Making The Ordinary Extra-Ordinary

WhatS The Secret Of Sir James DysonS Success? Six Emails A Day, Says The Inventor, Industrial Design Engineer And All-Round Genius. He Also Talks Ai, Bots, And Communication.

- John Arlidge / The Interview People

The best thing about being a billionaire almost eight times over is not the three-comma bank balance, being a knight of the realm, the yacht, the jets, or being acclaimed as one of the world’s most creative entrepreneurs. It’s this.

“I get six emails a day.” Get out? “Really. No more than six,” Sir James Dyson tells me in his office 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 £2.5 billion (A$4.5 billion) investment in AI, robotics and battery technology that he hopes will propel his firm 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 first 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”.