Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.

A great advantage I had when I started The Body Shop was that I had never been to business school.

Women are storytellers, they are communicators. They'll go and sit around a table and talk about their first date, their first smoke, their first lipstick, whatever it is. Those rituals of life, marriages and death aren't part of the language of men.

One of the key problems of the business world is that greed has become culturally acceptable.

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.

Business is not financial science, it's about trading.. buying and selling. It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it.

Mess with nature and it will mess right back.