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.
When a company identifies how to integrate the processes needed to give the consumer a sense of job completion, it can blow away the competition. A product is easy to copy, but experiences are very hard to replicate.
There are good examples of companies - Coca-Cola is one - that invested before there was a huge market in countries, and I think that ended up playing out to their benefit for decades to come.
Owning a popular sports team is very different than any other type of business. They don't throw parades when Apple has the biggest quarter in corporate history. People don't call and email asking for anyone from the team to come visit their sick child. They don't cry as they request a jersey of their child's favorite player to be buried with them.
The idea that you can create a template that will work forever doesn't happen in any business. There's some really, really bright people in this business. You can't do the same thing the same way and be successful for a long period of time.
Money goes out first to pay expenses and then comes back as profits later - if at all. The high rate of failure of new businesses makes painfully clear that there is nothing inevitable about the money coming back.
Industry is the soul of business and the keystone of prosperity.
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