Anita Roddick and The Body Shop
Anita Roddick was a renowned model of a responsible leader. She founded The Body Shop in 1976 on the basis that women deserved to be told the truth about the beauty products and on the basis that said products should promote heath and wellbeing (Roddick, 9).
Since the beginning, The Body Shop has shinned in the field of ethical business practice and values-based leadership. "We believe business can be both profitable and responsible," is the values credo posted on the company's website. With a tagline of "Made with Passion," the site further engages the viewer in the company's five current campaigns: against animal testing, support community trade, activate self esteem, defend human rights, and protect our planet.
Promoting responsible business and consumerism in a time when "the bottom line" was the dominant ideology put Roddick at the forefront of a "radical" movement. She says, "The Body Shop was one [business] swimming against the tide of institutionalized self-interest," (Roddick, 240). Roddick may be labeled as a progressive among the haves in O'Toole's Dramatis Personae of Change that he describes in his book, Leading Change, Overcoming the Ideology of Comfort and the Tyranny of Custom.
Just as O'Toole describes, Roddick was condemned by her colleagues in business, accusing her social responsibility over the bottom line as simply a marketing tool. "I was viewed with suspicion because I was always rabbiting about values and altruism and social responsibility and doing things differently" (Roddick, 241). Roddick herself complained of being ignored.
Critics of Roddick had a heyday when, in 2006, Roddick sold The Body Shop to L'Oreal for $1.3 billion. She was accused of selling out to big business with few values, especially since Nestle, a company known for its less-than-ethical business practices owns more than a quarter of L'Oreal (Mathison, 2006).
But Roddick saw the sale as a way to create change in the industry from the inside. In a blog on her website, Roddick writes, "Instead of the dinosaurs in pin-stripes determining our future, we will be entering into a partnership where we will be teaching L'Oreal how to introduce community trade throughout their business... I do not believe that L’Oreal will compromise the ethics of The Body Shop. That is after all what they are paying for and they are too intelligent to mess with our DNA. "
Was Roddick really a sell out? Was she right to attempt to change the industry from the inside by selling her values to L'Oreal? Responsible consumerism is a hot topic these days and environmentalism has developed into a major political movement, just as Roddick predicted it would (Roddick, 242).
O'Toole writes that "the ideas of progressives may become incorporated subtly into the revised prevailing ideology." Is Roddick's progressive ideology being incorporated? Are the "haves" who stoutly resisted Roddick's ideology starting to accept it?
Have we started seeing more corporate responsibility toward social justice and the environment because current leaders believe in value-based leadership or are they simply answering to the demands of consumers? Does responsible, values-based leadership simply sell more product? How do we ensure that responsible leadership is sustained?
Incidentally, I read a review of O'Toole's book that said O'Toole rejected Roddick's leadership style as a thing of the past. I would like to know why. I could not get my hands on a copy of the book to see for myself what O'Toole refers to. If anyone could shed some light on this, I would appreciate it.
RESOURCES: Roddick, Anita (1991) Body and Soul: Profits with Principles--the Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick & The Body Shop. New York: Crown Publishers.
O'Toole, J (1995) Leading Change: Overcoming the Ideology of Comfort and the Tyranny of Custom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Mathiason, Nick "Body Shop ethics bite back." The Guardian, Apr. 9, 2006. (www.guardian.co.uk/business/2006/apr/09/retail.theobserver)
Comments
Kristi,
I very much enjoyed your piece but I have to say, being somewhat skeptical, that I believe she was one of a very few with truly genuine intentions and actions with regard to consumerism. I'm one of those who believes that corporations do what needs to be done to make money - responding to changes in the purchasing practices of their consumers keeps them in business. I think very few of them do it out of concern for the environment, animals, or human rights concerns.
Sarah Waldemar
Posted by: Sarah Waldemar | February 24, 2008 09:53 PM
Thank you Sarah. I too was concerned when hearing about the Body Shop sale to L’Oreal. I appreciate your digging to find a defense in Roddick's favor. I have heard her success compared to that of Horst's Aveda sale to Este Lauder. The profit made from Aveda sales were used as seed money for Horst's pet projects that promoted environmental and sustainable business practices. I would like to believe that the legacy of Anita Roddick, particularly the material gains from cleverly living one's passion would continue to fertilize and span new movements that perpetuate her idealism.
As a tribute to her life, mentioning her surprising deteriorating health in 2007 and her untimely death is important. I am sure her family is reeling with the loss and struggling with the vacuum created by her absence. I want to believe that Roddick's will, motivation, and mission on earth will not die out or fade away because she no longer is with us. Somehow, in a strange phenomenon when great lights are taken early or "before their time", it seems that on a spiritual level, these magnificent souls understand that they are less encumbered by the constraints of our three dimensional reality and pass on to unlimited realms in which to work their continued magic from the other side. I find it quite comforting to accept the plausibility of ancestors intervening in the destiny of men.
If that were true, then one could imagine Anita Roddick taking on the cause with a new set of paradigms and freedoms that weren't available to her before. What a concept, to adopt the idea that maybe humanity is not alone in our struggle to make sense out of the mess humanity finds its self in? How might that change things if we would embrace help and receive direction from the other side? Indigenous cultures have been using tried and tested techniques for centuries. Wouldn't that make an interesting course read, Leadership for the 21st Century; the greats from beyond speak. A channeled perspective from Roddick, Einstein, Princess Diana.
(Ok, so I have a colorful imagination not limited by dogma.) What would they say?
That type of thinking has worked to renew the hearts of Evangelicals in the WWJD 'What Would Jesus Do?' campaign. Maybe, a shtick for embracing a progressive radical leadership change model, would be encouraging followers to wear wrist bands reminding us, 'What would Anita Do'? Might be as effective as other propaganda in amplifying leadership ideals of an impressive body of work. Thinking outside the box, Diana Turner
Posted by: Diana Turner | February 25, 2008 02:33 PM
My comments go both to Nan's and Kristi's reflections.
I also enjoyed the notion in K & P of good leaders as enzymes that can act to increase positive change but have the ability to not get so caught up in change as to lose site of the intent and direction. I really admire Roddick's ability to lead changes that were totally outside of the norm of the time. I kept thinking back to one of the main questions in this class: What does make a truly great leader? Roddick's statement about her childhood: "We didn't know about additives" and "no fast snacks", brought me back to the Hillman reading. Not just the "calling" that people feel, but the opportunity to be attune to your "calling." Roddick was born being attune to her calling. Life, while perhaps not simpler when Roddick was growing up, did have less "additives" or "fast snacks" to distract from being attune to your calling.
In a world of distractors, from the hormone-filled foods we consume to the perpetual attention demand of our cell phones, etc. How does anyone have the time or attention span to be attune to and nurture their calling? People are now born in to a world where the frequency of these distractors is not only common place, but is growing. When do people have time to just sit, listen, be, and dream? With all of these distractors becoming indoctrinated into our lives at such an early age, how do people have a chance in their lifetime to realize the chaos they cause and shut them out enough to become attune to their calling?
I belive that to be a truly great leader, you must be attune to and acting on your calling. I fear that we are losing the ability to become attune to our calling due to the growing number of "additives" or distractors in our life. If that's true, then we are losing an enormous potential in leadership lost within future generations.
Sorry for the pessimist outlook, it may just be the week I'm in! Catch me on another day, I probably have a different view.
Nick Deffley
Posted by: Nick Deffley | February 26, 2008 05:45 PM