How To Be A Trojan Horse

I’ve been researching a lot of my business heroes lately for my book. I share some of the most interesting insights I find with my mailing list. Sign up here to receive it first.

One of those is Anita Roddick, the pioneering founder of the Body Shop. When she was in her early 30s, Anita was raising two young children by herself while her husband was off fulfilling his lifelong dream to ride a horse from Buenos Aries to New York (true story!). 

Inspired by her travels around Europe, Africa and the South Pacific, she opened a small shop that sold simple creams and hair-care products made with natural ingredients. To keep the costs down, she used minimal packaging, offered discounts to customers who brought back their containers, and gave people the ability to add perfume scents to products after they bought them, all initially driven by a need to keep the costs as low as possible.

As the number of Body Shop stores grew, so too did Anita’s ambitions, using the power that comes with success to ensure all the products were not tested on animals, didn’t contain nasty chemicals and used refillable biodegradable containers. Anita was a refreshing and no-bullshit businesswoman, and within 15 years Body Shops stores were all over the UK, now reaching more than 3000 stores in 66 countries.

In 2006, the Body Shop was bought by French cosmetics giant L’Oreal for US$1.14 billion. It was seen by some as controversial because the parent company, with a turnover around US$18 billion, had a patchy record at the time on some of the issues that Anita had long campaigned for.

Explaining her decision, Anita said something very powerful: "I'm just excited that I can be like a Trojan horse,” she said, “and go into that huge business and talk about how we can buy ingredients like cocoa butter from Ghana and sesame oil from Nicaraguan farmers and how we can do that in a kindly, joyful way."

Anita realised that there was great value in working within the structure of an existing company to help change it from the inside. After all, most people are employees; around 85% of the population work for someone else.

Big companies have big budgets, deep chains of commands, and wide, established footprints for their impact to be felt straight away. If you can help implement a change that’s felt in a large company, you can have a serious impact.

When you’re inside an organisation there is earned trust that can help you reach dozens, hundreds or even thousands of people instantly. Big companies have established structures like social groups, intranets, committees and town hall meetings, that allow ideas to spread quickly. Even the smallest of changes can cause huge ripples.

The key is to understand that change rarely comes in sweeping reforms that transform a company in one fell swoop; change comes from the layering effect of dozens of small decisions that cumulatively add up. By systematically tackling a series of seemingly tiny things first, you can bring others along with you.

Anita Roddick sadly died 18 months after selling her company to L’Oreal. In the decade since, the French company has made a series of major strides in its supply chains, energy use, water usage and reduced its carbon emissions by 64% since 2005. All of these changes since then lead to the US arm being named the top performing global company on sustainability in 2017 by Newsweek's Green Ranking. 

They're not perfect, but Anita would have been proud.

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Read: How to sell a million shoes in two years.