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by Matthew Rock - Tuesday, 11th September 2007

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Real Business first interviewed Anita Roddick at the height of the dotcom bubble in the summer of 2000. We caught her on a bad day, after she’d been up all night with a sick daughter. She was full of hyperactive prickliness – challenging and generous all at once.

How would she describe entrepreneurs?

“Expediters,” she said. “The best thing we can do is find people who can do things better than we can. We vomit ideas – that’s all we do… We couldn’t manage ourselves out of a paper bag but are huge motivators, we have an enormous amount of energy, we loathe hierarchy and we are absolutely unemployable."

It was typical, great stuff. Pithy, honest, provocative, only just printable. In more recent public speeches, she’d talk about big corporations “dying of boredom” and endlessly berate the “suits” of the City.

The first chapter of her autobiography, Business as Unusual, hilariously recalls her wholly unsuitable behaviour at the CBI Annual Conference. It’s hard to imagine now just what an impact this loud, unmanageable, visionary woman made on the very traditional business community of the seventies. She encouraged a whole generation to conduct business with their whole, vibrant personality, not just with blandness and discretion.

More than that, she gave confidence to the incoherent but emerging community of entrepreneurs with an ethical outlook.

“She was an inspiration on all levels,” said Craig Sams, founder of Green & Black's and another pioneering ethical entrepreneur, speaking this morning.

“First she got rich, which was a huge inspiration to the rest of us who wondered if the world was ever going to cotton on to what we were doing. Then she got stroppy and talked back to the City.”

By leading the creation of the Social Venture Network, says Sams, she provided “group therapy” to a raft of entrepreneurs. “We’d meet and reassure each other that we weren’t mad! You’d go away from the meetings refreshed and prepared to run through brick walls again; it’s hard to put a value on that.”

I was lucky enough to host an evening’s debate with her at the British Library late last year. She was in cracking form, full of wit, wisdom and advice for her eager audience of aspiring entrepreneurs.

Only a few weeks later, she would announce that she was suffering from Hepatitis C. Again, rather than yielding to the illness, it became another campaigning issue that she championed until her untimely death yesterday.

Tags: anita roddick, cbi, craig sams, social venture network, hepatitis c, business as unusual, body shop,