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

House tapes deal – but shut him down by saying, ‘Yes, I do record a lot conversations but with a pen and a notebook!’
    I suspect that over the years ‘Richard’s thing about taking notes’ has become legend around the Virgin family of companies as I always detect a much higher percentage of note-takers at internal meetings than with outside parties. For example, I recently had a day-long series of meetings on Necker with a group of about twenty senior people and I couldn’t help but observe that our own people seemed to be the only ones taking any serious notes. I don’t know if the senior executives present were accustomed to having an assistant to take the minutes, or if they somehow felt it was beneath them to take notes – or maybe they all felt they had photographic memories – but I was distinctly unimpressed. One of the outside executives did peck away at his iPad on a regular basis, but based on the semi-furtive way he went about doing it, rather than taking notes I suspected he was responding to emails or playing Words With Friends.
    Call me old-fashioned if you will, but the all-too-common practice of texting or emailing under the boardroom table in the middle of a meeting is something that I find extremely irritating and downright disrespectful to everyone else in the room. I am not a big fan of lengthy meetings at the best of times, but is it really asking too much to have someone’s undivided attention for an hour without them having to constantly demonstrate their self-perceived indispensability by electronically tuning out every few minutes? I think not.
    Since my children were little, I have always kept notes on the funny things that they have said over the years. I always suspected these would come in handy some day and when twice in the last couple of years I’ve had to prepare speeches for their weddings it turned out I was correct. One of the best ones came from a five- or six-year-old Holly when she triumphantly announced, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I know what sex is! And you and Mummy have done it twice.’ Another time, Holly hysterically expressed her frustration at something by loudly proclaiming, ‘I don’t know what I want, I don’t know what I want, but I want it.’
    But back to the business world and another story I like to cite as to the benefits of listening combined with note-taking that goes back to a speech I delivered in Greece about twenty years ago – I honestly can’t remember what the occasion was other than the fact we did have some short-lived airline activities in the country. In any case, I couldn’t help but notice one very bright young man in the audience who kept asking me excellent, mostly aviation-related and clearly very well-prepared questions. In fact, over the course of the day he must have asked about 50 per cent of all the questions and 90 per cent of the really good ones! Not only did he ask good questions, but he listened intently to my responses and wasn’t afraid to zing me back with a tough follow-up when my response fell short of fully addressing his question. He was clearly an excellent listener and given my ‘thing’ about it, I was equally impressed by his ferocious note-taking. At the end of the day I asked one of the organisers if they happened to know the name of the young man who had so dominated the Q&A sessions – I had it in my mind that maybe he was someone who could work for us some day. Their response was one of, ‘Oh yes, we most certainly know him!’ and they proceeded to tell me that Stelios Haji-Ioannou was the scion of a wealthy Cypriot shipping family, and clearly not someone who was looking for a job. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before his name was all over the news in the UK as the founder of easyJet, a low-cost European airline that would go on to be a huge success: in fact I believe that, by passengers carried, they are now the largest UK-based airline. I like to use this story as a light-hearted example of the incredible