So jealous, Kim! My sister met him when she attended a Virgin-SomethingOrOther event in North Carolina a few years ago. She did get me a t-shirt though. 

It's a role he grew very comfortable with over the years.  He was not always so extroverted.

I went to one of his birthday parties at his London house, and don't even remember seeing him (yes, there were a lot of guests).

Yes, @Waqas, you are right that hard work are vital. You can't just be clever on social media, that's for sure! When everyone's looking at you and some are waiting for you to take a mis-step, it's even more important to ensure you're working hard, surrounding yourself with high-calber people, and listening to the right partners, colleagues, and advisors. 

@ Alison

Branson is surely an example and a trend setter so as to how an organization's leader should be. Glamour in his personality and the way Virgin brands itself are both something closely in comparison. Nonetheless, besides his personality and all the glamour that glows with it, his hard work and strategy are something to be truly appreciated.

@ kq4ym

It definitely makes us envious. Did'nt we work hard enough to get such fringe benefits and great office environments. Surley we did. Just that the skill the Google guys have is a bit scarce in supply in the labour market.

Stuff like slides are just publicity stunts. What employees really care about is material benefits such as cars, working hours, impressive remuneration, etc.

Kim, I'm not sure about when the era really ended, but I agree with your point.

But leaders set the tone and often others in the company adopt similar characteristics.  Here in Kansas, Bill Self is one of the most successful college basketball coaches in the country.  Many of his assistants have adopted the same speech patterns and vocabulary, even his accent, to the point that if one is interviewed on the radio, it's hard to tell immediately if it's Bill Self or one of them.

Tim Cook, to me, seems to emulate Steve Jobs in the same way.  If Apple is later viewed as declining after Jobs left, I think that would be an unfair point because Tim Cook, again to an outsider, seems to have kept everything going in Jobs-like fashion.

So, to your point, maybe that happened years ago and we're just seeing a different face.  It could be that the Jobs era won't end for a few more years until the company is basically purged of old-timers at senior levels.  It's an interesting thought that a CEO can have a lasting effect on a company's culture.  That can be good and bad, of course, but interesting nonetheless.

Mitch, I was only harkening back to 1997, when Steve Jobs came.  Only Mac purists thought he would succeed and their advice was to focus more on schools, make the hardware more colorful, that kind of thing.

Then, there were the haters, really, like Michael Dell, who suggested Jobs scrap the whole company.

I know it's trendy to applaud Steve Jobs and I'm really doing that, but what I admire at the time is that NO ONE said, "you know, Steve, why don't you leverage your Hollywood connections to create a supreme music store that will make downloading music and eventually movies mainstream, and while your at it, create a little funky music player without a display, and you'll become the most valuable company in the world."

One of my favorite authors is Gary Hamel because he pushes the concept of "Getting to the Future First," which means, define your future and achieve it before your competitors reach theirs.  He lost me a bit later when he claimed that anybody with any sense could have seen Enron's collapse a mile away.  Really?  He didn't.

If you were someone in 1997 who thought Apple had it going on, I believe you because you are a smart successful techie and an editor of this site full of thought leaders :-), but there are plenty of other people who fall to revisionist history.  In fact, you deserve to be exalted because you were probably scoffed at often in 1997.

I liked the whole story at the time because what I thought Apple did is brought back the single, as I've posted already.  That was cool to me and I felt it saved downloading of music.  I remember telling my kids that the prize at the time was iTunes, not the iPod.  I still stand by that.   (I'm not much of a socializer, so I was neither scoffed nor praised; my poor family is the only group to hear my old timer rants).

Branson also has the ability to market himself well. I've never met him, unfortunately, but he was one of the earliest CEOs to brand himself as part of his companies and vice versa (at least one of the earliest I can recall). Virgin, the company, and Branson, the man, are intertwined -- which will be bad if/when he ever wants to sell the company, isn't really who he says he is/acts, or when he dies. But in the meantime he's built a company that mirrors his public image, whose advertising and marketing directly correlate with his persona, and he is a whiz with social media as a direct result of that ease and that integration. 

Clearly, I need to learn more about Richard Branson. 

Branson started out by selling LP records by mail.  Simple idea, but it caught on.  He certainly has the entrepreneurial knack, but it's also important to be in the right place at the right time.

If Mike Oldfield had taken Tubular Bells to a different record label, or it hadn't ended up on The Exorcist soundtrack, the money to expand Virgin's business would have had to come from somewhere else.