It’s hard, given the acceptability of ‘smart casual’ in so many workplaces, to imagine a time when a businessman eschewing the tie provoked astonishment in the national press.
But an open collar, not to mention his willingness to sign the Sex Pistols when no other company would touch them, made Sir Richard Branson the poster boy of many a wannabe entrepreneur coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s. Breaking the dull, conservative, pinstriped stereotype of the businessman, he brought hippie ethics and punk’s can-do, anti-authoritarian spirit to the world of commerce – despite being educated at Stowe, one of England’s top public schools.
Turning business into a personality cult was only one way in which Branson changed received wisdom on how to make money. Since he began his career by launching a mail-order record company in 1970, he has taken the ‘Virgin’ brand – taken up because Branson was a virgin in business – into sectors as diverse as aviation, insurance, cosmetics, mobile phones and the railways. In the 1990s he even had two bids to run the National Lottery rejected – despite promising to give all profits to charity.
His network of companies was living proof that an abstract ‘brand’ could trump proven expertise in a particular area. Analysts have criticised the Virgin Group’s forays into a host of unconnected areas, but it hasn’t stopped Branson from amassing a personal fortune of £3bn, putting him seventh in last year’s Sunday Times Rich List.
If that is not stratospheric enough for a man once dismissed as a hippie with dreadful taste in cardigans, his embryonic space tourism company, Virgin Galactic, hopes to begin offering space flights to tourists for $200k a head.
Sir Richard, as he is now called, has a penchant for pushing the boundaries. He has tried, with varying degrees of success, to cross the Atlantic and the English Channel by hot air balloon and boat.
