Before turning to his autobiography Losing My Virginity, it is important to note that a series of unauthorized biographies of Branson has been published in past decades, including Bower’s two books Branson (2000) and Branson: Behind the Mask (2014) and Jackson’s Virgin King: Inside Richard Branson’s Business Empire (1998). What these unauthorized biographies share in common is their tendency to reveal the dark secrets behind the popular perception of Branson. These books paint a completely different picture of Branson than the one we find in Losing My Virginity (1998). Informed by Bower (2000) and Jackson (1998), Armstrong (2005: 88) argues that while Branson is widely celebrated as ‘the iconic entrepreneur of our times’, the reality behind Branson’s success is anything but admirable.
Rather than being viewed as the driver of innovation at Virgin, Armstrong (2005) claims that Branson would be better characterized as a ‘parasite’ on the creative people associated with the company. Branson’s ability to use ‘tactical empathy’ – that is, establishing trusting personal relationships that he could later exploit for his own advantage – enabled him to gain control of the company and thereby cash out the profit from what had actually been generated by a collective effort. Underneath the glamorous surface of Branson’s public image hides a story of manipulation, greed and power struggle. Branson’s public image is therefore an ideological construct – in the classical Marxian sense – that effectually distorts the actual social circumstances that have made Virgin a multinational corporation. In effect, Armstrong argues that ‘the mode of entrepreneurship outlined here [through analysing Branson], is not the Schumpeterian engine of innovation at the heart of the capitalist
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economy, but a social and economic pathology to which that economy is chronically vulnerable’ (2005: 103).
At first sight, demystification of Branson may seem like an efficient strategy for debunking the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur. But upon closer inspection, we can see that there is a major limitation to Armstrong’s critical strategy. Armstrong’s critique is derived from disclosing the gap between the popular perception of the entrepreneur as the source of value creation and the realities of Virgin’s success, implicating Branson’s character as an ‘emotional con-artist’ (2005: 102). Armstrong’s critique is to expose that Branson does not possess the qualities normally ascribed to him by the prevailing popular myth. On the contrary, he takes all the glory for initiatives that actually emerged from the collective around Virgin.
By exposing the gap between the normative ideal and the actual reality, Armstrong attempts to annihilate the Schumpeterian idea of the entrepreneur as the engine of innovation. Yet, despite this intention, this conclusion is not logically warranted. What Armstrong does show is that Branson fails to fulfil the qualities of the Schumpeterian ideal of an entrepreneur and maybe casts doubt on whether Branson should be considered an entrepreneur at all. But this does not mean that entrepreneurship as such should be seen as an ‘economic pathology to which that economy is chronically vulnerable’ (Armstrong, 2005: 103). To the contrary, Armstrong’s analysis shows that Branson may not be legitimately considered a heroic entrepreneur. But the fantasy of the heroic entrepreneur remains operative. Ultimately, the Schumpeterian idea of the entrepreneur as engine of innovation is scorned from critical scrutiny.
Therefore, instead of looking at the reality behind the fantasy of Branson, this chapter proposes to confront the fantasy itself. While
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Bower suggests in his recent biography that the ‘challenge is to discover the truth behind the mask’ of Branson (2014: xvi), this chapter wants to call into question the mask itself. To do so, the chapter will take Branson’s autobiography Losing My Virginity at face value and inquire into the fantasies that it creates. Although the stories in by Branson’s autobiography may be phantasmic narratives, they may nonetheless produce ‘real effects’ (Zizek, 2012: 69) as they circulate in popular and social media and help fuel the prevalent injunction to become entrepreneurial. Considering the biographies that have questioned Branson’s personal account, such an approach may seem unreasonable. But this is precisely the point. As De Cock and Böhm argue, a ‘Zizekian reading of popular management discourse would by definition be “unreasonable”; it would fully assume the tenets of the discourse and push these to the point of their absurdity’ (Cock and Böhm, 2007: 828).
Instead of demystifying the phantasmic narratives that we regularly encounter in social media with the intention to ‘liberate us from the hold of idiosyncratic fantasies and enable us to confront reality the way it is’, Zizek (2012: 689) proposes the opposite strategy: To fully equate the fantasy with reality and then spell out all the radical implications that follow. This critical strategy is what Zizek calls ‘traversing the fantasy’ which basically ‘means, paradoxically, to fully identify oneself with the fantasy—with the fantasy which structures the excess that resists our immersion in daily reality’ (2012: 689). The point of undertaking such a reading is to confront the fantasy as such rather than eschewing it.
In broad strokes, Branson’s autobiography tells the story of how he managed to transform a student magazine into a global business empire while simultaneously engaging in various attempts to break records, such as flying a hot air balloon across the Pacific or reclaiming the blue ribbon for fastest ferry across the Atlantic. While being a businessman and doing
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extreme sports may seem vastly different, for Branson, these activities actually followed the same logic, since they posed challenges he felt deeply motivated to overcome. The book, which is structured chronologically oscillated between telling anecdotes about how he managed to turn Virgin from a mail order service to a global company and reporting the details of his extravagant lifestyle, hanging out with celebrities, vacationaing at his private island in the Caribbean, speed boating and flying hot-air balloons.
In what follows, we will focus on two anecdotes from the book. The first tells about Branson’s childhood memory of learning to swim while the second is about a tax scam that he orchestrated to save Virgin at an early stage of its development. These stories have been chosen because they illustrate the ‘drama of subjectivity’ (Johnsen and Gudmand-Høyer, 2010: 340) played out in the book. Although the book is an autobiography, it should be read in relation to Branson’s other books that are explicitly aimed as he states in one of their subtitles, at revealing the ‘secrets they won’t teach you at business school’ (2012). These books make use of many of the same stories that are told in Branson’s autobiography, but turn them into explicit lessons that the reader should follow in order to become a successful entrepreneur. As Branson states, entrepreneurship is ‘the core of everything that I have done for the last forty-plus years’ (2012: 2). Instead of challenging such claims, we will fully accept that this is the case and inquire into what they reveal about his entrepreneurial subjectivity.