The Business of Life

Learning to Change by Sleeping with a Bug

“If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.” - Anita Roddick

One could be excused for thinking that a child of Italian immigrants, born in a bomb shelter in the middle of World War II England, would never amount to much. Considering that her parents divorced when she was nine years old and that she subsequently lost her stepfather to tuberculosis only a few years later would seem only to lengthen her odds. Yet by the time of her death in 2007 at the age of 64, Anita Roddick was hailed as a trailblazer in woman-owned businesses and a champion of ethical and environmentally-friendly business practices worldwide. The Prime Minister of England, Gordon Brown, called her an “inspiration and one of the country’s true pioneers.”

Anita Roddick was trained as a teacher but worked for the United Nations, traveling extensively in the Third World. She and her husband, Gordon, owned a hotel and a small restaurant before she founded The Body Shop in 1976, which she said was merely a way to support her two daughters while her husband was away on business in the United States. The Body Shop was one of the first cosmetics companies to prohibit the use of ingredients tested on animals, and Roddick openly promoted fair trade with third world countries. Starting with only 15 products sold from a storefront in Brighton, The Body Shop grew to over 2,000 stores selling 300 branded products by the time it was sold for £652 million to L’Oreal in 2006. It was voted the second-most trusted brand in the U.K. and the 28th-ranked brand in the world. Echoing the sentiments of many entrepreneurs before her, Roddick said in a 1993 interview with Third Way magazine that, “The Body Shop was a series of brilliant accidents… that always caused controversy. We knew about storytelling so all the products had stories. We recycled because we were running out of bottles. It wasn’t a sophisticated plan, it just happened like that.”

Additionally, Anita Roddick was a tireless advocate for the less fortunate in society. In 1990, she founded Children On The Edge in response to the horrific conditions for children in Romanian orphanages. Its mission has grown to be an advocacy for children affected by war, disease, famine and natural disasters throughout the world. Before her death of a massive brain hemorrhage, she fulfilled a promise to leave her estate to various charities on moral grounds.

If perspective is such a linchpin for the other qualities necessary for great relationships, then how can a mosquito shed any light on that? I think what Roddick meant as a takeaway is simply that everyone can make a difference. None of us is too small to impact another’s mood, viewpoint or life as a whole. How we do that is up to us.

We can energize a teenager about to embark on a college journey, or we can fill them with dire warnings, threats and remembrances of their past mistakes. A newlywed can be lifted up by our humorous reflections on marriage and family, or made to suspect their decision by our attitude toward a lifetime of serving someone else. We can educate a business colleague by having an orientation toward sharing and collaboration, or we can demand that they acquiesce to our position by pulling rank. Choices like these abound every day. Usually they are small choices that can have a big and, sometimes, lasting effect.

In my life, I hate to admit, I’ve sucked the life out of some relationships by being aloof, untrustworthy or just plain angry. I know that some friendships were destroyed because I chose to make a difference in the worst way. I needed to win at all costs, and that typically is not a recipe for success with other people. As I have aged and hopefully gained some perspective though, it seems that I get less twisted over the temporary stuff. There are fewer and fewer deal-breakers in my personal life and I’m less likely to burn a bridge than build one. It’s taken a long time, but my perspective is that so little of what we do every day needs to be in a win-lose context. I am not too small to make a difference. That’s a perspective worthy of any mosquito, although I hold out no hope of changing a bug’s life. What I am hoping to continue changing is my own commitment to making a positive difference in the lives of my family and friends.

Labels: Anita Roddick, personal relationships, perspective, The Body Shop

posted by Tom Hagerty @ 11:32 AM