Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you’re in love with the anarchist.
Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who’s going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it’s more powerful than religion. So it’s going to have to be the vigilante consumer.
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.
It is a critical job of any entrepreneur to maximize creativity, and to build the kind of atmosphere around you that encourages people to have ideas. That means open structures, so that accepted thinking can be challenged.
At The Body Shop we had always been measured by how many jobs we had created, and I got a major award from the Queen on that.
I didn’t go to business school, didn’t care about financial stuff and the stock market.
A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force. I love it.
By creating conversation, we let our customers spread our message by word of mouth.
If civilization is going to survive, business and policy-makers must move on, to find within themselves more developed emotions than fear or greed.
By definition, design, and practice, capitalism is a system that concentrates economic power in the hands of the few to the exclusion of the many.
A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school.
What we are trying to do is to create a new business paradigm, simply showing that business can have a human face and a social conscience.
I think it is completely immoral for a shop to trade in the middle of a community, to take money and make profits from that community and then ignore the existence of that community, its needs and problems.
Why should how I act in my workplace be any different from how I interact with my family at home? It’s making sure the company runs on feminine principles where the major ethic is care.
Don’t underestimate the power of the vigilante consumer.
If trade undermines life, narrows it or impoverishes it, then it can destroy the world. If it enhances life, then it can better the world.
If you pretend that business is beyond morality, that’s the kind of morality you get.
I think it’s just fear of death. I can’t bear to go to sleep. There’s very little, you know, between an entrepreneur and a crazy person.
I have no interest in being the biggest, the most profitable or the largest retailer. I just want The Body Shop to be the best, most breathlessly exciting company – and one that changes the way business is carried out.
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.