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.
Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.
If your customer base is aging with you, then eventually you are going to become obsolete or irrelevant. You need to be constantly figuring out who are your new customers and what are you doing to stay forever young.
When a company or an individual compromises one time, whether it's on price or principle, the next compromise is right around the corner.
Banking is very good business if you don't do anything dumb.
I've said it for four decades - work 'on' your business, not just 'in' your business!
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.
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