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sooner personalise our machinery than mechanise our staff.

I find it extraordinary that so many managers pay no attention to the fabric of their workplaces. How are people supposed to believe in your company when all they see of it, day after day, is a couple of dying pot plants and a fire extinguisher? At Virgin, we give people the tools they need to do their job properly. How else are they ever going to feel pride in where they work? Virgin people have told me that at the end of a tiring day, when they are off duty, having a drink in the pub, or a meal, they're occasionally asked where they work. When they say, 'With Virgin,' the enquirer usually replies, 'Lucky you! That must be a great place to work.'

Our staff usually agree.

For many of our companies, the work environment is also public space. On our planes, for example, we make sure that our seats are the most comfortable in the air, the food is excellent, the uniforms are the best and the planes are modern, safe and efficient. On board a plane, customer service and staff satisfaction are pretty much the same issue. They should be handled as one.

But a concern for surroundings is part of the general Virgin philosophy. It runs through all of our businesses, whether or not they deal directly with the public. We're not talking about glitz or vast expense. We're talking about providing people with the right tools for the job. Do that, and your employees will approach every day with freshness and enthusiasm. If you file and forget them in some kind of stationery museum, the keenest heart will wilt.

It occurs to me that so far in this chapter, I've been giving you a lot of 'don'ts'. Don't micromanage. Don't ignore people's needs. There's a better way of looking at the manager's role, and I can best express it by telling you about the first time I met Gordon McCallum.

Virgin Atlantic's inaugural flight landed in San Francisco in 1996. As we celebrated, I was buttonholed by an extremely vivacious Irish marketing executive who worked for McKinsey & Co. She invited me to talk to a group of the company's analysts and consultants at their California Street offices.

McKinsey's consultants spend most of the working week in the offices of their client companies. As a consequence, they don't get much time with each other. So they have made Friday lunchtime their chance to get together: a bonding session over a brown-bag lunch of chicken-mayo subs and fruit juices. Usually, they have a guest to talk about business. Now it was my turn. I got my invitation on the Wednesday; I turned up on the Friday.

Was I prepared? I was not. I cannot for the life of me remember what I said. Whatever it was, though, Gordon made the effort to keep in touch. Years later, I asked him what I said at the meeting that had hit a nerve with the McKinsey people.

'No idea.'

'Really?'

'Not a clue.'

'So why did you stay in touch?'

Gordon shrugged. 'You turned up with a sandwich and a fruit juice,' he said. 'You made time for us.'

When I was twenty-one, someone described Virgin as an 'unprofessional professional organisation', which for my money is just about the best backhanded compliment anyone in business could ever receive. We run our companies professionally and we make sure that everyone does their job to the highest standards. But the way we make sure is to see that people are having fun . Fun is not about acting stupid. It's the feeling you get when you're on top of things. We try to make sure that the people who come into contact with a Virgin business end up with a smile on their face (not always easy).

Formality has its place when it simplifies things: when it lets people know what's going on and what to do. We can't be continually reinventing the wheel every time three people meet in a room. That said, I dislike formality. For every time it oils the wheels of business, I can point to fifty more occasions when it gummed things up, made people feel miserable and stifled communication. It says