The Sunday Times Magazine – 7 May 2017

Rich List 2017

10 • thesundaytimes.co.uk/richlist

The secret of

my success?

Six emails a day”

Sir James Dyson

Inventor, designer, CEO and household name

T

he best thing about being a billionaire

almost eight times over , No 14 on

our Rich List, is not the three-comma

bank balance , being a knight of the realm ,

the yacht , the jets , playing tennis in the

Maldives with the family of Spanish former world No 1

Arantxa S anchez Vicario, as Sir James Dyson does , or

being acclaimed as Britain’s most creative

entrepreneur , our answer to Steve Jobs. It’s this.

“I get six emails a day.” Get out? “Really. No more

than six,” Dyson tells me in his offi ce in Malmesbury ,

Wiltshire , on one of those bright early summer days

when the Cotswolds is the only place on earth you’d

want to be. “I suspect everybody else in the business

will be like me.”

I’ve come to talk to him about his plans for a new

university and a whopping £2.5bn investment in

artifi cial intelligence (AI), robotics and battery

technology that he hopes will propel his fi rm into pole

position in “the fourth industrial revolution ” and help

to make post-Brexit Britain as innovative and fast-

growing as the “tiger” economies of Asia. We’ll get to

that, but fi rst I want to know his secret. I’d eat my

Dyson to get only six emails a day.

It all started 30 years ago , he tells me, when he

founded the company and banned staff from writing

memos, to encourage them to talk to each other

instead. He gave — and still gives — new recruits

old-fashioned exercise books and urges staff to use

them in meetings instead of laptops.

He has built dozens of cafes at his campuses “so

people can have face-to-face communication. We’re

creating things, working out how to sell them. You can’t

do that on your own. You have to talk.” If all that isn’t

enough, he has the extra protection of a professional

email address “that is odd and hard to guess”.

Soon, if he has his way, there may be no email at all,

for him or any of us. Thanks to AI — machines that

learn how we behave and begin to act for us — bots

could do our communicating. Britain needs to get

ahead and start colonising Botland, Dyson says, which

is why he is spending the £2.5bn creating a new

517-acre research-and-development centre on a former

RAF base at Hullavington , a few miles from Dyson’s

existing headquarters. H e has sold more vacuums, fans

and hairdryers than ever over the past year , but that’s

not enough. He wants to use the new hi-tech hub to

double the range of products his company makes in the

next three years to around 100 , many of them using AI.

Dyson , who celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this

week , but looks younger because he is as slim as one of

his cordless vacuums, thinks his wildly ambitious task

will be made easier by Brexit. A high-profi le supporter

of leaving the EU , he is “very excited about the

opportunities to cut trade deals direct with other

countries — America, India, Japan, Australia”. He is

looking forward to being able to hire top tech talent

from all over the world, rather than having to put EU

citizens fi rst. He’s no little Englander.

Fine, but under EU rules we can’t start negotiating

pacts on trade until the Brexit process is complete.

That’s nonsense, Dyson yelps. “We should start

negotiating with everybody else right away. It’s

ridiculous not to be able to do that. Totally restrictive.

Since when did the EU abide by European law?”

Despite warnings that the talks between London and

Brussels will be tough, Dyson predicts that the EU will

end up cutting a relatively free trade deal with Britain

“because they have more to lose. There’s a £100bn

balance of trade defi cit between us and them. They sell

more to us than we do to them.”

If no deal is reached, UK fi rms will have to pay a tariff

on the goods they export to the EU , but he predicts that

won’t hurt much. Dyson already pays a World Trade

Organisation tariff on its exports to the EU “because

we manufacture outside the EU in Malaysia , which

“

PHOTOGRAPH

DAVID VINTINER

THE

RICH LIST

INTERVIEW

JOHN

ARLIDGE

14 £ 7.8bn ▲

SIR JAMES DYSON

AND FAMILY

Household goods

and technology