Anita Roddick- " it’s obsessions that drives an entrepreneur’s vision."
Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.
Anita Roddick
I wake up every morning thinking… this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There’s no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.
Anita Roddick
To succeed, you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality.
Anita Roddick
Potential entrepreneurs are outsiders. They are people who imagine things as they might be, not as they are, and have the drive to change the world around them. Those are skills that business schools do not teach.
Anita Roddick
How do you teach obsession, because more often than not it’s obsessions that drives an entrepreneur’s vision? Why would you march to a different drumbeat if you are instinctively part of the crowd?
Anita Roddick
We were most creative when our back was against the wall.
Anita Roddick
It’s not really work for me because I have no idea what work is anymore. It is so much a part of my life.
Anita Roddick
It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don’t. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.
Anita Roddick
Successful entrepreneurs may hate hierarchies and structures and try to destroy them. They may garner the disapproval of MBAs for their creativity and wildness. But they have antennae in their heads. When they walk down the street anywhere in the world, they have their antennae out, evaluating how what they see can relate back to what they are doing. It might be packaging, a word, a poem, or even something in a completely different business.
Anita Roddick
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.
Anita Roddick
I’ve always said that travel is the best university; getting from one place to another means more than physical movement. It also entails change, challenge, new ideas and inspirations….I had this idea of making little products like shampoo and so forth using ingredients I had found when I traveled.
Anita Roddick
You always have to remember that what is most important in a company – or anything else – is unquantifiable in figures.
Anita Roddick
Measure your success according to fun and creativity.
Anita Roddick
There is no scientific answer for success. You can’t define it. You’ve simply got to live it and do it.
Anita Roddick
Be nice, for everyone that you meet is fighting a harder battle.
Anita Roddick
The end result of kindness is that it draws people to you.
Anita Roddick
I wake up every morning thinking…this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There’s no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal.
Anita Roddick
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 £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
Anita Roddick
If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.
Anita Roddick
In the business school model, entrepreneurs are most at home with a balance sheet, a cashflow forecast and a business plan. They dream of profit forecasts and the ay they can take the company public. You certainly must be able to wield these weapons. But these are just part of the toolbox of re-imagining the world. They are not the basic defining characteristic of entrepreneurship.
Anita Roddick
They will not teach you the most crucial thing of all: how to be an entrepreneur. They might also sap what entrepreneurial flair you have as they force you into the template called an MBA pass.
Anita Roddick
I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship – even by hallowed institutions like Harvard and Stanford – but I’m not all convinced it is a subject you can teach.
Anita Roddick
If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management. There is a sort of terrorism that comes with the operations and the science of making money, but by not knowing any of that, I had an amazing freedom.
Anita Roddick
It’s about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven’t a clue how we got here!
Anita Roddick
It gave me a lot of confidence in gut feelings – taught me to trust my instincts above everything else, and stood me in very good stead when I came to open my first shop.
Anita Roddick
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone it’s don’t obsess with this notion that you have to turn everything you do into a business, because that ends up being a small version of a large company. 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.
Anita Roddick
All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good. I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently. This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
Anita Roddick
I was a natural outsider, and I was drawn to other outsiders and rebels. James Dean was my schoolgirl idol.
Anita Roddick
If you can shape your business life or your working life, you can just look at it as another extension – you just fulfill all your values as a human being in the work place. If you are an activist, you bring the activism of your life into your business, or if you love creative art, you can bring that in.
Anita Roddick
You change your values when you change your behavior. When you’ve lived six months with a group that is rubbing their bodies with cocoa butter, and those bodies are magnificent, or you wash your hair with mud, and it works, you go on to break all sorts of conventions, from personal ethics to body care. Then, if you’re me, you develop this stunning love for anthropology.
Anita Roddick
I told my kids that they would not inherit one penny. The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn’t one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.
Anita Roddick
If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
Anita Roddick
I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.
Anita Roddick
A two-for-one sale no other cosmetic company could ever hope to match: buy a bottle of ‘natural’ lotion and get social justice for free.
Anita Roddick
A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force. I love it.
Anita Roddick
I made no claim to prescience, to any intuition about the rise of the green movement. At the forefront of my mind at the time there was really only one thought – survival.
Anita Roddick
We made a list of all the things we didn’t want to be. We did not want to be these captains of industry. That didn’t make our blood sing. I didn’t want to be a cosmetic diva wearing high heels and make-up, prancing around at the celebrity functions. We were rooted in family and community.
Anita Roddick
For myself, I needed to earn money, to look after the kids while my husband was traveling for two years across South America.
Anita Roddick
I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs.
Anita Roddick
To courageously ensure that our business is ecologically sustainable, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future.
Anita Roddick
If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?
Anita Roddick
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.
Anita Roddick
It wasn’t only economic necessity that inspired the birth of The Body Shop. My early travels had given me a wealth of experience.
Anita Roddick