Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, tells us some of his experiences:
“I enjoyed working in the serial The Rebel Billionaire in the United States because I found it very amusing to put a group of young managers through several challenges, some of which were taken straight from James Bond films, though none of them was impossible. They were designed to go on reducing the group till only one person remained, the one with the strongest character and the best prepared to achieve their aims.
The final episode had a brutal twist to it. We all gathered on the terrace of my house in my private island of Necker, on the beach near the sea, for me to hand on to the winner, Shawn Nelson, the final prize, a cheque for a million dollars.
There was a snag. He could take the cheque or gamble for a bigger prize, heads or tails at the throw of a coin. If he missed, he would lose everything. I handed him the cheque. He took it, and when seeing the long line of cyphers I could see in his eyes how much that sum meant for him and for his business plans. Then I took the cheque back and put it in my back pocket. In its place I showed him a silver coin.
‘Which one do you choose? – I asked him – the coin or the cheque?’
Life is full of hard choices. What would he choose? Shawn looked bewildered. It was a huge risk. All or nothing. He asked me, ‘What would you do, Richard?’ I told him, ‘The choice is yours.’ I could have told him ‘I take risks, but only calculated risks. I measure the probabilities of all I do’, but I told him nothing. He had to decide.
The tension increased as Shawn kept pacing the terrace from one end to the other, unmindful of the idyllic view of the sea, immersed in his own struggle with himself to take a decision. To gamble was an appealing choice. He would prove himself ‘cool’. Besides, the unknown prize could be incredible. Even so I said nothing. I knew what I would do, but what would he do?
At the end he said, ‘I’m taking the cheque.’ He had a small business and could use the million dollars wisely to make it grow. He could change his life for the better and help the people who worked with him and believed in him. He chose the cheque.
I felt very glad, and while taking the cheque from my pocket and handing it over to him, I told him: ‘If you had chosen the throw of the coin, I would have lost my respect for you.’
He had made the correct choice by not gambling at something he could not control. He got the million dollars, to which we added the mysterious prize. The great prize was to become for three months the president of the more than 200 Virgin companies with their 50.000 employees. Shawn would learn much. It was a golden opportunity, and, by not risking everything at the throw of a coin, he had shown that my companies would be in good hands for those three months. He had earned the job.”
(Richard Branson, Hagámoslo, Arcopress 2008, p. 57)
