This Woman Has Changed Business Forever

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She bristles at the question. "Look," she says, "if I put our poster for Colourings [a line of makeup] in the shop windows, that creates sales and profits. A poster to stop the burning of the rain forest doesn't. It creates a banner of values, it links us to the community, but it will not increase sales. What increases sales is an article in boring Glamour magazine saying Princess Diana uses Body Shop products. Then we'll get 7,000 bloody phone calls asking for our catalog. You can measure the effect."

It's a provocative argument, but it's a little misleading. Most of the activities are, in fact, intended to generate publicity for The Body Shop, and the company milks them for all they're worth. Even Anita would admit, moreover, that -- over the long term -- they do tend to increase sales and, yes, profits. What's most interesting, however, is the way that happens. Indeed, this may be the single most striking aspect of The Body Shop's entire approach to business.

The first thing you have to understand is that the primary audience for these activities is not the public: it is her own work force. The campaigns, which play a major role in her educational program, are anything but random attempts to promote goodwill. They are part of a carefully researched, designed, and executed business strategy. She regularly turns down causes that don't meet her criteria, and she won't launch any campaign until she feels confident of all the facts on the issues involved. She takes these matters far too seriously to adopt a cause that might come back to haunt the company, or to carry it out in less than a thoroughly professional manner.

More to the point, she wants causes that will generate real excitement and enthusiasm in the shops. "You educate people by their passions, especially young people," she says. "You find ways to grab their imagination. You want them to feel that they're doing something important, that they're not a lone voice, that they are the most powerful, potent people on the planet.

"I'd never get that kind of motivation if we were just selling shampoo and body lotion. I'd never get that sort of staying late, talking at McDonald's after work, bonding to customers. It's a way for people to bond to the company. They're doing what I'm doing. They're learning. Three years ago I didn't know anything about the rain forest. Five years ago I didn't know anything about the ozone layer. It's a process of learning to be a global citizen. And what it produces is a sense of passion you simply won't find in a Bloomingdale's department store."

The key word here is bond. For Anita is not just educating and motivating employees. She is not just selling cosmetics to customers. She is not just selecting franchisees, or establishing trade links with people in the Third World, or setting up factories to hire the unemployed. She is creating a community, a global community. The common bond, moreover, is not merely a mutual desire to save the Amazon rain forest. Rather, it is a belief that business should do more than make money, create decent jobs, or sell good products. The members of this community believe that companies should actually help solve major social problems -- not by contributing a percentage of their profits to charity, but by using all their resources to come up with real answers. Business is, after all, just another form of human enterprise, as Anita argues. So why should we expect and accept less from it than we do from ourselves and our neighbors?

There are many people, of course, who would quiver at the prospect of companies becoming social activists. Some would contend that business ought to stick to its collective knitting and do what it does reasonably well. Others would note that, for many companies, knitting well is difficult enough without taking on society's problems in addition to their own. Still others would prefer to leave such matters to nonprofit organizations or to government, which is presumably more accountable for its actions.

But Anita doesn't buy any of those arguments. She believes that there is only one thing stopping business from solving many of the most pressing problems in the world, and it has to do with the way most of us think companies must be managed. That is precisely what she wants to change.

* * *

Trading
Preserving the start-up spirit
Anita Roddick is reminiscing in her Littlehampton office. On the wall next to her are photographs of the original Body Shop in Brighton. The company no longer owns the store, she explains, but she is doing everything she can to get it back. "Then we'll put it back exactly the way it was in 1976. It's a real good reminder of the initiative and creativity that counts when you have no money."

Back then, Anita needed all the creativity and initiative she could muster, what with two children at home and her husband in South America pursuing his lifelong dream of riding from Buenos Aires to New York City on horseback. Before he had left, Gordon had run the numbers and told her she had to make 300 a week in order to stay in business. "I said, 'What happens, Gordon, if I don't?' He said, 'Give it six months and then pack it up and meet me with the kids in Peru.' "

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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