The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed
Interpretation
Business should prioritize social responsibility over profit-making.
Anita Roddick emphasizes that the primary focus of businesses should not just be on generating profits but rather on fulfilling their responsibilities to society. By advocating for the public good over private greed, she calls for ethical practices that contribute to the well-being of the community and environment.
In practice
In a corporate social responsibility meeting, leaders can use this quote to encourage a shift in focus towards ethical practices.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of Β£300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.
First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.
If you aren't committed to diversity of thought, you have no business launching a startup.
If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you're putting yourself out of business.
Eventually, all companies are replaced.
When an entrant competitor attacks the low end of any market, the rational reaction of the incumbent firms is to abandon rather than defend it - because the low end is the least profitable of their possible investments.
In the Machine Age, the company itself became a machine - a machine for making money.
The companies that survive longest are the one's that work out what they uniquely can give to the world not just growth or money but their excellence, their respect for others, or their ability to make people happy. Some call those things a soul.
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