Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My causeway this week is a businessman, one of Britain's most successful High Street retailers,

he founded his first commercial enterprise at the age of 10 buying and selling stamps.

He didn't do very well at school, but he barely finished his education

before he was turning his father's North London photographic shop into a highly profitable

operation. His flare for buying led him to import good quality well-priced cameras from the far

east and by his late 20s he'd become a millionaire. Today with 1300 outlets across the

country he heads a 5 billion pound business.

He can look back on a life guided by single-mindedness, conscientiousness and determination.

You've got to have a rage to make things happen, he says. You've got to burn inside.

He is the chairman of Dixon's, Sir Stanley Calms. That's a description of aggression,

really, isn't it, Stanley? standing you know that will to win that

hatred of being beaten that's all in the mix too is it? Yes I think that aggression is

very much part of the philosophy of success. You do need to want to be successful. You do need

to have an inner drive. It's like being a top sportsman really, isn't you've got to want to go out

there and kill them? I don't really like the word kill because I don't think you see it in those terms.

You have to be successful for yourself.

The opposition should be able to bang their head against your success, but you don't have to

kill them. I've never made an

objective of destroying the other side. I've made the objective of being more

successful in my own field of adventure. Yes but that involves destroying the

...