Our Wildest Dreams: Women Entrepreneurs Making Money, Having Fun, Doing Good. - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1992 by Tom Peters

Despite the obligatory annual articles in Fortune and BusinessWeek on "women cracking the glass ceiling," Godfrey is right about women's lingering invisibility in business (and in business books, including, lamentably, my own). But that may start to change. And if it does, no one will deserve greater credit than Body Shop founder Anita Roddick. To my mind, her Body and Soul is one of the best business books written in years by an author of either sex. Personal proof: It is the single book that I choose to give young women--and men--thinking about a career in business.

Roddick, more brazenly than Godfrey, plumps for a new way of doing business. "The twin ideas of love and care touch everything we do," she writes. Roddick is a champion of passion's role in business, and fervently believes that doing good can result in doing well. Her doing good has included well-publicized campaigns aimed at saving the rain forests and working with Amnesty International. The doing well is not in question either. The first Body Shop opened in 1976 (the first day's take from the Kensington Garden Shop was (British lbs)130), and, in a mercilessly competitive industry, it's now grown to more than 794 shops worldwide, with an early 1992 stock market valuation of about $1 billion.

Roddick, who claims that "a great advantage I had when I started the Body Shop was that I had never been to business school," is as disparaging as Godfrey about big business:

For me there are no modem-day heroes in the business world .... I have met no captain of industry who's made my blood surge. I have met no corporate executive who values labor and who exhibits a sense of joy, magic or theater .... In the 15 years I have been involved in the world of business it has taught me nothing. There is so much ignorance in top management and boards of directors: All the big companies seem to be led by accountants and lawyers and become moribund carbon-copy versions of each other. If there is excitement and adventure in their lives, it is contained in the figures on the profit and loss sheet. What an indictment ! She's clear about what she's about, subscribing to a "loosely structured, collaborative, imaginative, and improvisatory management style, rather than doing things by the book." She adds that, "For us the business of business is to keep the company alive and breathlessly excited, to protect the workforce, to be a force for good in our society and, then, after all that, to think of the speculators .... If companies are in business solely to make money, you can't 'fully trust whatever else they do or say .... The whole sense of fun is lost, the whole sense of play, of derring-do, of 'Oh God we screwed that one up.'"

Godfrey devotes a whole chapter to fun and play ("Fun is not frivolous; it is essential, play is imperative"). How else, she asks, do you engender creativity and adaptability? Roddick would doubtless applaud. Her barebones principles of doing business:

First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labor is [an acknowledged steal from Ralph Waldo Emerson].