When James talks of his job, he uses visionary terms such as ‘painting a picture of the future’ and working with his team to take the company ‘on a journey to that place’. In more mundane terms, that means shaping Senergy’s future, breaking barriers and taking the company in new directions. His motivation is not money but love of the job. There are obviously pressures but he has been used to operating 24 hours a day 7 days a week in hazardous conditions in the offshore industry. With slight regret, James confesses that his wife tells him that he doesn’t do well chilled.
Family life is important to him and one result of this is that he’s chosen to live in a place which forces him to spend the first and last few hours of each day working on the train and working days are long. But he uses the journeys to catch up on emails, do some thinking and get ready for the next day.
He went to Antwerp International School in Belgium and Queen Anne High School in Dunfermline and his attitude to work was evident from an early age. At the age of 17, while still at school, he had three day jobs, serving breakfasts between 6.30am and 8.30am, working in the local petrol station between 5pm and 9pm and then serving suppers in the hotel before going to bed. He also sold hi-fis in Comet at the weekend. It was his way of ensuring that he was financially independent.
He was awarded his BSc Hons in Engineering at Aston University in Birmingham his postgraduate degree in Civil Engineering at Glasgow University. On graduation, he found himself in a rapidly expanding industry where he was given huge financial and technical responsibilities at a very young age. After that, he knew that anything was possible. He started as a well engineer with Britoil and took on his first senior role in 1986 when he was appointed director of a small engineering consultancy.
He’s a great admirer of Robert Burns. For one week every year, he travels all over the world to attend and speak at Burns Suppers and raise money for charity. He identifies with Burns’s work hard, play hard lifestyle and, with tongue in cheek, claims that he’d welcome any tips on how to get away with it. Burns provides one of the three maxims by which he lives. The other two are ‘to challenge accepted wisdom’, and his clan motto ‘Through hard work one prevails’. From Burns he takes the well known lines ‘Oh wad some power the giftie gie us To see oursel's as others see us!’. He’s actually had it inscribed into the boardroom table.
He’s in no doubt as to his perfect form of relaxation. In his own words, it is ‘a long walk on Kings Barns beach followed by a round of golf, followed by a meal with my wife at the Cellar restaurant in Anstruther or the Seafood restaurant in St Andrews’. He enjoys relaxed music, such as that of Café Del Mar. He does also spend time raising money for cancer and child related charities.
Asking him about his dream job produces an answer which might have been easy to predict. ‘I believe you make your dream job and right now I’m extraordinarily happy with what I’m doing at this point in my life’