Customer Reviews

Business As Unusual: My Entrepreneurial Journey, Profits With Principles

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I just loved this book. With all my respect to Anita Roddick, I had never expected this book to be so insightful and challenging the conventional wisdom, before I received it into my postbox! I have enjoyed reading it very much. I still like to open a random page and read it again.

I think any entrepreneur, and especially woman entrepreneur can benefit a lot from reading this book.
- it gives a better understanding of phenomenon of The Body Shop;
- it explains how and why Anita Roddick made her way to entrepreneurial success;
- it supplies so many wonderful quotes and insights about being
an entrepreneur who makes a difference, that you just enjoy the whole book from the beginning to the end.

Fascinating book if you are interested in marketing. Anita is a genius marketer. If you have followed the controversies about the body shop, you will know about the the questions about whether she actually did any of the feel good things she liked to talk about - see [...] But there is no question that she was a world class marketer, and in this book, she spins a darn good yarn, regardless of whether what she's says is true or not. Yes, she seems like a meglomaniac and self centered, but wow, you cannot but admire her talent at selling.

She is great as an entrepeneur... read book while pursuing the home business she offered, met her at conference... hype hype... then she sold out to Loreal... big business.... contradictions... oh well

"I am not interested in business as usual. It is business as unusual that excites me", said Anita Roddick, the founder of "Body Shop". Like Prof Michael Porter, Roddick learns how "uniqueness" can be a powerful business tool, a source of "competitive advantage" and how "doing the right thing" can have many long term effects for a company, not only internally but for all its customers and suppliers. Roddick emphasises that her managers must be great "story tellers": The story behind your business and its product will set it apart. Finally, in wanting to use her business as an instrument to change the world, Roddick followed the great Quaker businessmen of the 19th century, for whom wealth was only true wealth when it benefited everyone involved. The best enterprise, this outlook holds, is a purposeful community that also happens to make money.

I first heard about Anita Roddick on NPR this spring during their memorial to her life. She sounded like someone that I could learn from as I develop my new business. I finally bought the book and read it with great interest. It is now dog-eared to mark all the pages where her experience or her philosophy fuel my vision for my business.

A great read for these fertile times in which to create businesses that honor humanity and nature to bring about times of beauty and truth.

I wanted to like this book. I was looking for memoirs of business women to help me think about my own career. However, I found the style so off-putting, I couldn't get through it. The writing was kind of scattered and self-indulgent. I was surprised that she was able to run a company if that was how she communicated.

I suspect that some people will find the style fresh, entertaining and irreverent. It just didn't work for me.