My Role Model : Sir Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson is one of the worlds most intriguing, succesful and enduring entrepreneurial business leaders out there. As the founder of the Virgin Group, he has established a very interesting background and approach to both leadership and where he chooses to put his resources to work. He is an extremist in serial entrepreneurship and has a very interesting and exciting leadership style, seemingly not picked out of any regular handbook in management styles.

His leadership qualities :

Figurehead : Branson is by all means a figurehead for Virgin, and perhaps even more important than the brand itself. When Virgin Cola launched he charged into Times Square with a tank, symbolically starting a war with Coca Cola and Pepsi. This is by no means a normal act of any marketing manager.

Below is an interview link of Sir Richard Branson

Passionate : Sir Richard Branson should be regarded as a passionate leader. On the Virgin group website the company mentions “giving birth” to companies and “holding their hand” through the organisational development. This is by all means a supportive standpoint, far away from the quarterly run businesses of many other stock exchange businesses

Courage : An example of Branson’s willingness to take risk is his venture into space tourism with Virgin Galactic. That business is by no doubt regarded as extremely courageous and risky. But at the same time driven by the same reasons as any other business, profit

Here is a video on Virgin Galactic

Know Your Business : In an interview for Time he talks about eliminating “the spoke and hub approach” that many airliners have and initially focusing on direct flights between busy airports where the demographics correspond to the Virgin brand image (young and hip).

Creativity : Richard Branson’s ventures portray creativity, venturing into airliners using new creative measures such as touch-screen ordering of food and comfortable planes. This comes in an era where most other airliners are figuring out how to remove the last remaining frills to cut costs.

Adaptability : One of his strong characteristics, besides his charisma, seems to be his adaptability to situations. It is strongly developed and witnessed by him turning the situation named as the “dirty tricks affair” in which he had a battle with British Airways.

Sir Richard’s leadership style and characteristics are based on some very simple and down-to-earth rules:

• Smile, everything gets much easier if you show a friendly face
• Have fun at work
• Believe in your ideas, employees and colleagues

Branson’s main efforts during his day are put into effective time management. He divides his days equally between trouble shooting, new projects and promoting his businesses⁽¹²⁾. He is considered being a genius at handling and preparing PR activities and is never afraid of being in the front line of it, to bring maximum momentum to the PR event

 He is definitively a relationship-oriented leader who is good at aligning people and giving them emotional support and encouragement. He seems to fall into the segment of being a participative and consultative leader. His very strong charisma seems to make anyone listen and follow him

I conclude that Richard Branson has got the style of a transformational and charismatic leader, which most of us only dream of working for or with. At least I do. Another dream of mine is to get Sir Richard’s own opinion on this review of him as a leader, delivered through a two hour long interview of him on his island, sharing a nice bottle of red wine. But that will most probably stay à dream, as will the wish of working for or with a leader as Sir Richard Branson.