As part of the firm’s mission to bring commercial business skills to charities, we want to engage business leaders with the fact that they have a vital role to play in solving the challenges of today’s society. To this end, we are holding a series of talks delivered by amazing leaders from the business world, so that we might inspire ‘conscious leadership’.
In April, we were thrilled to welcome respected retail entrepreneur, Julian Richer, to give the first in this series of talks.
Julian is the founder of Richer Sounds, the UK’s biggest hi-fi and home cinema equipment retailer. His style of leadership has been highly praised and he now advises heads of business such as Marks and Spencer CEO, Steve Rowe. He’s written several books the most well-known being The Richer Way and his latest book The Ethical Capitalist was launched last year to promote ethical capitalism and has already received many favourable reviews.
During the talk, Julian passed on some of his tips for successful leadership. Here are some of his thoughts:
Julian strongly believes that business leaders should be encouraged to behave ethically and that those that don’t, should be called out.
He talked about the balance between capitalism and ethics. Capitalism is based on greed and to date, it’s been easy for leaders who make more money to gain more power. He believes that employers have a duty towards their employees and society as a whole, and that the tide needs to turn against greed and towards a moral purpose.
Finally, Julian said that ethically run businesses are invariably more efficient, more motivated and more innovative than those that only care about the bottom line.
Elif Shafak writes, speaks and thinks about the difficult, big, important issues of our time and does so, to quote the New York Times, “with vision, bravery and compassion.” Elif will join us to discuss how business leaders can (and should) put moral responsibility in the community before profit and will help us to untangle the challenges and contradictions we will face as we try to build the moral purpose companies of the future.