The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership Read Online Free PDF Page A

you’d been watching TV we wouldn’t just have enjoyed that interesting discussion.’
    And, while I may not have appreciated it at the time, as usual, my mother was absolutely correct. Although I may have been denied access to the small screen, I did get to watch my fair share of stuff on the big screen where I was (and still am) a big fan of Westerns, especially those starring the late great John Wayne. Despite all the memorable visual moments in Wayne’s films it was one line that has stuck with me from the movie Big Jake : ‘ You’re short on ears and long on mouth.’ Even without the classic John Wayne drawl, it is such a great way to describe one of the most common human failings – listening too little and talking too much – that I have been borrowing it ever since.
    L-I-S-T-E-N
    One thing I do remember from an English class at school was when a teacher pointed out that if you want to play anagrams with the above letters they also form the word SILENT. As an ardent Scrabble fan and being a little more tuned in than usual that day, I recall precociously pointing out that the letters could also spell ENLIST. This led to a class discussion, which has clearly stuck with me: if more of us could ‘enlist’ the art of remaining ‘silent’ in order to ‘listen’ we would, in one fell swoop, dramatically improve our ability to learn and get a lot more out of our time at school.
    Maybe the class discussion was too little too late for me as within a year or so of that English class I had left Stowe in order to launch Student , my own magazine, and soon found myself putting that teacher’s words into practice. I remember as if it were yesterday, interviewing novelist John le Carré whose 1963 breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold was an instant bestseller. I was as nervous as a kitten as I frantically scribbled down notes on his responses to my carefully prepared list of questions. I often carried a big old reel-to-reel Grundig tape recorder, although it was more to give me the appearance of being a professional than anything else as half the time it never worked. That was when I took up what was to become a lifetime habit: I began capturing my thoughts, observations and just about anything of interest that someone said or did in my hard-backed lined notebooks.
    In the forty-odd years that I have been in business – wow, just writing that makes me suddenly feel ancient – those now hundreds of notebooks have served me incredibly well. And I am not talking about just their day-to-day aide-memoire uses, but in four major lawsuits with British Airways, G-Tech, T-Mobile and most recently with our run-in with the UK Department for Transport on the West Coast train franchise renewal. Listening is a wonderful skill, but given that the average human brain tends to store a very small percentage of what, at the time, may seem like insignificant statements and ideas, those books fill in a lot of what otherwise would be blank spaces in my memory bank. Acquiring the habit of note-taking is therefore a wonderfully complementary skill to that of listening. Please write this down right now so you don’t forget it!
    Unfortunately, as leadership skills go, listening gets a bit of a ‘bum rap’ – that may also have been a John Wayne line. It’s such a seemingly passive thing that many people misguidedly see it as almost a sign of weakness – as in ‘Did you notice Harry hardly said a word in the meeting, I wonder what his problem is?’ Such a viewpoint is almost certainly fuelled by the historical association between great leaders and great orators being powerful people. Ask a Brit of my generation whom they would consider to be history’s greatest leader and like me they’d probably name wartime prime minister Sir Winston Churchill. Ask for a speech and they’d almost certainly reference his 1940 ‘this was their finest hour’ broadcast. Had I grown up in the US, the chances are that I would probably