be able to make off-the-cuff deliveries. Twain addressed this perfectly in 1899 when, speaking at a dinner given in his honour at London’s Whitefriars Club, he said:

‘But impromptu speaking – that is a difficult thing. I used to do it in this way. I used to begin about a week ahead, and write out my impromptu speech and get it by heart.
’

Another piece of astute advice to speakers from
Twain speaks to the tendency nervous speakers have of taking a deep breath and then – like me with the runaway teleprompter – rushing through it like an express train. It’s almost as if, as is usually the case, they just can’t wait to be done with it and get off the platform. Addressing this very common affliction, Twain spoke about a rightly timed pause being every bit as critical and effective as choosing the right words. ‘
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.’

Before the teleprompter arrived on the scene, I always used to work from index cards. David Tait, who would usually write my speeches for Virgin Atlantic in the US, used to take delight in sticking in the odd strategically placed card that in big letters would just say ‘PAUSE’ to ensure I stopped long enough to let a point sink in with the audience – low-tech, for sure, but highly effective nevertheless.

Twain’s other statement on the subject of speaking that made me feel a lot better about my qualms was,
‘There are only two types of speakers in the world: 1. The nervous and 2. Liars.’

The strange fact is that nervousness is good. The best and most experienced public speakers still get nervous, so don’t fret about it. A touch of the jitters sharpens the mind, gets the adrenalin flowing and helps you to focus. At least that’s the theory, and as easy as it is to say, ‘Don’t sweat it’, for some people, of whom I used to occasionally be one, the fear of public speaking can be absolutely debilitating. The best way to mitigate it is quite simply, practise, practise, practise and practise some more. Go through it until you are saying it in your dreams and it will be a lot easier on the day.