In Memoriam: TheBusiness World Remembers The Body Shop's Anita Roddick
Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, died suddenly Monday, September 10,2007 of a brain hemmorage.Writing in the FC Expert Blog Valerie Maltoni reminds us that Anita Roddick, didn't just sell innovative cosmetics, she changed the way businesses thought of their customers.
She anticipated the values of her customers, super served them and never wavered. Her success followed naturally.
The Body Shop has been defining the customer experience by telling a different story – one of vision, responsibility, and care. By doing that, they have turned an idea into reality; people and customers come first. Here's to the hope that The New Academy of Business, a masters degree course at Bath University, which she helped launch in 1997 with the aim of reforming business education for the new century will contribute to carrying on those ideals.
Writing in her personal blog, Conversation Agent, Maltoni shared some of Roddick's thoughts on becoming an entrepreneur. This is what Roddick believed.
- The vision of something new and belief in it that's so strong that it becomes a reality.
- A touch of craziness.
- The ability to stand out of the crowd because entrepreneurs act instinctively on what they see, think and feel. And remember there is always truth in reactions.
- The ability to have ideas constantly bubbling and pushing up inside until they are forced out, like genies from the bottle, by the pressure of creative tension.
- Pathological optimism.
- A covert understanding that you don't have to know how to do something. Skill or money is not the answer for the entrepreneur, it is knowledge: from books, observing or asking.
- Streetwise skills. Most entrepreneurs she met have had an innate desire for social change. They understand that business is not just financial science.
- Creativity.
- The ability to mix all these together effectively.
- And finally, every entrepreneur is a great storyteller. It is storytelling that defines your differences.
Liz Fuller, writing in More Than WE Know says that Roddick was one of her role models.
Anita was one of the orignators of the idea of doing business to do good. Ecological principles were a foundation of her business with its philosophy of re-use, re-fill and re-cycle. Later, she expanded her social activisim to include human rights, animal rights and sustainable environmental practices. Anita traveled the world to gain inspiration and to give assistance. She was an author, a speaker, a teacher, and an activist. She was an example for Women Entrepreneurs everywhere who want to achieve success and help the world to be a better place.
From chinese bood, irish heart,
Promoting and engaging in Fair Trade and eco-friendly business practices may not have been the first order of business for Anita Roddick and The Body Shop, but hell, they've done much more than any company in that industry.One of the first books I read on global warming and fair trade policies was produced by Dame Roddick, so I thanked her for that.She was one of the few that injected some sort of humanity and compassion into the great capitalist and globalisation machine; and no doubt spawned a new type of entrepreuneur that saw globalisation as a means to better the lives of poor people who were disconnected from the frantic world of global...
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