The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed
Interpretation
Business should prioritize social responsibility over profit-making.
Anita Roddick emphasizes that the primary focus of businesses should not just be on generating profits but rather on fulfilling their responsibilities to society. By advocating for the public good over private greed, she calls for ethical practices that contribute to the well-being of the community and environment.
In practice
In a corporate social responsibility meeting, leaders can use this quote to encourage a shift in focus towards ethical practices.
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.
Large organizations don't worship shareholders or customers, they worship the past. If it were otherwise, it wouldn't take a crisis to set a company on a new path.
If you don't understand the details of your business you are going to fail.
If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.
In the final analysis, finding a way to do clean business and not to pay bribes actually improves your bottom line.
People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.
Customers don't always know what they want. The decline in coffee-drinking was due to the fact that most of the coffee people bought was stale and they weren't enjoying it. Once they tasted ours and experienced what we call "the third place" ... a gathering place between home and work where they were treated with respect.. they found we were filling a need they didn't know they had.
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