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The Share
Guide: My first
question relates to the subject of our theme, "Business and
Spirituality." You have a quote in your book Business As
Unusual: "Spirituality in business is not about religious
ideas but rooted in concrete action of people whose sense of caring
stands beyond themselves." Are you saying here that you think
business leaders should shift their emphasis to the human spirit?
Anita
Roddick: Yes, that's
exactly it. All through history, there have always been movements
where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but
also for the public good. Look at the Quakers--they were excellent
business people that never lied, never stole; they cared for their
employees and the community which gave them the wealth. They never
took more money out than they put back in. It is a good example of
how you can actually run a business. You can view it as not just a
job but as an honorable livelihood where you can, by using your
imagination, develop the human spirit. I believe this has been done
brilliantly by some small and large organizations. It is difficult
and it is work, but it can be done. I believe in businesses where you
engage in creative thinking, and where you form some of your deepest
relationships. If it isn't about the production of the human spirit,
we are in big trouble.
The Share Guide:
So actually you are saying that instead of making the businesses
shift their emphasis it is more a re-awakening of a consciousness
that has always been, and going back to the old ways.
Anita Roddick:
Yes. Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was
either the education platform, or it was health or it was other
issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded
every other human value.
The Share Guide:
You started The Body Shop back in 1976 I believe, so it is having its
25th anniversary this year?
Anita Roddick::
Yes. 25 years is a rite of passage and it gives you pause for
reflection. When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry
sickness--you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is
such fun. I am trying to find thoughtful time, not just for
reflection but to find the resonance of what's going on. Finding
balance, that's what is difficult.
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. 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.
The Share Guide:
In other words, you did not know it couldn't be done.
Anita Roddick::
Right! I hadn't a clue. I had never even read a book on economic
theory.
The Share Guide:
When you started The Body Shop what were your main goals?
Anita Roddick::
My goal was livelihood. We don't use that word often enough. 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 in life 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. If we can actually bring in education, that polishes
livelihood like they used to do in the old days, where there were
apprenticeships for different skills like a woodworker or a
blacksmith. This way is far more exciting and much more creative. For
myself, I needed to earn money, to look after the kids while my
husband was travelling for two years across South America.
The Share Guide:
What do you see as the difference between a livelihood and a
business?
Anita Roddick::
If you take a measure of business, let's say a small start-up
business, and you have the discipline, and you employ people, you
create more than an income--you create and develop a process or
strategy of developing it to make it bigger and bigger. That is the
notion of it, expansion. But if you have a skill or interest and you
polish it into a livelihood--in other words, you earn money for your
survival plus your education plus travel, whatever, but you don't
think big, that is a different thing. You're not thinking it's got to
be bigger and bigger and bigger.
The Share Guide:
Does it become a business when you start hiring people?
Anita Roddick::
Definitely. For me it did. Then you really have to look at certain
standards. You have to start playing by the rules and you have to
honor paychecks and benefits, and you have to be disciplined.
The Share Guide:
I had my first business grow into a dozen employees and basically get
too big and too complex, and so I sold it. This second one, the
magazine, I kept a home business, and for nearly ten years it was
just me and my wife, other than outside distributors and the printer.
Now we have one employee, the same person for over two years. I guess
it is a "keeping it closer to your livelihood" kind of thing. Now
that we have a third person, we can take a break now and then. The
downfall is that if you are a mom-and-pop operation and you have no
help, it can burn you out. The good thing is that you don't have to
worry too much about employees with just one or two. So to me, small
and careful is good but having a little help is really a benefit.
Anita Roddick::
But still it is manageable at that stage.
The Share Guide:
Yes. I do have to pay employee taxes and keep it official now. Before
we hired Lisa I didn't have to think beyond myself and my wife
Janice.
Anita Roddick::
The hard thing when it grows larger is that you lose intimacy.
The Share Guide:
I have been tempted to grow this business, to get more people and
make it bigger. But I remember what happened with the first one, and
I want to have a little more free time now. So you just wanted to get
your livelihood going when you started The Body Shop?
Anita Roddick::
The livelihood came about because women tend to say, "What can I do
to make money?" Direct selling, knocking on doors and selling
Tupperware really wasn't happening in England in those days. I
traveled enormously during the 1960's, when you measured everything
by where you traveled and what you did as travelers. I traveled in
mostly pre-industrial areas. Because I have the interest of living
with indigenous groups of people and pre-industrial groups, I learned
so much. For example, when your shampoo is gone, you end up mashing
up stuff to put in your hair. You put on mayonnaise, eggs, anything
to clean and scrub. It is real experiences that change your
values.
The Share Guide:
This was before The Body Shop started?
Anita:
Years before, when I was in my twenties.
The Share Guide:
How old were you when The Body Shop started?
Anita:
Thirty-four. Everything back then was small scale. My kids were
young, they were about 3 and 5, so I wanted something easy--you know,
close the door at five o'clock. So I had this idea of making little
products like shampoo and so forth using ingredients I had found when
I traveled. Actually, the biggest influence for me in setting up the
first store was Spaghetti Westerns. . .you know, with Clint Eastwood.
In those movies there were these dusty old towns, and you see a
general store and you go up some dusty wooden steps and everything
was rough-hewn, rustic looking--that was the image I had of what my
shop could look like.
The Share Guide:
You wanted it to be old fashioned.
Anita:
Yes. So elemental. And that's exactly how it was because I couldn't
afford to do anything anyway. I only had about 20 products.
The Share Guide:
Were you making all the products yourself?
Anita:
Not all of them. I had a little chemist that was making a few of the
products. A lot of it is just raw ingredients like cocoa butter or
lavender.We made it look like we had a lot of products though. When
you entered the tiny 370 square foot shop, we had five sizes of
everything, so it looked like we had 120 products. That really was
genius, as I look back on it, because it gave people choices. Also, I
could only afford a box of 700 empty bottles, so I told everybody to
come back for refills. My Mum used to say it was like the times
during WWII, when they recycled and re-used everything. I think that
sort of good housekeeping or frugality, which would certainly be
considered eccentric nowadays, was part of the idiosyncratic nature
that set us apart. Nobody was stupid enough to offer 5 sizes of one
product; it simply didn't make sense. We turned it around into a
survivor's option: customers pick up the size they want and come back
every week for a refill. Recycling had nothing to do with being
environmentally conscious at that point.
The Share Guide:
So it was just an economic decision at first?
Anita:
Yes. The movement for the environment really only started in the mid
1970's.
The Share Guide:
And you were at the beginning of that wave.
Anita:
Yes. We were all social activists, and the activism sort of
transferred itself into a new environmental movement. But at the
beginning, the minimal packaging was because we didn't have any
money. There was no option at all. We were most creative when our
back was against the wall. One of the interesting things is once we
started to get smarter and understand the issues more, and when we
realized that we were going to be a real voice, then we ventured out
with an extraordinary social justice agenda. We turned all the shops
into action stations to educate the public on certain issues such as
human rights. Right now we are doing this boycott of Exxon and then
we're doing a huge global warming campaign with Greenpeace.
The Share Guide:
I know that in the past you've had places in the stores where people
could sign petitions and get information. I haven't seen that so much
lately.
Anita:
No, you haven't seen it in the past few years, but you will now. We
just did a big industrial hemp campaign during the first week in
June, 2001 and then there will be the global warming campaign. We
have a new joint venture partner that is much more interested in
getting the business right, and then focusing on the social
agenda--which is just starting to happen.
The Share Guide: They are both important. You
are a successful business woman and a
social activist, and the combo really excites me. But I have a
question regarding the activism in the stores. I was recently killing
time in the Atlanta airport and I had your book Business as Unusual
with me because I was reading it on the plane in preparation for this
interview. The Body Shop has a store in the airport, and I saw the
book cover on a little cardboard sign. But I was very disappointed
that the young women working in the store really didn't know about
your book or about the social mission. They don't have much of that
in my local Santa Rosa, CA store either.
Anita:
You are right. I think it has to do with the notion in America that
education in terms of social values is secondary. Also, so many
people are part-time, which is really rare in Europe.
The Share Guide:
I think it would be great if you and I and those like us could make
Americans more aware. I actually took the time to show the store
clerks your book since I had it with me and told them a little bit
about it. They were very receptive.
Anita:
I think what I have lost in America in the past few years is
communication skills on these issues. One of the things I absolutely
want to bring back is more communication about what we do with PBS
stories, such as the one they just did in Nicaragua. Unfortunately,
for the past two to three years the values have not been high in
terms of staff education. That is changing. It has to change, under
my direction. There is nothing more motivating than when you have a
young shop and they realize they can bring their values to the
workplace.
The Share Guide:
It seems that the awareness in the stores has been much greater in
Europe than in America.
Anita:
The difference is night and day. In Germany the refills are at about
80%, in England, less, but America they just don't care. It's just an
extraordinary waste.
The Share Guide:
Here's another question: Many folks I know are socially active and
share our values but suffer from what we call poverty
consciousness--feeling consciously or subconsciously that too much
success is bad, that money is evil. What are your thoughts on this
and did you struggle with any of these feelings when your business
started to take off?
Anita:
It came late in my life, you know, in my 40's. But I always had a
courageous human spirit. 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. But the minute we went public on the stock market,
which is how our wealth was created, it was no longer how many people
you employed, it was how much you were worth and how much your
company was worth. So the first public speech, after we went on the
stock market, the BBC cameras were in there to film. Here's this
young entrepreneur woman who was just wild and eccentric and
articulate and had a vision of things that was different. I didn't go
to business school, didn't care about financial stuff and the stock
market. So we were the darlings. The shares started at about 60 and
it went up and closed the day at about one pound forty. I remember
asking Gordon as we drove home that day in our broken down van how we
were going to deal with this. 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. The way to
preserve that was to put obstacles up to keep us from becoming
something else, these people we didn't like. The first thing we did
was set up a community volunteering program where every staff member
was paid for doing volunteer work once a month. This program was just
extraordinary. The poor man shames us all. Then we started to get
quite political. We went over into Romania where they had these
appalling orphanages and institutions, and had our staff do
refurbishing. At the same time I was travelling and realizing that we
could go into communities and work directly with the native people
and set up community trade. This work stopped us from being like
these muggy schemers and arty farty types. We kept our sense of
humanity, especially with me traveling in the Third World countries
that I do. That has been my saving grace. I am sure if I didn't do
that I still wouldn't be like the glamorous celebrity type, but I
bloody well didn't want to take the risk. Consistently in my life
I've had the understanding that wealth can grow and nourish the
spirit.
The
other thing I did was 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. We are active in all of the most unpopular causes, whether it's
human rights or the poor independent farmer in this country that is
an endangered species. We are really doing grass roots community
organizing and building. I have smart kids, and they realize that
their gift is their health and their joy and their family and their
intelligence and they will be superb at administering monies, because
they're activists both. The most bizarre thing is that the media
thinks I'm nuts.
The Share Guide:
So you're going to leave all your money to The Body Shop
Foundation?
Anita:
I don't even think that it will be a foundation at that point. It'll
probably be privately funded. I also have the Roddick Foundation,
which is quite political. If I could mash the two together, that
would be interesting.
The Share Guide:
So there are two different foundations that do different work?
Anita:
Yes, at the moment. We do different things with them. The Body Shop
Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and
environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies. We
work within the communities and it is an interesting and profoundly
effective foundation because money spent directly assisting community
organizing or grass roots groups is money well spent.
The Share Guide:
You often refer to businesses that you admire, like Patagonia and Ben
and Jerry's. Are there any others that you would like to mention?
Anita:
There are a ton of them in Europe. Scandinavian businesses, by law,
have to have much more of an agenda of responsibility. But it's
really hard to find a publicly listed company in the stock market
that can push out the agenda. If I wanted to maximize my profits,
which is supposed to be this country's duty of business, I would have
to lie and sell anti-aging cream, which is one of the greatest, most
insidious lies out there. I am not intending to do that even though
it is one of the most profitable products in the beauty industry. If
I wanted to maximize my profits I would take the two or three months
that we do campaigning, which comes to about 3-4 million quid, and
put it into keeping the shareholders happy. But I am not interested
in maximizing the wealth of shareholders; I am interested in keeping
my company breathlessly alive and socially active. I'm consistently
trying to define spirituality in business.
The Share Guide:
What do the shareholders say about that?
Anita:
They don't say anything.
The Share Guide:
Are still getting a decent profit?
Anita:
Yes, they get great dividends.
The Share Guide:
Since they are getting their dividends they don't mind this social
action?
Anita:
If the prices are not that good at the moment that's because the
bloody business is not very well run. It has nothing to do with the
social agenda. We save a huge amount of money by not advertising, and
by not going around in Lear jets, or having obscene compensation
packages like many others do.
The Share Guide:
So instead of putting money in the wrong pockets, you can put part of
it into socially conscious things?
Anita:
Right. One of the reasons for wanting to go private again is to be
able to legitimately give more money away. We give I don't know how
many millions to shareholders, when we could be doing other things.
Think of the amount of schools we could build. . .we are building
quite a lot anyway though. To me, the joy of making this business
successful is giving stuff away.
The Share Guide:
You mention in your book that you are buying back some of the
franchises.
Anita:
Yes. A lot of us started in our 40's and are now pushing 60. Some
people just want to go fishing or something like that. But some I
think will go to the grave with the company. I have franchises in
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden that could just go on and may
never retire because they are such guardians of the gate posts.
The Share Guide:
In the same way that one can buy back franchises, could you also buy
back shares and re-privatize the company?
Anita:
We tried twice but we got cold feet. We didn't know who we were
getting into bed with. We don't know any bankers, and you have to
borrow the money and go to a major level of borrowing. Suddenly we
realized we were going to have these guys on our board and they would
say, "You know, maybe you shouldn't be spending so much money on the
social campaigns." So we just stopped.
The Share Guide:
Do you think that in America companies like Patagonia and Ben &
Jerry's are very rare because it's so hard to go public and still
keep a good agenda?
Anita:
You can define social responsibility in various ways. How good are
you to your employees? What about education? How about diversity?
There are companies that are famous for doing well in one area, but
the notion of maximizing profits often gets in the way. I think it is
truly rare for a company to have a mentality where the values of the
employer are equal to the values of the financial investors and also
equal to the values of the community.
The Share Guide:
It seems that more small companies can think that way.
Anita:
Yes, the ones that aren't controlled by financial institutions.
Financial Fascism is "only the strong survive." There is no agenda
other than financially increasing the bottom line--which doesn't
include human rights or social justice or environmental protection.
As a business owner, I want to be penalized if I screw up. And I
think businesses should be banned from entry into any country if they
try to sell products made with sweatshop labor. It amazes me how
Wal-Mart has gotten away with it.
The Share Guide:
I think part of the problem is the original Corporate Charter: the
way it is set up in America, there is no social agenda.
Anita:
Yes, you're right. In our country we call it Articles of Association.
These are important legal documents. In ours, we dedicated The Body
Shop to social and environmental changes and human advocacy. That had
to be 70% of all our shareholders.
The Share Guide:
You did this when you incorporated? How long after you started did
you do that?
Anita:
We did it when we went on the stock market in1984, eight years after
we started.
The Share Guide:
Some people with small companies or individual home businesses may
think they are too little to have an effect.
Anita:
I don't think that's true. Take a look at what the small company does
to keep a community happy. Then look at big corporations--how many
people did they fire? Take a look at Motorola, for example, with
3,000 people out of a job while the CEOs picked up 2 million dollars
in bonuses. Big businesses are consistently looking for cheap labor,
closing up factories and moving out to countries where there are no
human rights standards or environmental standards. The backbone of
this country is the small 1 to 5 people businesses, I think. If there
is one bit of advice I have for people it is to buy locally and
support local business. There is a wonderful restaurant in upstate
New York called the 17-Miles Restaurant. They only bring in produce
within a 17-mile radius. Phenomenal idea! Organic stuff that is not
shipped from around the world. I think that is truly the way to
go.
The Share Guide:
You have quite a bit of self-confidence, what they call spunk here in
America, and a willingness to challenge the stuffed shirts in the
corporate world. Do you feel that your childhood exposure to
business, your parents running their own business, had anything to do
with this?
Anita:
It wasn't about business. It had to do with being an outsider. We
were the only Italian immigrants in this little blue-collar town, and
we were outsiders. My mother was the most eccentric and
extraordinarily beautiful woman, and a young widow at 39, so she had
this dramatic aura around her. She raised 4 kids by herself. I
remember her hating the priest because she didn't want to give my
father a Catholic burial. She was an atheist and she was annoyed at
sending the kids to church so she spread garlic all over our coats so
it would stink up half the church. We were pushed into exercises of
bravery. You couldn't be a meek and mild person with my Mum
around.
The Share Guide:
And since you were Italian immigrants in England, that caused you to
be spunky as well.
Anita:
I guess that's true. And we worked very hard.
The Share Guide:
Have you allowed yourself time for vacation, rest, to rejuvenate
yourself?
Anita:
One of the dark side is you weren't given leisure. Our concept of
work as kids. . .we were the original child labor. We had to work in
my Mum's café all the time, so we didn't understand
leisure.
The Share Guide:
And once you got The Body Shop going you were still stuck with that
work ethic?
Anita:
The dark sides of success is that you have an overextended notion of
responsibility. That you have to work on behalf of everybody else,
and take care of everything. The second thing is you feel you don't
deserve it, which is really a Catholic thing. You define yourself by
your work and your sense of being alive. Maybe it is an addiction to
new experiences. 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 in terms of
the activism. I shaped The Body Shop into who I am: activist, social
agitator, radical, crazy in terms of theatrical, all of that
stuff.
The Share Guide:
So you don't take breaks?
Anita:
Not a vacation like going into a hotel and La de da. I spent a month
in Nicaragua working alongside the sesame farmers and that was a joy.
And I spent some time with the Black Farmer's Cooperative in Alabama
and Mississippi trailing from one farm to the other.
The Share Guide:
Let's return to the stores for a minute. You are hiring people for
more than just a job. You are trying to create a sense of community
in the stores themselves, aren't you?
Anita:
Yes, but that is easier done when you have 2000 people in the
workplace, which we have at our International Headquarters in
Littlehampton. To create a sense community, we bring in all different
age groups: parents and grandkids and kids can all work together in
The Body Shop. Community was really much more polished after we set
up a child development center attached to the workplace. It has about
50 kids up to the age of five years, and another 50 up to age 12
during holidays. We offer paternity and maternity leave as well, so
the family was being protected. We also have this great idea called
the Love Program which allows any member of our staff to be given 100
quid a year to use on any skill that has nothing to do with the
business, whether it's studying fear of spiders or tightrope walking
or whatever. That has been a great plus. We also do community
volunteering, where each department goes and does something in the
community. At the big headquarters it is a really creative place;
there is very much of a carnival atmosphere.
The Share Guide:
So you've got a couple thousand people working at the Littlehampton
headquarters, and in one location its possible to create a sense of
community. But it is a whole other animal with the different stores
around the world, isn't it?
Anita:
I think the Australian stores are probably the most highly polished
in terms of the community. They even have their own vegetarian
restaurant on site, and an Olympic sized swimming pool. In Ireland
the shops won't even advertise products in their windows at
Christmas, because they are working on political issues. Canada has a
strong community for peace, very much like we do in England. And
Australia, they have this huge community strength around the issue of
domestic violence. But some countries just don't do anything.
The Share Guide:
Here in America it seems like most of The Body Shops I have seen are
in shopping malls rather than in downtown.
Anita:
I think that was one of the big mistakes I made early on, thinking
that I had to be in the shopping malls. We are focusing on street
side locations now.
The Share Guide:
The malls generate business but they suck the energy out of downtown,
the heart of the community.
Anita:
They are monuments that don't communicate, and they're bloody boring!
The mall stores, especially in New Hampshire, are just pathetic about
some of the issues we wanted to raise. They complained when we did
the "Thank You For Our Dream, Dr. King" day. They complained when we
had our Self-Esteem Day. They are always complaining about the
political imaging that we do. I remember being interviewed in one of
the malls in New Hampshire about a voter registration campaign we
were doing. Security came up and said, "What are you doing?" like the
only thing you can do here is trade. We were told that we shouldn't
be putting up posters with Dr. Martin Luther King's face on them,
because we weren't here for public education.
The Share Guide:
I notice that you've got your headquarters in Burlingame, California.
And you have another headquarters in North Carolina?
Anita:
North Carolina is mostly for distribution. Marketing and product
development for the American regions is in Burlingame.
The Share Guide:
Why did you choose to be in Northern California?
Anita:
The bigger question was why North Carolina (which was a very good
idea, since we were originally in New Jersey). We picked North
Carolina because it allowed all our staff the chance to have a great
house, because it was an affordable area. It was a great place but it
was a cemetery for creative marketing of ideas. We created this huge
distribution center, expecting to be opening up 50 to 60 stores a
year, but that never really happened. After about 7 years the sales
really dropped. Competition came in furiously. So we just decided we
wouldn't develop North Carolina. What we needed was some smart
thinking. I desperately wanted to get to San Francisco, which is more
our type of town with our type of people.
The Share Guide:
So you wanted the creativity of California. . .
Anita:
I love San Francisco. It was my former home when I was with Mother
Jones. It is fun; it is the most European of the American cities.
There's a great community and there is right thinking. In Northern
California they haven't got the hardened political cynicism of the
East Coast. And of course it is so bloody lovely!
The Share Guide:
What do you say to environmentalists that believe remote indigenous
tribes should be left completely alone and not traded with?
Anita:
I tell them to dream on, because they have been trading with people
for years. That is a very imperialistic viewpoint. You speak to most
indigenous people and their livelihood is trading. The real issue is
whether or not you abuse them. Some the loggers will bring in alcohol
and tobacco. There is no indigenous group that hasn't been discovered
now anyway. Everywhere I go they've been discovered. Remote is
definitely gone, going on 40 years now.
The Share Guide:
How about saying a little about NGO's, non government organizations,
and how more conscious consumers are changing the business world?
Anita:
There is a big conspiracy of silence in America, regarding this huge
rise of the NGO's, who are utterly powerful now. We ignore them at
our peril. I'm talking about Greenpeace or Rainforest Action Network
or Friends of the Earth or Global Exchange. They have the moral
agenda that politicians don't have. These are incredibly profound,
intelligent, thoughtful and daring organizations. I'd rather put my
monies with them than any sort of marketing agency. If you take a
look at any consumer research, politicians are not regarded as either
honorable or honest but NGO's are. People are really listening to
them. People will listen to Social Venture Network or Human Rights
Watch or whatever, and they will not listen to politicians and
believe that the politicians have anything other than their own
career advancement as their agenda. I think the most interesting
thing is the ways that businesses and NGO's are working together, and
almost ignoring the political system.
The Share Guide:
Apparently consumer awareness is growing, such as with Levi's when it
came out that they were made in China and their sales suffered.
Consumer opinion is really making a difference now in how companies
run their business.
Anita:
I think that more companies are now realizing it's corporate
reputation at stake and what they fear mostly is consumer revolt. I
think what's needed is the powerful forces of non-government
organizations working alongside direct action specialists, such as
the Ethical Investment Fund and the church organizations. I think
there's got to be a more revolutionary kindness in business. What I
find is they're doing reputation management. Take companies like
Exxon or Shell or Nike, they employ dozens of public relations
companies, these sultans of sleaze, that try to whitewash their
image. But we have the internet now, and we need to get the
information out and wake people up!
The Share Guide:
Tell us a little bit about The
New Academy of Business.
Anita:
The New Academy of Business is a Masters Degree Program in New
Business and Responsibility that I set up through Bath University. It
is absolutely riveting in terms of how successful it has been. People
mostly in their 30's and early 40's, heads of NGO's, heads of fun
businesses, plus a lot of consultants, come and take this course. We
bring in some of the most incredibly effective speakers, such as
Matthew Fox from the University of Creation and Spirituality, and
Susan George, an alternative economist. These are really profound
thinkers on global issues; the alumni are unbelievable.
The Share Guide:
So there's a physical campus for this?
Anita:
Yes, at Bath University.
The Share Guide:
Is there a distance learning aspect to it?
Anita:
Not yet. We are trying to get it replicated at the University of
Taiwan, and we have been playing around with a couple of Universities
here in America.
The Share Guide:
I noticed at the end of your book you said that you were interested
in publishing.
Anita:
That is happening as I speak. My second book is coming out in America
in November 2001. It is called Take
it Personally, and
it is a sort of Citizen's Guide. That sounds pretty boring, but
actually it is a real myth buster about what we are being told is the
right way to do business.
The Share Guide:
Didn't you write another book, in the early 90's?
Anita:
Yes, Body and Soul was the
first one. It was my first
autobiography, covering the first ten years into The Body Shop.
Business As Unusual took over where that one left off. I am an idea
person. . .I don't need to author too much, I just need to corral and
gather together. There are some good books that I can muster on
different things, but I am really interested in grass roots stuff. I
want to be able to do some work in India and in Taiwan. I just want
to get in those areas and make education accessible. You know, like
the pamphlets that get information out which isn't controlled by the
big publishing organizations that want expensive, heavy duty
hardbacks. With my books, no rights are reserved--you take anything
you want, use it well, our knowledge is free. Just credit the people
involved and hopefully donate some money to NGO's.
Anita
Roddick's book, Business As Unusual,
is
available at book stores or
visit www.thorsons.com.
For more information about The Body Shop, visit www.thebodyshop.com.
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