Malcolm Steward: audio journalist

First published in The British Audio Journal in 2000

The Big Yin

After a ten-year intermission, two older, wiser – and possibly mellower – industry curmudgeons sat down to record another interview. As the year 2001 dawned, Ivor Tiefenbrun MBE brought Malcolm Steward up to date on a decade of developments at Linn Products.

Malcolm Steward: It’s ten years since I last visited the Linn factory and in that time you’ve nearly quadrupled the number of employees and you’re about to expand the facility considerably. That suggests you have plenty of cash in the bank and the outlook for the company is rosy.

Ivor Tiefenbrun: Well, in manufacturing you’re always only a couple of weeks away from oblivion. It’s a tough game and no one can predict the future but we’re currently bursting at the seams. And it’s true that our business has grown very strongly over the past few years.

MS: If you charted the company’s growth over the past decade would the graph show a steady rise or discernible peaks that could be attributed to particular events or developments?

IT: Linn has always managed to build its business year by year. Even when we’ve looked on paper as though we’ve taken a step back – and that’s only happened once or twice in our history – it’s simply been because we’ve had a very heavy investment program. From a distant view it appears that Linn just grows every year and that we increase our sales every year – some years more than others. That growth depends on many factors. We’re obviously influenced by the world economy but basically the company becomes more competent, fitter, adept and skilful every year. So our growth would show a pretty straight line, although it is now accelerating as we increase our resources and abilities.

MS: Did you not notice a marked rise in business when, for example, AV started to take off, and similarly with custom install becoming more established?

IT: I’m talking in terms of the company as a whole, although obviously we’ve made a lot of changes from being a producer of a single product based on records to a full system embracing CD and radio; and from a conventional system to one that handles multi-channel and video; and then to a distributed audio system that interfaces with computer technology. All of these things, though, hang together: we haven’t moved out of analogue into digital or out of audio into video. Linn is about integration: all our systems are designed to work together.

MS: It almost seems as if Linn had ‘insider knowledge’ that AV and home integration were coming before they arrived. When I saw your AV51 system I wondered what on earth you were doing producing AV gear. And when you launched Knekt I couldn’t see where the demand for it was going to come from. Now, not many years later, Knekt is a household name in the integrated home field.

IT: It’s flattering of you to say that but the fact is that Knekt goes back about ten years and came about as a result of our amplifiers being the first such products with microprocessor control. And that happened because we came up with solid state switching about 20 years ago when we were working on a record cutting lathe. That led to the LK1 pre-amplifier, which had to have a microprocessor to control its switching. That meant that we could provide remote control. It also meant that when we brought out subsequent products – tuners and CD players – we fitted the same control system. That then meant that we ended up with surplus, redundant processing power duplicated in all these products, which made us wonder what we could do with it.

Remember that in those days it was expensive to put microprocessors into a product. One thought we had was to hide all the rest of the electronics in a cupboard and access the system solely through the CD player – the CD could route command signals to the tuner, pre-amplifier and so on. Then we realised that the rest of the system could just as easily be in another room. And from that casual observation we decided to put a communications port on all our products, which enabled us to develop the Knekt system. We had a distributed system that could access central sources and also allow you to control local sources. And it’s still probably the only system with that kind of capability out there – ten years after it was all started.

One thing tends to lead naturally to another at Linn: it’s just kind of obvious to us what we should be doing next. Dolby Digital, for example, offered the possibility of a quality of music reproduction with movies and concerts that was above the minimum threshold of expectation that Linn demands from a format before we feel able to work with it. Obviously, the minute that door was opened we wanted to participate.

It’s really all no-brainers. We haven’t done anything smart or intelligent. We’ve just done what we thought was obvious.

MS: I’d like to pick up on one point you made. You talk about the notion of hiding the system away in a cupboard but in the old – Karma, Isobarik, Sara – days that wouldn’t have been mentioned. Linn was about hardcore, enthusiast hi-fi. Its buyers were happy to suspend their speaker cables on fishing twine from the ceiling: they wanted their gear on show. And you were catering to that very different market.

IT: Hah! The truth is that we never were. Linn emerged from a precision engineering background and the things that we’re doing now we were doing in the earliest days of the company. The LP12, for instance, was simple and discreet: it wasn’t flashy and it had just one button to make it work. The idea that a product should compete in the shop for a customer’s attention wasn’t a philosophy we shared. We thought that what stood out in a shop would most likely look intrusive and hideous in the home. The product that looked good in your home would be almost bland, have timeless styling, be simple and not intrude on your enjoyment of the music with flashing lights and that sort of stuff.

Nothing has changed. We’ve always been focused on the end-user and his enjoyment of music. That has always driven our business. The idea that the installation should be discreet is obvious to us. The fact that we sold our systems to a lot of enthusiasts through a lot of enthusiast outlets doesn’t mean that those systems were aimed at customers who were any different to the customers we’re targeting today – people who love music, love quality, and want the best out of life.

We’ve never been tweaky people but it’s true that we’ve encouraged a lot of tweaky people. We were the first company to use spikes on loudspeakers, fancy terminals, cap screws, decent fastenings and rugged stands. We could never persuade people that a turntable sounded different but we created a vast industry in clamps, cables, special feet and so on. People would accept that the mat on the turntable could make a difference to the sound but they couldn’t accept that the turntable could. I’ve never understood that perception because Linn is a precision engineering company and it all seems obvious to us.

MS: Those old days were certainly entertaining, though. I remember when your product support guys would turn up at a shop and tell the manager, “You have to take that coffee table out of the room because it’s ruining the sound! You need to change those curtains to make the system play in time! That ashtray has to go if you want a tuneful performance!” Then it escalated to making people take off their digital watches because the bleeper inside them was acting in the same way as an additional loudspeaker in the room. You must have had a damn good laugh about all that.

IT: The digital watch thing was an extreme example of having an undriven transducer in the room. It was really propagated more by others. I’ll always remember one industry figure we both knew well asking a man to leave a demonstration because he was wearing a hearing aid! Although we were seen as being associated with that kind of militant, terrorist-style enthusiasm we were never really that extreme. We were rational in that we would explain how things made differences but we respected the customer’s right to use the system the way he saw fit.

MS: I was going to ask you how you reconcile the single-speaker demonstration ideal with selling AV systems where there are at least five loudspeakers in the room.

IT: The answer is that in an AV system all the loudspeakers are driven. The single-speaker concept still applies in that you shouldn’t have a loudspeaker that’s not driven in the room. It will then be driven reactively by the sound the driven loudspeakers are producing and contribute non-linearly to the sound and introduce distortion. If you drive loudspeakers coherently then you can have as many as you like in the room and still get a good sound.

MS: Do you think, as a music lover, that although we now have the capacity for multi-channel audio we truly need it?

IT: Well, we’ve got it and the answer is “probably”. It’s difficult to accommodate but it has a lot of advantages. The advantages for movies are obvious…

MS: But does one need it for simply sitting down with a glass of wine in the evening to chill out with some music?

IT: When we asked our people to consider ways of making a multi-channel system compatible with high quality stereo replay of music, the initial feeling was that we needed to find some way of controlling the speakers – a way to cover things up, limit the damage. But Philip Hobbs, who heads up Linn Records, said that we shouldn’t regard this as a problem: it was really an opportunity to make a better sound by using all those channels. We told him he was being silly but he insisted that the idea that music should just come from two speakers had no absolute merit. Music wasn’t always performed in a concert hall or on a stage: that in itself is a by-product of the technology revolution that made big span concert hall buildings cheap and available world-wide. Historically music has always been much more ‘in the round’ – in a church hall or people sitting around a camp-fire or whatever – and multi-channel genuinely affords us the opportunity to do something better. When Philip re-routed the signal and tweaked it in various ways – driving stereo through a 5.1 system – we were surprised that it was actually much more agreeable than a straightforward, two-channel system.

Naturally we are excited by emerging multi-channel music formats but we’re equally convinced that there can be benefits for regular CD replay, provided you have a sufficiently high standard of replay equipment and you use the right algorithm. We use the extra channels in a subtle way: we don’t do anything gross or too ambitious. It’s complex to engineer but you can end up with a very subtle, simple impact upon the listener.

It’s early days – and we started out very sceptical – but I believe that improved multi-channel recording offers real benefits. We’re very positive about the possibilities. Shocking, isn’t it? But there’s real potential to record music in a much more involving way. I don’t pretend to know what that way is yet but we have a lot of ideas we’re working on. There’s real potential for involving people much more in the music – without gimmicks or silly effects – conveying the message of the composer and the merit of the performance much more effectively than we have been able to do in the past. We need a higher standard of music reproduction than DVD-Video gives us but that is available through DVD-Audio and SACD.

MS: Can we return to more general matters because I’m keen to ask you more about Linn’s success and the various factors that have created and perpetuated it? I remember, for example, that in a year when your sales amounted to about £180,000 you went out and spent £38,000 on a computer, much to the dismay of your finance department: most businessmen would not do that.

IT: I obviously wasn’t a businessman then … and I’m probably not a businessman now!

MS: You clearly saw a good reason for doing that, though, and it must now being paying off. You have a truly impressive facility that clearly could not operate effectively without a solid IT infrastructure.

IT: We’ve invested millions in computer technology. For instance, you’re sitting in an open-plan office with maybe 60 or 70 people at their desks: tell me how many times you’ve heard a phone ring.

MS: Once, maybe twice.

IT: That’s because our IT system ensures that everyone has access to all the information they need at their desks. When a phone rings it’s nearly always a customer or a supplier: it’s contact with the outside world not an internal battle for information.

We’re also trying to connect our retailers to our business: behind our public-facing website there are trade zones. They don’t, however, provide complete access to our system and there are good reasons for that. One is that we find that many retailers are reluctant to get involved with new technology. Do you remember when we revised our distribution contracts in 1992? One of the conditions was that any Linn retailer had to have a computer and a fax machine. They went ballistic when we told them that. Effectively we wound up having to give them increased discounts so that they could purchase them.

Nowadays we don’t force people to do anything. We’ve had so much criticism for encouraging people to do things that we believed were good for them that now we’re prepared to let them decide for themselves.

MS: The distribution contract revision you’re talking about wouldn’t happen to be the event that coincided with the release of your dealer manual, would it? I remember talking to a couple of retailers shortly after they received that. One said, “Who the hell do they think they are trying to tell me how to run my business?” The other told me that it was such a good read that he took it to bed with him every night to study before he went to sleep. I found that rather sad but it did demonstrate the way your manual polarised opinion.

IT: A dealer recently told me that the Linn retailer manual was the document that built his business. Another told me that our baby brochure, the one that told you how to build a system, was what built his business. Another told me that Linn’s documentation and the way we run our business had changed his business. These dealers are all doing very large sums of money – $20 million plus in one case, $12m and $6m in the others. They were dealers who were hungry for help: they wanted us to tell them how to grow their Linn business.

There are other dealers who don’t want us to be a bigger part of their business than we already are: they get nervous if we represent more than a certain percentage of their sales. They want a number of options and we have to respect their wishes. We always have but there was a time when many felt that we were trying to ram our vision down everyone’s throat. It was too time-consuming and expensive for us to try to build our business that way. We learned the hard way – that people have to discover things for themselves when they are ready. In a way just like us.

We tend to discover things earlier than most people do because we computerised our business around 1975, long before the desktop PC arrived. Because we had real-time, multi-user, on-line computing we hit problems of integrating systems then that other companies hit 20 years later. It wasn’t a case of us being prophetic: it was simply that we started on that journey earlier so we discovered what was round the corner before other people. And once you’ve been round a few corners you can start to extrapolate where that particular road is likely to go in the future.

But everything, they say, has in its birth the seeds of its own destruction. The clarity of the original focus that drives a business is critical to how well it can grow and prosper. Obviously, there’s also always chance – and a lot of business is about chance and circumstance. I’m not one of those people who believes the success of the company is all down to the ‘genius’ of the founder, but you’re dealt a hand and it’s up to you to choose how you play it. You are responsible for how you handle events, deal with problems and challenges, and seize or create opportunities.

It’s fair to say that a lot of Linn’s character, attributes and what you might call its personality were clear and pronounced at its birth. It’s also fair to say that we really were not shy about telling other people what we thought they should do. We proselytised and argued for the Linn proposition to be an industry-wide proposition and a British hi-fi proposition. I thought we could get much more co-operation and we could achieve much more in the market than we have in fact achieved. Now I’m older, wiser and reconciled to allowing people to discover things in their own time. But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in contributing to the business or the industry, or that we shouldn’t be open in our approach to people: we are.

MS: Were I to say to you that I wanted to start a manufacturing business, what would be the best piece of advice you could give me to ensure that the venture was successful? And what would you say to someone who wanted to become a successful specialist retailer?

IT: I think in both instances that customer focus is the key thing. Carefully identify your target customer, the person you’re trying to please. Then be best at what your target customer values most. Offer him a complete product and service that differentiates you from your competitors – a USP, an advantage.

What Linn does that confuses many people is to say that the end user is our customer. Traditionally the retailer considers the end user as his customer. The national distributor considers the retailer to be his customer. We say that he is, but the end user is also Linn’s customer. We want to go together with the national distributor to the retailer, and together with the national distributor and the retailer to the end user. Just as we want our suppliers to come with us to our distributors and retailers and end users. We are part of a chain and we try to connect every person in that chain very visibly and transparently.

MS: When you say “supplier” are you talking about the companies that provide your nuts and bolts and the aluminium for your cases?

IT: Absolutely. If the guy who supplies our aluminium doesn’t understand that we’re using it in a product like the CD12 and he doesn’t understand how we machine it, the price of the product, the sound performance, the fact that it’s bought by the most judicious, demanding and critical human beings on Earth, then he’s unlikely to understand why a small company like Linn requires a specification of aluminium that no aircraft manufacturer in the world demands. Why is it that Linn casts its own platters for the LP12? Because people who were casting for military and aerospace manufacturers didn’t have customers as demanding as ours. A single blemish on a platter guarantees it will be sent back. The fact that that blemish has no structural or material impact means nothing: that turntable was bought with the customer’s savings because of his passion to own an LP12 and he won’t tolerate a tiny blemish on any part of it.

That’s why we put as much effort into working with our suppliers as we do working with our customers. Anyone who knows Linn will not find that surprising. What have we always said? “The source comes first.” There’s a hierarchy to the system. The rules that we apply to our business are the rules that we apply to our music systems. We also apply those rules to our people: personnel selection is critical in this company and we don’t just take anybody. We have a highly developed system to select candidates.

MS: I used to find the fiercely nationalistic Glaswegian attitude at Linn very….

IT: Off-putting?

MS: …No. Bizarre. But I think now that I’m beginning to understand it. I read where you spoke of Scottish and Northern English people who have a strongly industrial mentality that shapes their attitudes. But then I remembered that my wife’s family comes from the Midlands, which is also an industrial region, and people there are far less aggressive – very different. They certainly don’t have your evil sense of humour. They don’t have your almost confrontational way of talking. So, what it is about this culture that makes it so different and has it been instrumental in Linn’s success?

IT: It’s true that Glasgow is an idiosyncratic place and Scotland is a strange country in many ways. It’s not maybe the country it used to be but it still has many of the historical advantages of a country with the longest-standing, continuous track record of universal education for boys and girls in the world – over 400 years. We still have the legacy of having had four or five universities 500 or 600 years ago while England had only two. We still enjoy the tradition of innovation that came from Clark-Maxwell, Fleming, Lord Kelvin, the Rutherfords and the pioneers of the industrial revolution. This fierce independence and the belief that every man has the right to direct access to God without any intermediary – King, priest or Pope … this fiercely held conviction and belief in the individual and his supremacy.

We’re involved in lots of businesses and say we’re installing a Linn system on a boat we can tell the customer that in Glasgow we have the oldest school of naval architecture in the world and invented the screw propeller and … we can go on forever boring them. If they’re involved in the aerospace business we can tell them how Scots built the first helicopter and the first faculty of engineering and blah, blah, ad infinitum.

MS: But we can do the same in London. We have plenty of things to brag about but we don’t. It’s a place to live and we’re not passionate about the sod of earth we happen to inhabit. I don’t feel any need to convince anyone that I live in the greatest place on the planet.

IT: We’re not trying to do that. We just want people to realise that we have this innate advantage! I’m joking but it’s a fact that if you do have the first faculty of electrical engineering in the world in your city, the chances are that that will leave some mark. What you have here in Glasgow is an industrial tradition that results in more Scottish kids wanting to be engineers than the national average. England doesn’t do well in that respect; nor does Wales or Ireland. We can pick and choose our engineers to a greater extent than companies further afield.

We also judge people by performance rather than their position or status. In some places, if I say to you that my friend is a doctor people will immediately be impressed. In Glasgow they’ll ask if he’s a good doctor or a bad doctor. The mere fact that he’s a doctor – or a lawyer or an engineer or a plumber – makes no difference: a Glasgwegian wants to know how good he is.

A Scottish mother tells her child that it doesn’t matter what he does, it’s how well he does it. It’s a belief that while you can’t control how clever you are or who your parents are, you can determine your own interests, your own enthusiasm, and how hard you work to master and apply the skills that you’ve been given.

My background is in precision mechanical engineering and unsurprisingly Linn sees itself as, and is, a precision engineering company. We are not a branding company. So when everyone else in the early ‘nineties decided to outsource to Thailand or China or Sri Lanka or Poland, we said it’s going to be tough so let’s bring more in-house. We’ve tended to do the opposite of what most British companies have done. We tend to integrate vertically. We want to control more processes. We want to understand and master more disciplines. We’re not trying to buy this in, repackage that, and save ourselves more effort…

MS: But isn’t that akin to me deciding not only to edit and manage the BAJ but also to write everything in it, take all the photographs, produce the paper it’s printed on, make the film for the pages, then buy a print works and print the journal myself? Where’s the sense when expert, specialist companies can do all that for me?

IT: Absolutely true. If someone can do something better than we can, we’ll use them. But if we think we can do the job better then we’ll do it ourselves. Some things might be beyond us – maybe the investment is simply too great – but we’re driven by the pursuit of quality and not a simple desire to own every aspect of the process.

We recognise the value of integration. One of the things you learn as an engineer is that the first rule of automation is that as soon as you get hold of the component you should never let go. It’s a bit like the first rule of adolescent sex: once you get started don’t stop! We know that, for instance, that if you have a computer that buys your parts, that’s great… but if it can use the same data to control your manufacturing, supply your customers with service components, etc., etc., that is much better. If you can perform every step in the chain – record music in the studio, make your own records, produce source, control and playback products, comparing and monitoring the signal at every stage – you can learn things that no-one else can learn.

A lot of Linn is about learning and a lot of the things we do are about learning. And every time we invest in something … Well, I remember when we made our cutting lathe, our sales manager went mad. He said “Do you know how much time and money the engineers have spent on that lathe?” and I said “No.” He thought it was time and money wasted. But it always costs to learn, and every part of that exercise gave us benefits quite apart from establishing Linn Records and doing what we bought it to do, providing a controlled reference against which to test our turntables. From that lathe came the Valhalla controller for the LP12, the direct-coupled tone-arms, the first metal bodied cartridges, low-noise pre-amplifiers – because nothing available was quiet enough. It also gave us power amplifiers that weren’t microphonic, our first microprocessor control products … Within a few years, every single bit of that so-called wasteful investment translated into new products that helped take the company forward.

MS: When you bought that lathe, did you have any idea of what might result from its purchase?

IT: No, of course we didn’t. We just knew that we needed to cut an accurate acetate to test our turntables because we could no longer buy acetates with a 3K test tone cut accurately by Decca, which had shut down, and that nobody else could produce them with the precision that we required. We could have just run away and said “It doesn’t matter,” “No-one will know,” “This will be good enough.” Or we could have said that we didn’t actually need to play a record to test a turntable – we’ll just assume that if it’s going round at the right speed, which we can measure with a strobe, that it’s all okay.

But we said “No!” because there’s no bullshit in engineering. You can bullshit in sales and marketing or if you’re repackaging someone else’s technology but if you’re in real engineering it boils down to whether something is within the tolerance or outwith the tolerance. So we didn’t. We did the right thing and we got the right result.

I believe, generally, that if you do the wrong thing it’s a safe bet that you’ll get the result you don’t want. Equally, I believe that if you do the right thing you’ll usually achieve the right result – although there’s no guarantee because nothing in life is guaranteed – but generally it’s the best option.

If you question it the chances are that you’ll never do the right thing. You do it by instinct; you do it out of belief; you do it out of passion and conviction and interest; and you do it because you want to. You rationalise afterwards when people ask you why you did it. An awful lot of things in our business we just do – it’s a no-brainer; it’s obvious. Sometimes we make mistakes but that’s life.

MS: I presume you’re still a car enthusiast; you still enjoy driving…

IT: You obviously saw me arrive in the maintenance department’s Toyota truck, which is my current mode of transport…

MS: Given your passion for cars, are you like me in that you don’t listen to music when you drive because either activity demands your total concentration to enjoy fully?

IT: I almost never listen to music when I drive. When I do it’s because I’ve been told to listen to a tape or CD and give an opinion … but when I drive I like to enjoy the peace and quiet, the isolation and the sounds of the vehicle. Nowadays, though, I don’t drive as much as I used to, and right now I don’t even own a car. In the last six months I’ve hardly been at home.

MS: The question really isn’t about the car itself, it was leading to my asking – as you have AV covered, multi-room covered, and proper hi-fi covered – whether you’re tempted to produce a Linn car system?

IT: Yes, there always has been a temptation. I think everyone in the audio business would love to see their brand in the car. But we would want to do more than that: we’d want to see our products in a car. Linn has a big OEM business driven by people who’ve come to us and asked us to address a particular market requirement. And people have asked us to look at the in-car area. The technology that we deploy in our products means that we could very easily address the car market and it is something that interests us but I doubt you’ll ever see a complete Linn system in a car, although we might manufacture something for someone else.

It certainly interests us. And if you want a view of the future, I don’t think there’ll be any big difference between car systems and home systems … and the plane system, and the personal system, and the professional system, and the boat system. We’re seeing that audio is becoming a smaller part of a big solution and that standard networks and interfaces are going to make connections easier. The whole world is going that way.

MS: Do you mean replacing the CD-changer in your boot with a hard drive in a caddy that you can remove when you get home and jack into you house’s media server?

IT: That is so attractive, making a subset of your music collection on a hard disk or sticking it over a radio link into you car. All that is going to come. We can contribute to the development of such systems but we’re not in a position – we’re far too small – to deliver them at the price that the car industry requires. The only car industry segment we could hope to address is at the very top end of the market where performance outweighs all other considerations.

MS: Well, I didn’t envisage you supplying Halfords with self-install systems at £249.

IT: Not unless the product was fantastic. If we could make a £249 hi-fi that blew away everything else, let me tell you that we would do it. Every engineer in this company, no matter what product they’re making, tries to blow everything else away. When someone is making a pair of our least expensive loudspeakers they’d love to make them sound better than a pair of Keltiks. The competitive mechanism works throughout Linn: no one is trying to protect any position, product sector or price point.

And we price our products according to the cost of manufacture. We don’t use opportunistic or market-based pricing: we price on a cost-plus basis. That way you’re mobile: you don’t dig a hole you can’t climb out of.

MS: There has to be a point below which you cannot drop. If a product goes out of the door having cost you £500 to produce and you can sell it at retail for £2,500, why not do so? Why not sell it for £3,000 if that’s what a competing product costs, and make yourself another £500 to reinvest in your business?

IT: We’ve never done that and we’ve often been asked why. There are two groups of people who ask that question. The first is just hoping to figure out what our products are actually worth. The second group is retailers who want us to increase our prices so we can increase their margins to give them eighty points.

The reason we don’t price that way is that I like to sleep at nights. I like to know that we’re offering a very competitive product; and I want to be a very hard competitor. And I want to know that if someone wants to produce a product that offers equivalent or superior performance to ours they’re going to have to be a hell of a lot smarter to do it – and smarter still to undercut us.

MS: When I bought my first LP12 I though it was very expensive but twenty years later it’s still performing beautifully, it still looks good, and I can still fix it if it breaks, which makes it look like exceptional value for money. Had it been less costly, Linn might not have survived and I could instead be looking at a turntable that would be rendered useless were any small part to fail. Given that, why not increase your prices and put the extra money away for a rainy day?

IT: It doesn’t work like that because what governs the margin the manufacturer makes is so highly geared, so volume-dependent, that there’s a very powerful imperative to have the price as low as possible to maximise volume. I know there are companies out there where every time they sell a product the factory stops and has a party … but they never get anywhere. Whereas, if you deliver the best products you can you maximise your revenue because you maximise your customer base. If the buyer is thrilled and their purchase exceeds their expectations and gives them a lifetime of pleasure the chances are that they will talk highly of you, recommend you to others, and come back and buy more from you.

MS: While we’ve been talking I’ve noticed that Year 2001 Ivor seems a much mellower character than the Ivor of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties. Is this product of age or are you more chameleon-like than you used to appear to be? I remember you being much more abrasive. I also I read that in a speech you gave to the RSA you said there were three answers to most questions – yes, no, or fuck off. I can’t imagine that kind of response going down too well in many territories in which you do business.

IT: You’re quite right. People in the Far East, say, wouldn’t understand that. It’s idiomatic and it was in the context of a discussion after a lecture when I’d established a rapport with the audience. It was a bit humorous but I wouldn’t say that out of the blue where it might be perceived as rude or offensive. I can be rude and offensive but I’ve never intentionally and knowingly been rude or offensive.

MS: But you can be very entertaining when you’re rude and offensive.

IT: Very entertaining, I’m sure. But because of the person I am and my sense of humour I sometimes see the funny side of a situation and can’t resist saying something that is outrageous: that can be very funny at times but equally it can hurt people. That’s regrettable … but it doesn’t always stop me saying something ridiculous. But I think everybody is like that.

MS: It’s taken us months to find a mutually convenient time to conduct this interview. What exactly are you doing these days that makes you so hard to pin down? It seems to me that you’re far less visible and available than you used to be.

IT: I’m still out there. I’m not in the factory that much nowadays although I love being here because you develop close bonds and relationships with your colleagues – and I love the people here – and that’s been my life. But I also enjoy and love the customers and suppliers we deal with world-wide. All of them expect me to show a personal interest in their businesses – and we probably deal with nearly a thousand of them – and I attempt to visit as many as I can and go to every market on a rotation basis. I still visit retailers and do musical evenings; I visit companies for whom we do OEM work; and last night I gave a talk to a small architectural practice, with whom we do no business but they asked if I would talk to them about running a business. I did that after a two-day year-end review at Linn.

MS: Do you never simply switch off?

I’m not one of those people who can sit about doing nothing – although I’m pretty good at it sometimes. I can switch off although I don’t do it very often. I can relax with things I love – my family, friends, boats, the countryside, climbing, walking, yoga …

MS: Yoga?

IT: Yes. I’m pretty fit. A bit fat but still fit. I do relax but I always want to be doing something, creating something, converting ideas into action.

Linn has transformed people’s lives with its products, which give people solace when they’re unhappy and comfort when they’re dealing with sickness, bereavement and loss; we give people pleasure when they’re ready to party. We’re in a great business. It’s a great way to earn a living.

So, to answer your earlier question, I don’t feel like I’m doing too much – I’d really like to be doing more.