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.
If you want to invest in us, we believe customer number one, employee number two, shareholder number three. If they don't want to buy that, that's fine. If they regret, they can sell us.
I think that, too many times, business has been seen as acting in its narrow self-interest rather than, essentially, contributing more broadly to society. I think a lot of that is unintentional; I don't think that many managers are deliberately trying to be unethical or are not trying to be sensitive to social needs.
No enterprise can exist for itself alone. It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others; or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.
I think that the direct conversation is exactly what companies need to earn trust of customers. Admit an error. Fix a problem. Commit to doing better. That is only human.
Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market.
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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