Culture: February 2009 Archives

About a week ago, I went to a breakfast talk featuring Richard Branson, who happened to be launching the new Boston to Los Angles Virgin America route the very same day. Having been interested in Branson and his success at building the Virgin brand into over 400 companies, I was very much looking forward to the talk. Unfortunately, soon after the talk began, it seemed as though most-- if not all--of the questions had been rehearsed ahead of time. Disappointing, but I did get some key takeaways:

• Branson structures smaller divisions of his company as separate entities and as entrepreneurial ventures. Branson spoke only for a few minutes about this, although I wish he went into more depth. He discussed how his companies are structured as independently run businesses, each with their own goals, advisors, and employees, with the common tie being the overarching brand. By keeping tabs on the number of employees in each "company," he can keep them from getting too big, and losing the entrepreneurial perspective. Very powerful concept of creating self-sustaining companies all of which further the brand.
• Branson got the audience to participate and interacted with them, too. Any public speaking book, seminar, or course will tell you to get the audience to participate, and when speakers take a question, it's recommended they acknowledge the question in some way. Branson did something that was very interesting that although might not have worked well in the large forum of this particular event, was very effective in engaging the audience, and acknowledging people: after answering a question from a member of the audience, he posed another back to that same audience member. This meant fewer questions were asked by audience members overall, but it was effective in producing more substantive comments.
• Simple solutions for complex problems. As of late, Branson has been interested in using his success not only to further the Virgin empire, but to do good in the world, from stopping global warming to halting food shortages. His approach to complex socioeconomic problems is ridiculously simple: bring together the best minds in the world, free from constraints bureaucracy can impose, and they innovate solutions to a wide range of problems. When they're proven effective--on private companies' budgets--they hand over the plan to various governments for implementation around the globe.

After the talk Branson left for Logan Airport, where he dressed in drag to launch the new Virgin route from Boston to Los Angeles. Good times. Check out this video from CrunchGear:

I've written a number of blog posts about our culture and core ideologies. Most recently, I wrote about how to keep these values top of mind and visible, and this graphic came to mind. Trying to visually represent all of these important concepts, link them with our longer term goals ('big hairy audacious goal' or 'BHAG' for short) and to ultimately show how interconnected it all is wasn't an easy task.

In order to take such an abstract concept and make it concrete, we worked with our graphic facilitator to create an interesting graphic that we've since used in company communications, a goals worksheet, and our wiki.

Starting from the left, the core purpose is the first concept, then we integrated all the core values around an apple core to give it some visual appeal (apple core, core values--get it?). Each core value has a few actions or notes next to it remind us exactly what it is.

Our brand promise is next and highlights the four concepts that are most important to us as a company. Finally, tying it all together is our long term goal, or "BHAG" as Jim Collins called it, one million influential entrepreneurs as customers. This creates a very powerful graphic with visual appeal while still communicating very important concepts which are at the core of what we do.