Free The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership by Richard Branson Page A

successful companies, but even there I’ve always found a transition at the top is a perfect opportunity to get a fresh perspective on where the company is going (or not) and if necessary then a little shake, rattle and roll never did anyone any harm.
    Clearly when considering candidates for leadership positions their resumes/CVs have to come into play, but they really should be judged equally on their vision for the future as on what they’ve achieved in the past. If a company is to move forward, hiring clones of the previous incumbent will rarely generate much in the way of positive change. No matter how good the previous person in the job might have been there is always room for improvement so my favourite question with internal applicants has always been, ‘So if you get the job, what are the first things you are going to change around here and why?’ Much as we like to hire from inside at Virgin I have no aversion to bringing in new blood from the outside – a pair of fresh eyes (and ears) can often see latent opportunities that long-term employees have simply come to accept as the norm.
    THE INSIDE ON THE OUTSIDE
    As it happens, over the last few years we have put new CEOs in charge of our two biggest airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia, and in both cases I believe we may have surprised a few people by replacing the long-term incumbents with senior executives from two major legacy airlines.
    In Australia we most certainly shook the industry a little by hiring John Borghetti to take over from the airline’s outgoing founder Brett Godfrey. As a thirty-six-year veteran of Qantas, Australia’s dominant carrier, John had quite literally started in the mailroom and worked his way up to the second highest position in the company. When he came to us he was more than a little bit bummed because he had just been passed over for the top job there. In my opinion this was a huge mistake on Qantas’s part, but we remain eternally grateful to them for letting someone like John escape their clutches. So much so, in fact, that after we’d had John on board for a couple of months I was sorely tempted to send Qantas’s chairman a ‘thank you for the wonderful gift’ note, but managed to resist the urge.
    My first meeting with John to discuss the possibilities of joining us was in Singapore after the F1 Grand Prix and I have to confess I was incredibly impressed. I’d been extremely doubtful that a career (thirty-six years is a long time in any one place) big airline guy could ever be a good fit at our somewhat funky little Australian operation but he proved that I was way off the mark. John came totally prepared with strategies for everything he thought needed to be done to take Virgin to new heights and was clearly our man. While all the dating books say you should never get into a relationship with anyone who’s on the rebound from a failed marriage, I felt there was a lot more than a revenge motive in John. Yes, he was angry, and justifiably so, that he hadn’t been offered the top job at Qantas after spending his entire career there, but it was as if he was desperately seeking an outlet for all the things he hadn’t been able to get done while at his former employer. When I asked him why he had not put a particularly smart initiative he’d suggested in place while he was at Qantas, he simply replied, ‘Because I wasn’t the CEO and didn’t have the board’s support. Here I already get the feeling that’s not going to be a problem.’
    Suffice it to say that if we had a cloning machine and the ability to replicate our best and brightest Virgin leaders, John would be one of the first ones we pushed in there. He is a highly strategic thinker and yet he also has outstanding people skills, which is a must-have for any CEO in a Virgin company. One big bonus, of course, is that he certainly knows how to read the mind of our biggest competitor in Australia – on a couple of occasions I have been convinced that