Anita Roddick (The Body Shop) Essay Example for Free

Anita Roddick (The soundbox keep going) Essay stir profiles and best practices for entrepreneurs Twenty-six years ago the Brighton Evening Argus ran a story on a dispute between two funeral parlour owners who were upset about a new cosmetics boutique which had undecided up next door. It wasnt the nature of the business they were getting hot under the collar about, but its name. They apprehension the green shop front emblazoned with the words Body Shop in gold leaf capability put off prospective customers. They wanted me to change my shop front which I had just worn out(p) 870 of my 4,000 loan on, recalls Roddick. My smart move was to call the Argus and tell them I was being threatened by Mafia undertakers who wanted to close me down. The press loved it. The story of the beleaguered single mum with the house in hock trying to support her two kids with a bootstrapping start-up worked a treat. The small splash made Body Shop a cause celebre, won plenty of local support and won an important booking to get the business off the ground. The anecdote is a small aside, recounted with a chuckle and a current of air of outrage in a long interview. But although the battles got much freeger as Roddick grew her business into the multinational retailer it is today, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Body Shop story will instantly deal the defining characteristics of its fiery feisty founder in those early days of the business Ethical Anita versus the big bad world.There has never been any compromise in Roddicks views on how business should be through with(p) this is why her husband Gordon was tasked with handling the City suits (they didnt wish well me talking about sexual tension at work) and why she stepped away from the business in 1998 when the shareholders said a campaigning chief executive was not what they wanted for Body Shop. You might think after thirty years of business and the comfort of a healthy shareholding and a wedge of cash in t he bank Roddicks hunger for campaigning might pee-pee diminished. But little has changed since 1976. Her latest venture, a publishing start-up, produces books on ethical matters. It promotes her on the speaking rotary and all the profits going into campaigning. The only difference is now she occupies the position of an icon for women and female entrepreneurs something I dont take lightly And there is still plenty to shout about when it comes to what she sees as an ethical inanity in business today.Suffocation She rails against the suffocation of UK businesses as we outsource to cheaper countries the failure to preserve the inescapably of shareholders in public companies the lack of respect for the responsibility of business to the community at large the current need for women to conform to a male template in order to succeed the lack of credit of the value that employees bring to a business. Being ethical in business is not about broad stuff away Roddick is emphatic about what this means in practice not sandals, beards and group hugs in the boardroom but the adoption of simple moral values. People use the excuse of business to advance their morals at the front door and I dont know how they get away with it.But whoremonger ethical business really fit in with the cut-throat world of today? Her business, she says, is living proof. She describes Body Shop as a great business experiment which is still proving a point you can conduce an entrepreneurial business, provide a return to shareholders while campaigning on ethical issues and placing a elevated value on human capital. Being ethical in business is not about liberal stuff away. Its about your relationship with your employees, its about the aesthetics of the workplace and its about communication, says Roddick. There is no savvy why the workplace tilt be a genuine creative place, why there cant be flexitime, why there cant be transparency and even good manners. If Roddick doesnt sound like a busines s woman its because she has never claimed to be one. She puts her success down to a need for a livelihood and sees herself as the accidental entrepreneur.