Virgin Rebirth

He has just said that he would like to buy London's Gatwick Airport when it comes on the market next year, and by the end of October he aims to break the transatlantic monohull sailing record. There is no escaping Sir Richard Branson, the chairman of Virgin Group, who goes to extraordinary lengths to put himself on the front pages. Not even a near-disastrous abseil down a building in Las Vegas last year could deter him. His brand is not just Virgin—it is also Branson. His ambition is boundless: lately he has been holding meetings on his private Caribbean island with a group of experts, to work out how to save the world from global warming and its people from disease. The name Branson means two things to British people. To most he is the country's best-known businessman, hoist to stardom by his derring-do ballooning stunts and photo-ops with busty blondes, an anti-establishment "cheeky chappy" whose plucky airline has battled the mighty "monopoly" of British Airways (BA) and whose Virgin brand has spawned a business empire. The other, lesser-known Branson is a ruthless, wily entrepreneur who is always trying to get one over his rivals. The former thinks he walks on water; the latter skates on thin ice. Two books published last month sum up these conflicting portraits. "Business Stripped Bare", billed as the "adventures of a global entrepreneur", is Sir Richard's take on how to succeed in business, peppered with self-justifying anecdotes from across his empire, from Virgin Atlantic to Virgin Trains to Virgin Mobile. It is an interesting read, marred by boasting and embellishment. The management lessons range from the homespun to the banal: "find good people and set them free"; "it's attention to details that really defines great business delivery". In fact, Mr Branson's real talents are his winning way with people and his ability to inspire loyalty—both hard to distil into business-book maxims. The new edition of "Branson", by Tom Bower, treads the same ground but takes a very different view. Mr Bower is a former documentary-maker who has carved out a career as a biographer of business figures (he is being sued by disgraced tycoon Conrad Black). Sir Rich ard described Mr Bower's original work, published eight years ago, as "a foul, foul piece of work". Mr Bower retells the story of the "dirty tricks" war with BA in the early 1990s, which ended with Sir Richard winning a libel action against BA's chairman Lord King. This was a side issue (BA's house journal falsely accused Sir Richard of lying). As Mr Bower describes, Virgin was fighting a propaganda war with BA. It revelled in the sympathy it attracted as the alleged victim of dirty tricks, in the process benefiting from plenty of free publicity. Mr Bower delights in detailing Sir Richard's antics—avoiding sales tax in his first record-retail business, for example—and in outlining his group's brushes with insolvency. In March 1992 he managed to extricate himself from losses and debt by selling his music division to EMI for £560m ($983m). In 1998 he raised cash by selling half of Virgin Rail to Stagecoach, a bus group. And in March 2000, weighed down again with losses, notably in music retailing, he freed himself by selling 49% of Virgin Atlantic to Singapore Airlines. He was soon at loggerheads with his..... Read the rest on: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/virgin-rebirth/368317/0

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