I think that business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by "feminine" pinciples, qualities like love, care, and intuition.
Interpretation
Business would benefit greatly from adopting typically feminine qualities such as empathy and intuition.
Anita Roddick suggests that if businesses embraced qualities traditionally associated with femininity, such as love, care, and intuition, they would see significant improvements in their practices. This perspective emphasizes the importance of interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence in the business world, challenging conventional, often more rigid business practices.
In practice
In a business seminar on leadership, a speaker could use this quote to discuss the importance of empathy in decision-making.
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.
What business strategy is all about-what distinguishes it from all other kinds of business planning-is, in a word, competitive advantage. Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors.
I was never, ever interested in becoming a businessman or an entrepreneur. If I was a businessman, or saw myself as a businessman, I would have never gone into the airline business.
If I had one dollar left, I'd spend it on PR
Time is the friend of the wonderful business. It's the enemy of the lousy business. If you're in a lousy business for a long time, you're going to get a lousy result, even if you buy it cheap. If you're in a wonderful business for a long time, even if you pay a little too much going in, you're going to get a wonderful result if you stay in a long time.
It turns out that people - in every country in the world, there's a segment of buyer that wants the best product and the best experience. And that's what we're about providing.
Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.