Audiobook Review: The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership

I have completed listening to The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson (2014). It is entertaining and rich with leadership and quality customer service lessons. Don't micromanage. PowerPoint culture is boring, ineffective and completely out of hand. Strive to be excellent and atypical. Say what you mean and mean what you say. Get out and kick the tires. Look at your business from the perspective of customers and competitors. Everything can always be improved on.  Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. The harder I practice the luckier I get. One size will never fit all. Hiring the right people is a skill and the most important part of my job. The concept of being over-qualified is nonsensical. It all comes down to attitude and desire. Hire for attitude and train for skill. Provide excellent and plentiful customer service by real people. Profit is a bi-product of good customer-service. If you don't have passion for what you're doing you shouldn't be in a leadership role. Fun is infectious and good for business. Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Nurture your people or someone else will soon be stealing your lunch. In Part IV: New Skills for a New World, Branson champions entrepreneurship and states that it should be nurtured at a young age. He charges the education system with being myopic and detrimental to maximizing one's full potential. Teachers teach what they know and it isn't entrepreneurship. Government and companies should encourage and support entrepreneurship. (I am taken back to my 16 year career with the YMCA, championing entrepreneurship and intrapreneurship.) Very successful people often had the help of a mentor. Lead from the front. Collaboration is essential to success. Face-to-face communication is essential for building trust. Silos are for grain. Tear down the walls. Informal collaboration is key to creativity. Branson quotes Steve Jobs: "Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings from random discussions. You run into someone. You ask what they're doing. You say WOW and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas!" Branson's Afterword: Follow your dreams and just do it. Make a positive difference and do some good. Believe in your ideas and be the best. Have fun and look after your team. Don't give up. Listen, take lots of notes and keep setting new challenges. Delegate and spend more time with your family. Turn off your laptop and iPhone and get your derriere out there. Communicate, collaborate and communicate some more. Do what you love and have a couch in the kitchen.  The Virgin Way entertains and educates from beginning to end. 11.5 hours of listening