Anita Roddick (The Body Shop) Essay

Inspiring profiles and best practices for entrepreneurs 26 years ago the Brighton Evening argus pheasant ran a layer on a dis ordinatee between two funeral living room owners who were upset just intimately a saucy cosmetics boutique which had opened up side by side(p) door. It wasnt the nature of the transaction they were acquiring hot under the collar about, entirely its name. They thought the green shop await emblazoned with the words dead body patronize in gold leaf might put despatch prospective customers. They wanted me to diversify my shop front which I had further spent 870 of my 4,000 loan on, recalls Roddick.My smart actuate was to call the Argus and tell them I was being threatened by maffia undertakers who wanted to close me mass. The press love it. The story of the beleaguered single mum with the dwelling in hock trying to actualise her two kids with a bootstrapping start-up melted a treat. The smaller splash made physical structure Shop a ca manipulat ion celebre, won chain reactor of local support and won an unconstipatedtful battle to fall the rail line off the ground. The anecdote is a small aside, recounted with a chuckle and a hint of revolt in a long interview. exactly although the battles got much bigger as Roddick grew her vocation into the multinational retailer it is today, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Body Shop story will instantly recognise the shaping characteristics of its fiery feisty founder in those early days of the business honourable Anita versus the big bad world.There has never been any compromise in Roddicks views on how business should be through with(p) this is why her husband Gor feign was tasked with handling the city suits (they didnt uniform me talking about sexual tension at work) and why she stepped away from the business in 1998 when the shareholders said a campaigning oldtimer executive was not what they wanted for Body Shop. You might think after xxx years of bus iness and the comfort of a healthy shareholding and a wedge of cash in in the bank Roddicks ache for campaigning might have diminished. that little has changed since 1976. Her latest venture, a publishing start-up, produces books on ethical matters. It promotes her on the verbalise circuit and all the profits passing game into campaigning. The only difference is now she occupies the range of an icon for women and female entrepreneurs something I dont take lightly And there is still plenty to shout about when it comes to what she sees as an ethical vacuum in business today.Suffocation She rails against the suffocation of UK businesses as we outsource to cheaper countries the failure to sustain the privations of shareholders in public companies the neediness of respect for the responsibility of business to the participation at large the ongoing need for women to conform to a male guidebook in order to succeed the lack of recognition of the value that employees bring to a business. Being ethical in business is not about giving stymie away Roddick is emphatic about what this agency in practice not sandals, beards and aggroup hugs in the boardroom but the borrowing of simple moral values. People use the excuse of business to leave their moral philosophy at the front door and I dont know how they get away with it.But apprise ethical business really fit in with the cut-throat world of today? Her business, she says, is living proof. She describes Body Shop as a swell business experiment which is still proving a point you can run an entrepreneurial business, provide a return to shareholders spot campaigning on ethical issues and placing a high value on human capital. Being ethical in business is not about giving twitch away. Its about your relationship with your employees, its about the aesthetics of the workplace and its about communication, says Roddick. There is no apprehension why the workplace cant be a genuine yeasty place, why there can t be flexitime, why there cant be transparency and even good manners. If Roddick doesnt sound like a business woman its because she has never claimed to be one. She puts her success down to a need for a documentation and sees herself as the accidental entrepreneur.