entrepreneurship as survival

Maximum Creativity

January 31, 2013 Leave a comment

“We were most creative when our back was against the wall.”-Anita Roddick

Anita started the Body Shop to make the 300 Pounds per week she needed to support herself and her two children.The early days of the business was plainly about survival.In fact her survival instinct led to many of the innovations that would later become company trademarks.

For instance, favouring recycling came from Anita’s inability to afford more than 700 empty bottles.

When she began,Anita had only a few products.So she decided to have five sizes of everything.That way when a person entered the small 370 square foot shop, this give the illusion that the store carried over 120 products.

The green paint which is the trademark of her stores was chosen because it was the only colour that would hide the mould on all the damp patches on her shop walls.

Filed under Entrepreneurship, Tool Kit Tagged with Anita Roddick Quote, Body Shop, creativity to survive, entrepreneurship as survival, postaday, recycling

Anita On MBAs In Entrepreneurship

January 31, 2013 2 Comments

wealthymatters.com “I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship – even by hallowed institutions like Harvard and Stanford – but I’m not all convinced it is a subject you can teach.How do you teach obsession, because more often than not it’s obsessions that drives an entrepreneur’s vision? Why would you march to a different drumbeat if you are instinctively part of the crowd?

If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management. There is a sort of terrorism that comes with the operations and the science of making money, but by not knowing any of that, I had an amazing freedom.In the business school model, entrepreneurs are most at home with a balance sheet, a cash-flow forecast and a business plan. They dream of profit forecasts and the day they can take the company public. You certainly must be able to wield these weapons. But these are just part of the toolbox of re-imagining the world. They are not the basic defining characteristic of entrepreneurship. Read more of this post