Free Sinclair and the 'Sunrise' Technology: The Deconstruction of a Myth by Ian Adamson, Richard Kennedy Page A

the one trying to put a constraint on him ... He has a very quick temper indeed, and a rather noisy temper. Also being quick-tempered he doesn’t hold grudges. If he’s angry he’s angry and everyone in the workshop knows about it. To a certain extent the business is him, it’s his ideas and his innovative powers that have made the business what it is, and I think anybody that tried to stop him doing that would be very foolhardy, because you’d end up with another run-of-the-mill business. (Ann Sinclair, BBC Radio 4, 18 January 1978.)
    It is worth emphasizing that, as of the time of the NEB’s initial funding, what Sinclair had made the business was a company so close to bankruptcy that his financial advisers had thought that bringing in the receiver was the correct course of action. Sinclair’s ‘innovative powers’ had been given due leeway, with work supposed to be proceeding within his allocated fiefdom of the research labs. His ‘ideas’ on how to run a company had not proved themselves in practice, however much Sinclair wished to place the blame on the volatile calculator market, and something had to be done. Sinclair’s complaints about the Hewett period are, as a presumably considered case, petty. The commissioning of a business plan by Hewett, on the advice of Nick Barber, is presented as a sneaky act on Hewett’s part. The likely reason for the resentment is suggested by Clive’s biographer’s comment: ‘ not that Sinclair had much faith in management consultants anyway ’ (The Sinclair Story, p. 83). Clive’s constraint that all recruiting was stopped by Hewett was mildly countered when we asked him about it with the comment that it’s standard practice to halt and reassess recruitment when in financial difficulties, and that anyway it wasn’t Sinclair’s job.
    The true trouble lay in the fact that Sinclair thought it was all his job. A typical difference was over market research. Sinclair’s view was that he knew what the public wanted:
It has to be done on the basis, I think, of understanding why people like products or dislike them. It’s no use saying to somebody, ‘Would you like a pocket TV?’ when no such thing exists. The question comes out of the blue to them, they haven’t any chance to think about it. It’s much more useful to think oneself, you know, will people like them once they’ve had a chance to play with them. (Clive Sinclair, BBC Radio 4, 18 January 1978.)
    Hewett was rightly dubious of Sinclair’s powers of prediction in this area. He felt that the company was exposed and vulnerable with a single profitable product, and the fact that the saleability of this product was based on faith in Sinclair’s vision. As he says:
When the development of a product has taken the place of market research, you presume that by developing it it’s going to be sold, whether the public wants it or not. You have to assume they will, because you’ve already burnt your boats. (Interview, 16 October 1985.)
    Hewett commissioned some market research on customer reactions. This showed that people didn’t want a 2-inch screen on a miniature television, because it was too small, but would have been happy with a 3-inch screen. There was a board meeting at which it was agreed that any future model would be a 3-inch version, against the objections of Sinclair to paying attention to survey results:
He announced at the time that he didn’t believe it. I said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t believe it? Are you saying that it hasn’t been carried out properly?’ ‘It’s all rubbish,’ he said, and had no arguments to support his position. So when you ask if he’s rational from a business point of view, I think his reaction to that sort of thing is such that you have to say he isn’t. He’s not objective. He rejects things that run counter to his egocentric views ... they’re not acceptable, (ibid.)
    With this sort of resistance, Sinclair and Hewett seem to have existed in a state of