A Different Kind of Business Leader

Love her or hate her, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick had an outsized effect on how many companies conduct business and on how many consumers view corporate power.

Much of her impact came from her way with an epigram. In person, on television, and in her many books—including her last, Business As Unusual: My Entrepreneurial Journey, Profits With Principles—she was a master of distilling her business philosophy to a pithy, memorable sound bite.

That sometimes came back to bite her, as critics scolded her for not living up to her well- and often-expressed business values. A decade ago, for example, one group asserted that so-called "fair trade" ingredients, a pillar of Roddick's "Trade Not Aid" philosophy, accounted for a tiny fraction of Body Shop's sales.

Before that, the German government sued Body Shop's subsidiary there for misleading advertising, leading the company to abandon labels claiming "not tested on animals" for labels that simply stated "against animal testing."

Roddick personally came in for criticism after appearing to cozy up to big corporations like American Express, for which she appeared in a television commercial, and L'Oreal, the French cosmetics giant that bought Body Shop last year.

Still, she provided a veritable Poor Richard's Almanac of aphorisms about the importance of thinking outside the balance sheet.

"If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?"

"Wealth has never worried me, greed worries me."

"I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently ... This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten."

"All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good."

"I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in."

"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."

"If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just."

"To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality."

"Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice."

"If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito."

"There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it."

"While many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda."

"The market controls everything, but the market has no heart."

"Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer."

"Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking."

"When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness—you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun."

Roddick died Monday in England of a brain hemorrhage. She was 64.

by Mark Stein