Richard Needham Author

Richard Needham was MP for Chippenham for eighteen years. During that time he was Britain’s longest serving minister in Northern Ireland, responsible for its economic regeneration. In 1992 he was promoted to the Ministry of Trade, in charge of the U.K.’s export strategy. In 1997 he left politics to return to industry. He was a director of Dyson for sixteen years and chairman of Avon Rubber PLC for five. He has been involved in many other large, medium and small companies covering many sectors. He has three grown-up children and lives with his wife in Gloucestershire.

Richard Needham has spent a lifetime in business and politics starting at the bottom and having reached the top finding himself at the bottom again. The one constant in his varied life has been the management theory espoused by Douglas McGregor called Theory X and Theory Y.