The big question is: how do you institutionalize success and still keep that edge of craziness and wildeness?

I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

Entrepreneurs are outsiders by nature - outsiders with a work ethic.

It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.

Communication is the key for any global business.

I think it is completely immoral for a shop to trade in the middle of a community, to take money and make profits from that community and then ignore the existence of that community, its needs and problems.

The trouble with the new world we have watched being created over the past decade is that it sees no further than money. People have always been obsessed with money, of course - greed is as old as history. But when the institutions that govern all our lives forget there was ever anything else, then it gets dangerous.