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.' "
So Anita had done all the things people do when they start a business they know nothing about, with no resources to fall back on. She worked around the clock, improvising as she went along. "We had only about 15 or 20 products," she says. "So we had the idea of offering five sizes of containers, which made it look like a bit more. And we had all handwritten labels with explanations of the products. We thought we had to explain them because they looked so bizarre. I mean, there were little black things in some of them. We had to say these were not worms. We were offering honesty of information that we didn't even know was honesty. We thought it was the only way to sell the products."
She goes on, talking about all the crazy things she did in the early days. Leaving a trail of strawberry essence on the street in hopes of luring customers with the smell. Planting a newspaper article about the morticians next door who were trying to shut her down because they thought a store called The Body Shop was bad for their business. Starting a refill service as an ecological way to reduce the need for new containers, which she couldn't afford.
It is obvious, as she talks, that she enjoys the memories. And yet, there is no trace of sentimentality in her reminiscences. She is not yearning for the good old days. Rather, she is remembering her own naïveté, and she is reminding herself how well she did because she was naïve. Her innocence, she is saying, led her to do the right thing.
"There was a grace we had when we started -- the grace that you didn't have to bullshit and tell lies. We didn't know you could. We thought we had to be accountable. How do you establish accountability in a cosmetics business? We looked at the big companies. They put labels on the products. We thought what was printed on the label had to be truthful. I mean, we were really that naïve."
Anyone who has been involved in a successful start-up understands what she is talking about. There is terror, there is excitement. There is a sense of living by your wits, relying on your instincts, knowing that your dumb mistakes could sink you, hoping that they don't. And there is something else: a kind of simplicity, a clarity of purpose. You have a product, or a service, and everything depends on your ability to get customers to buy it. This is what Anita calls trading. "You set up a business without any understanding of business vocabulary. If you throw away all those words, you have trading going on. That's all it is. Here's a product. Here's the environment. Here's the buyer. Here's the seller."
Business on that level is exciting and rewarding. It is also very human. It is a simple activity centered on direct relationships between people. "I actually see it as ennobling," says Anita. "It's been going on for centuries. It's just buying and selling, with an added bit for me, which is the magical area where people come together -- that is, the shop. It's trading. It's making your product so glorious that people don't mind buying it from you at a profit. Their reaction is, 'I love that. Can I buy that?' You want them to find what you are doing so wonderful that they are happy to pay your profit."
But businesses seldom remain on that level, not successful ones at any rate. They grow. They hire employees. They acquire assets and make commitments. Life gets complicated. Management structures are created. Responsibilities are delegated. Control becomes an issue. Reporting systems are developed. Financial discipline is introduced. And along with it comes a new language -- the language of budgets and profits, of return on investment and shareholder value. In the process, business ceases to be just trading and becomes, in Anita's words, "the science of making money."
Professional management is the common term for this way of running a company. In the world of business, it is generally considered to be a good thing, not to mention an inevitable and necessary consequence of growth. Without it, we are told, a company can never reach its full potential. Sooner or later, it will be overwhelmed by chaos and die. The only way to avoid that fate -- short of selling out or staying small -- is to develop sophisticated, financially based management systems, to "cross the threshold" and become a full-fledged, major-league corporation.
But business is charged a steep price for this kind of "success." The bill is paid in the currency of cynicism -- the cynicism of customers, of employees, of the community, even of other businesspeople. If companies are in business mainly to make money, you can't fully trust whatever else they do or say. They may create jobs, they may pay taxes and contribute to charity, they may provide an array of goods and services, but all that is incidental to their real purpose: to generate profits for shareholders.
