Screw Business as Usual: Turning Capitalism Into a Force for Good, by Richard Branson. Portfolio Penguin 2011, reissued as paperback 2017). 372 pp.
Richard Branson is the 66-year-old British billionaire who founded Virgin Atlantic airline and dozens of other successful business ventures. A maverick entrepreneur who has spent most of his life fighting the business establishment, he is just the sort of person who would title his book “Screw Business as Usual.”
Branson has used his wealth and his prominent business position to raise awareness of global warming, to oppose capital punishment, to promote universal access to broadband internet, and to support many other social causes of the progressive variety. This book was originally published in 2011 and was reissued in 2017, amidst the growing movement toward socially responsible business practices.
Who better than Branson, then, to be a model for encouraging for-profit businesses, such as law firms, to help serve the communities in which their customers are located, to engage in corporate social responsibility, and to foster the ethic of volunteering?
A reading of the book leads to the conclusion that Branson’s energy and creativity in support of his causes are boundless, as, perhaps unfortunately, is his ego. He has obviously done extremely well financially while also attempting to do good works and, in a phrase he’s not at all ashamed of, to change the world.
Branson writes in this book that if you can only give people the opportunity to do the right thing, they generally will – and that this is true of business as well. What he means by “the right thing” is to support the liberal causes that he supports:
One of the more devastating theories of the 1970s was that no matter what it took to achieve it, the primary purpose of business was to maximize value for its shareholders. This principle has led to a variety of social ills where businesses discard employees (at the drop of a hat), pollute our air and waters, or create short-term gains that are unsustainable. It is important for people in business to recognize that long-term shareholder value is more likely to be created by companies that value their employees, act as good environmental stewards and think long term in general.
Or, as Branson states succinctly:
Screw business as usual. We have to change the rules and fix things now, not wait for another twenty years . . . Everything is built on a core belief that businesses really can and must do better in the world to take care of people and the planet.
Branson’s sixties-style, bomb-throwing rhetoric is not typical for a businessman from any nation, in any generation. And it is going to be offputting to most law firm leaders who happen to notice it. (He comes by it naturally because he came of age in swinging late-sixties London. As a teen, he interviewed John Lennon, partied with Mick Jagger and marched with Vanessa Redgrave.) But his message is clear, and the examples he gives of companies fighting world hunger, reducing their carbon footprint, fostering microfinance, and the like, are compelling.
The biggest problem with this book is that it too full of lengthy anecdotes and of name-dropping references to every celebrity that Branson ever met and worked with on a project. We encounter Nelson Mandela, Jimmy Carter, Kofi Annan, and rock stars of all types and persuasions. Branson strikes us as a fascinating person to encounter at a party and as a person truly committed to social change, but this book is simply too long.
By Jonathan Groner, Freelance Writer and Public Relations Consultant for the May/June 2017 LMA Mid-Atlantic Region Newsletter