"This may sound like a truism," writes Richard Branson in a rare moment of self-awareness in his new book Like A Virgin: Secrets They Won't Teach You At Business School, "but it has to be said: it takes an engaged, motivated and committed workforce to deliver a first-class product or service." He's right, of course, apart from the bit about it having to be said. And, to be fair, Like A Virgin is eye-opening, though not in the sense I assume its author intended: my eyes kept widening in disbelief. One of his five "secrets to starting a business", for example, is: "Be innovative." How? By "thinking up a product [that] people really want". You have to be willing to take risks; you shouldn't dwell on regrets. To be a good leader, he observes, "you have to be a great listener" and, "like the proverbial bad apple", a bad leader can destroy a company.
So as not to spoil the whole thing, I won't reveal what Branson thinks is "the real engine of any business", nor the name of a deceased entrepreneur he greatly admires. (Oh, all right then, I will! It's "people", and Steve Jobs.) There's also an impassioned chapter arguing against the War on Drugs, which has nothing to do with anything else. The subtitle isn't misleading: I'm pretty sure they don't teach any of this stuff at business school, for several good reasons.
Yet Like A Virgin is improbably instructive, partly because it exhibits so many familiar problems with advice lit. These include "survivor bias": Branson hasn't tried to ascertain whether listening and innovating aren't also the characteristics of failed entrepreneurs, so he can't know their role in his success. Then there's the fact that we're often strangers to ourselves: there's no reason to assume that the stories he tells himself, however sincere, are the best explanation for his accomplishments.
But I'm fighting a losing battle. Entrepreneurial wisdom of the "Be innovative" variety is the perfect self-help complement to David Cameron's "strivers' Britain". The people "who want to get on in life", as the PM puts it, may not learn much from this publishing genre, but their prejudices will be pleasantly confirmed: success is a matter of individual spark, and those unable or unwilling to muster the requisite zeal have only themselves to blame.
The other criticism to which Branson is vulnerable, clearly, is that his advice is exceedingly obvious. But hold on: as Scott Berkun, who writes far more illuminatingly about innovation, points out, "It's OK to be obvious." Obvious ideas can be potent: they're frequently obvious, after all, because they've worked so well in the past. And "surprising" ideas can be awful. (One ironic implication of this is that being innovative isn't always the path to business success.) No, the biggest problem with Branson's tips isn't that they're obvious, but that they're unimplementable: "be innovative" just isn't a thing you can do. Fans of the productivity guru David Allen will be familiar with his insistence that, in the context of daily work, physical actions are the only things you can do. That's why a surprisingly powerful anti-procrastination trick is to keep rephrasing a task until it involves the use of your limbs: "Pick up phone and call…", "Open laptop and search for…" Instructions such as these are the opposite of "be innovative." Try it. And don't forget, to quote another Bransonism, to have "fun, with a capital F!"
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
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