Anita roddick quotes

A vision is something you see and others don't. Some people would say that's a pocket definition of lunacy. But it also defines entrepreneurial spirit.

Business is not financial science, it's about trading.. buying and selling. It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it.

Any business or enterprise that shaves away loneliness is going to last forever. And like it or not but we've got a lonely society.

You persuade people with passion, so you've got to have a product or service you feel emotionally charged about. Then you can tell stories about it that will inspire others.

There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.

The word love is never mentioned in big business.

For me, campaigning and good business is also about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practices or human rights abuses.

One of the key problems of the business world is that greed has become culturally acceptable.

The key to handling problems and conflict within an organization is to keep the channels of communication wide open.

I think the leadership of a company should encourage the next generation not just to follow, but to overtake. The duty of leadership is to put forward ideas, symbols, metaphors of the way it should be done, so that the next generation can work out new and better ways of doing the job. The complaint Gordon and I have is that we are not being overtaken by our staff. We would like to be able to say, "We can't keep up with you guys", but, it is not happening.

Be daring. Be first. Be different.

My argument is: keep the bloody bottom line at the bottom. That's where it should be.

I can't bear to be around people who are bland or bored or uninterested (or to employ them).

the function of wealth is not to accumulate it but to give it away as productively and responsibly as you can.

The market controls everything, but the market has no heart.

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.

I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing too.

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.

We communicate with passion and passion persuades.

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.

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.

You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message.

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.

We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.

Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.

To run this business ... you need ... optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic and fun, and that secret ingredient-euph oria.

The big question is: how do you institutionalize success and still keep that edge of craziness and wildeness?

I didn't go to business school, didn't care about financial stuff and the stock market.

The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.

The freedom that comes with globalization is freedom for the rich and powerful nations to further exploit and further marginalize those at the bottom of the social ladder.

I believe that conventional marketing techniques are increasingly ineffective. Customers are hyped out. They have been overmarketed. They are becoming more cynical about the whole advertising and marketing process.

The bigger you grow, the more intimate communication has to be. It almost has to be belly and belly. As you get bigger and bigger in an organization, everything gets more and more detached and everything is on email or voicemail. That's the worse thing because lack of intimacy is one of the downsides (of growth).

The beauty and the fashion industry want to control you. And the way that they do it through your body. So once they control your body they control your purse and the products you buy. Its a fantastic strategy and it's working.

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.

I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses and made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently . . . This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

Be courageous. It's one of the only places left uncrowded.

We should be evolving into a new age of business with a worldview that maintains one simple proposition - that all of nature: humans, animals, earth, are interconnected and interdependent.

The trouble with the new world we have watched being created over the past decade is that it sees no further than money. People have always been obsessed with money, of course - greed is as old as history. But when the institutions that govern all our lives forget there was ever anything else, then it gets dangerous.

Every time you buy something consider it a vote of confidence in the company that produced it.

There has been a real influence on young people, whose travel is experiential. For them, their values change when their experiences change; travel is like a university without walls.

Make heroes out of the employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.

Quite apart from anything else, my experience is trying to change things for the better makes you feel better, healthier. Humans are communicative animals: when you do good in a community, the benefits eventually get back to you.

If you pretend that business is beyond morality, that's the kind of morality you get.

We are honest about our methods and our mistakes. We are not perfect - it isn't possible to be perfect - but we are trying to go in the right direction and in those circumstances, it's best not to mystify what we are trying to do.

The end result of kindness is that it draws people to you.

Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.

Economic globalization creates wealth, but only for the elite who benefit from the surge of consolidations, mergers, global scale technology, and financial activity.

Women are networkers, women hate hierarchy and especially entrepreneurs hate hierarchy because when they see hierarchy structured in they see rules and regulations are commonplace, and they want to tear it down.

Get informed. Get outraged. Get inspired. Get active.

By creating conversation, we let our customers spread our message by word of mouth.

You can't change t he wor ld f rom t he rear view mir ror.

Mess with nature and it will mess right back.

There are no rules or formulas for success. You just have to live it and do it. knowing this gives us enormous freedom to experiment toward what we want. Believe me, it's a crazy, complicated journey. It's trial and error. It's opportunism. It's quite literally, "Let's try lots of this stuff and see how it works."

I have always found that my view of success has been iconoclastic: success to me is not about money or status or fame, its about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.

Advertising beauty products is easy. All you have to do is revile your customers by creating a disease called getting older, and then provide a remedy which does not work.

A Sense Of Outrage Is Essential For The Entrepreneurial Spirit. I Think Discontentment Drives You To Want To Do Something About It. And My Outrage Came Very Early On.

Ninety-nine per cent of what we say is about values. I firmly believe that ethical capitalism is the best way of changing society for the better.

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.

I'd have opened a bloody library if I'd wanted to be quiet.

I think that business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by "feminine" pinciples, qualities like love, care, and intuition.

A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force. I love it.

If I had to choose my driving force, it would be passion.

People I work with are open to leadership that has a vision, but this vision has to be communicated clearly and persuasively, and always, always with passion.

The aging process is fascinating because it doesn't disturb me, because this is what it is supposed to be like. But I'll tell you what does - it's the lack of strength - you can't hold up suitcases and do it yourself. Loss of physical strength.

Entrepreneurs are visionaries - they see things other people don't see.

You educate people, especially young people, by stirring their passions, so you take every opportunity to grab the imagination of your employees, you get them to feel they are doing something important, that they are not a lone voice, that they are the most powerful and potent people on the planet.

We can't have self-government without the self-confidence that is at the root of it.

If you've got a partner that's supportive and you're doing something you enjoy it doesn't ever become a job or a burden. Its about community, new friendships, support mechanism.

One of the most intriguing things in management and in business is the role of storytelling - people need the anecdotes to do the work that they do.

I don't want to be defined by being the founder of the Body Shop, and I don't want to be defined as a woman suffering from Hepatitis C. There's more to my life than that.

When you take the high moral road it is difficult for anyone to object without sounding like a complete fool.

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.

We are essentially outsiders and that is the best definition of an entrepreneur I have ever come across.

If you don't believe one person can make a difference, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.

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.

Women want to be free to choose from the same range of options that men take for granted. In our quest for equal pay, equal access to education and opportunities, we have made great strides. But until women can move freely and think freely in their homes, on the streets, in the workplace without the fear of violence, there can be no real freedom.

To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality.

I'm an activist and I come from a very socialist background. For me, my thinking was formed by great thought leaders. And wealth preserving wasn't part of my thinking.

There are 3 billion women in the world who don't look like supermodels and only 8 that do.

To me the desire to create and to have control over your own life, irrespective of the politics of the time or social structures, has always been a part of the human spirit. What I did not fully realize was that work could open the doors to my heart.

The next time you go shopping, demand more change.

Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea and the resources to make it happen.

I don't want our success to be measured only by financial yardsticks, or by our distribution or number of shops. What I want to be celebrated for - and it's going to be tough in a business environment - is how good we are to our employees and how we benefit our community. It's a different bottom line.

People don't want simply to buy the product, they want to have sympathy with the company too.

Retiring isn't even a word I'd understand. Taking what makes you feel alive, and everyone's looking for ways of making them feel alive, in whatever they do - relationships, business or work - and not just being a voice for a money making business.

Tap the energy of the anarchist and he will be the one to push your company ahead.

we can wake up one morning and find that the technology of this virtual, inter-connected world wasn't the liberating force we thought, but binds us ever more tightly under the control of the money men.

You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message. What I have learned is that people become motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.

I don't think I'm a risk-taker. I don't think any entrepreneur is. I think that's one of those myths of commerce. The new entrepreneur is more values-led: you do what looks risky to other people because that's what your convictions tell you to do. Other companies would say I'm taking risks, but that's my path - it doesn't feel like risk to me.

Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you're in love with the anarchist.

if companies are in business solely to make money, no consumer can fully trust what they do or say.

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.

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.

Speed, agility and responsiveness are the keys to future success.

Women are storytellers, they are communicators. They'll go and sit around a table and talk about their first date, their first smoke, their first lipstick, whatever it is. Those rituals of life, marriages and death aren't part of the language of men.

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.

We were most creative when our back was against the wall.

The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed

Whatever you do, be different. If you're different, you will stand out.

the leaders of globalization ... have tied themselves to a single measurement by which they judge success and failure ... They only measure money and the bottom line.

There are only two ways of making money: the hard way and the very hard way!

Communication is the key for any global business.

My passionate belief is that business can be fun, it can be conducted with love and a powerful force for good.

You've got to be hungry - for ideas, to make things happen and to see your vision made into reality

If I had to name a driving force in my life, I would name PASSION every time

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.

I hope to leave my children a sense of empathy and pity and a will to right social wrongs

Never feel too small or powerless to make a difference.

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.

Entrepreneurs are all a little crazy. There is a fine line between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. An entrepreneur's dream is often a kind of madness, and it is almost as isolating. What differentiates the entrepreneur from the crazy person is that the former gets other people to believe in his vision.

If you really didn't ever want to get wrinkles, then you should have stopped smiling years ago!

My mother's bottom line was truth to her values. It meant bringing your heart and your humanity to work.

Be special. Be anything but mediocre.

The growth of The Body Shop is testimony to the fact that you don't need to waste money on costly advertising campaigns to be successful. Instead, we've always relied on word of mouth and stories.

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 can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?

I run my company according to feminine principles, principles of caring, making intuitive decisions, not getting hung up on hierarchy or all those dreadfully boring business-school management ideas; having a sense of work as being part of your life, not separate from it; putting your labor where your love is; being responsible to the world in how you use your profits; recognizing the bottom line should stay at the bottom.

business itself is now the most powerful force for change in the world today, richer and faster by far than most governments. And what is it doing with this power? It is using free trade, the most powerful weapon at its disposal, to tighten its grip on the globe.

Over the past decades...while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual', I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda.

Never be seduced into believing it isn't the role of business to tackle the big issues, because it absolutely is.

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking

Being good is good business

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.