Anita Roddick Quotes & Sayings

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

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

The market controls everything, but the market has no heart. — Anita Roddick

The word love is never mentioned in big business. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

The next time you go shopping, demand more change. — Anita Roddick

If trade undermines life, narrows it or impoverishes it, then it can destroy the world. If it enhances life, then it can better the world. — Anita Roddick

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

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. — Anita Roddick

Communication is the key for any global business. — Anita Roddick

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

A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school. — Anita Roddick

The most exciting thing happening in business is the rise of vigilante consumers. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness - you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun. — Anita Roddick

I traveled enormously during the 1960's, when you measured everything by where you traveled and what you did as travelers. — Anita Roddick

If civilization is going to survive, business and policy-makers must move on, to find within themselves more developed emotions than fear or greed. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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." — Anita Roddick

Traditionally, the role of the individual was to conform to the organization. In the future the organization will have to conform to the needs of the individual. — Anita Roddick

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

Corporate crime kills far more people and costs taxpayers far more money than street crime. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

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. — Anita Roddick

Why should how I act in my workplace be any different from how I interact with my family at home? It's making sure the company runs on feminine principles where the major ethic is care. — Anita Roddick

How can you ennoble the spirit when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream? — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

Entrepreneurs are outsiders by nature - outsiders with a work ethic. — Anita Roddick

With fewer and fewer corporations controlling more and more of the world's trade, there is an ever greater need to know more about the practices of these large faceless organizations. — Anita Roddick

Internationalism means that we can see into the dark corners of the world, and hold those companies to account when they are devastating forests or employing children as bonded labour. Globalization is the complete opposite, its rules pit country against country and workers against workers in the blinkered pursuit of international competitiveness. — Anita Roddick

The most powerful bodies in the world, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, are also the least democratic and inclusive. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

A social conscience is not incompatible with profit. — Anita Roddick

It's frustrating sometimes to see the mismatch in resources between the pointless and the urgent, isn't it. Like the gap between the vast resources poured into military technological research to make war more sophisticated, and the trickle that goes into developing techniques that might prevent war instead. — Anita Roddick

The predominant idea behind globalization, in its most virulent form, is an unpleasant kind of social Darwinism - that the world is for winners not losers, that only the successful count, that money is considerably more important than votes. — Anita Roddick

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

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

It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here! — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

Being good is good business — Anita Roddick

I think progress is a sort of comfortable disease, and we've got a media that says entertainment and celebrity, which isn't bad in itself but it stops the real issues coming forward. — Anita Roddick

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

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. — Anita Roddick

Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking. — Anita Roddick

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

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. — Anita Roddick

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

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

When your back is against the wall financially, creative juices flow. — Anita Roddick

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

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

Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

Let me tell you how the French seduce you. They are the most bloody seductive people on Earth. They are charming, they are well-mannered and they praise and flatter you. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

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

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

Values carry the message of shared purposes, standards and conceptions of what is worth living for and what is worth striving for. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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

There are a lot of dark sides to success, but the light side of it is the ability to be opportunistic, and to be able to do things. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

Over the past decade ... 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. — Anita Roddick

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

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

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

The function of wealth is not to accumulate it but to give it away as productively and responsibly as you can. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

I think it's just fear of death. I can't bear to go to sleep. There's very little, you know, between an entrepreneur and a crazy person. — Anita Roddick

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

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. — Anita Roddick

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

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

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. — Anita Roddick

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). — Anita Roddick

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

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

The movement for the environment really only started in the mid 1970's. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick

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. — Anita Roddick