The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson

Author:Richard Branson [Branson, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-09-09T00:00:00+00:00

PLANE SAILING

When we were getting ready to launch Virgin Atlantic, and with zero experience whatsoever in the airline industry, I realised how important the ability to delegate was going to be. With a helping hand from Sir Freddie Laker and others, we were soon able to assemble a team of very smart and highly qualified aviation experts to blend with our experienced Virgin business managers. Roy Gardner, who became our first managing director, and David Tait, who ran the US side of the business, were two of the first people we grabbed, both having formerly worked closely with Sir Freddie at Laker Airways. I soon got the feeling that Roy and David were used to having a boss who knew the airline business inside out so I think they quite enjoyed working with someone new to aviation who was prepared to delegate most of the decision-making to them.

For a new company it was almost like managing a merger. And the blending of our existing Virgin Group music industry people with the newly hired career airline people certainly made for an extremely interesting chemistry experiment. A lot of the time we never quite knew how the laid-back Virgin attitude of ‘Hey, don’t sweat it – rules are made to be broken’ was going to react when mixed with the more ‘by-the-book’ and rigid disciplines of the airline industry. We obviously couldn’t tell an engineer to try plugging his gizmos in somewhere else just to see what happened, but we could suggest that maybe we should try using the famous French restaurateur Maxim’s of Paris with butlers in tailcoats to serve our Upper Class section. Sadly it didn’t last more than a few weeks! The fancy French sauces that worked in a kitchen at sea level just didn’t hold together at 35,000 feet and worse still those tails kept tripping the butlers up as they climbed the circular staircase to our Boeing 747’s upper deck. But it certainly got us lots of press and – as with all attempts to effect real change – if we’d never tried it we’d never have known.

It was a tribute to the people on both sides of the equation that – surprisingly, perhaps – we never had any violent eruptions and the two groups quickly came together with a healthy balance and understanding as to which elements the other needed to function and where there were grounds for serious further experimentation. Together, in an unprecedented period of just five months, the team not only got a brand-new transatlantic airline off the ground (literally) but in the process they succeeded in creating and delivering the level of service that I had hoped for and that a lot of newly acquired passengers would appreciate for many years to come. Had I not been willing and able to step back and let them get on with it, the outcome could have been very different.

Hiring the right people is a skill, and like most things you get better at it with practice, but there are some good shortcuts that can help you learn quickly.

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