Branson’s leadership style and its effectiveness in the U.S. today

Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group Ltd., is a London based businessperson who turned the conventional business wisdom to a diverse business with a unique style. Today, the Virgin Group is one of world’s most recognizable brands in different lines of businesses such as retail stores, air travel, financial services, books and music, and telecommunications. The Virgin Group is a multibillion-dollar company with approximately 50,000 employees and more than $20 billion in annual sales (Hellriegel & Slocum, 2011).
According to Hellriegel and Slocum (2011), Transformational leadership involves influencing the followers through the leader’s behaviors and abilities. Transformational leaders create vision for the organization and embrace the change to achieve the goal by following set of rules with the strong beliefs, anticipating the future barriers, and empowering the followers to be leaders by inspiring through motivation, and intellectual stimulation. Transformational leaders are risk-takers. They are quite challenging and compassionate at the same time with high integrity.
Sir Richard Branson’s dominant leadership style is transformational in many aspects. Branson communicates in open, candidly and clearly about the setbacks in his business career. Three of the setbacks he openly discussed with many are the launch of MP3 player, which was a total disaster, holding Virgin MegaStore retail outlets for too long that caused a huge financial loss, and Virgin Cola trial to acquire Coca-Cola, which was again a huge loss. Open communication about failures and assuming responsibility for one’s own mistakes clearly shows the individual consideration one of the core components of transformational leader. Another example to prove his transformational leadership style is that he reads