In this post, I explore some of the principles, life lessons and reflections from James Dyson’s autobiography. A true maverick, he represents so much of what seems to be missing in Britain today. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, the lessons learned, and was even inspired to take a trip into London to see one of the Dyson demo stores.
Dyson was brought up in Norfolk, whose parents taught at Gresham school. His father died when he was just nine. Dyson brings this up several times during his book, and he says he wells up with tears every time he thinks about it. He clearly remembers his dad waving goodbye as he left to go to London to see a doctor for cancer treatment, and never returned. How awful it must have been for his father to have said goodbye knowing he would never see his family again. The school enabled James to complete his education, which he remained eternally grateful for.
Reflecting on his fathers death when he was at such a young and formative age, Dyson says many people have gone on to be successful in life, after losing a parent at a young age, including many British Prime Ministers. I can think of quite a few people that I have worked with in the past, whom have lost a parent at a young age, and they have done well. Perhaps it is because the hardship that it can bring, creates a necessity, and a drive to do well.
After attending London’s Royal College of Art, Dyson worked for Jeremy Fry at Rotork engineering, designing a Sea Truck first, and then leaving after four years to start his own venture, working on building a Ballbarrow, essentially an innovative wheelbarrow for the construction industry. He got some partners in, and mistakenly signed over the design patents to the company, rather than holding the patents in his name, and licensing the company to make the product. When the company got into financial difficulty, he was heavily diluted (his wife said he was effectively “screwed”), and from this experience he learnt two very important lessons:
- Own a company outright, and avoid taking on shareholders (today he is the sole shareholder of Dyson)
- Never give up control of your inventions/intellectual property (from this moment he committed to retaining personal ownership of all inventions, patents and companies)
In 1974, Dyson left his mentor Jeremy Fry and went on his own, spending several years working on prototype after prototype (5,127 in total) of a vacuum cleaning machine, until he reached a breakthrough, going on to become an incredible success story. He ran up a massive overdraft over a 15-year period, whilst working in the “coach house” of a house in the Wiltshire countryside, bringing up a young family of three children. Along his journey, or Pilgrims progress, as he calls it, with plenty of ups and downs, false turns and many failures, he built an incredible empire, and experienced many failures along the way. I have tried to extract some principles and lessons from his journey, and also some insights about the state of Britains place in the world today.
Philosophies and Logics
- Invention is rarely a flash of brilliance, or “eureka moment”. It is more about failure, endurance, and patient observation, than ultimate success.
- Stamina and determination, along with creativity are needed in overcoming seemingly impossible difficulties in life.
- Learning by failure is a remarkably good way of gaining knowledge. Failure is to be welcomed rather than avoided, it is part of the learning process. Dyson worked on 5,126 prototypes, before being in a position to license his final one. These were all failures, but each failure led to a gradual improvement, which led to the ultimate success.
- An invention might be a brilliant idea, but either unsuited or irrelevant to the market it needs to sell in. As an example, Dyson spent over £500m on developing the electric car, which he later abandoned since the selling price was too high for adoption by the market.
- Natural talent, when backed by natural enthusiasm, will shine through only if the right doors are opened.
- At Dyson, they don’t particularly value experience. If you want to pioneer and invest in new technology, you need to step into the unknown, and in this realm, experience can be a hindrance. Dyson is more interested in how things shouldn’t be done, rather than how they should be done. He talks about one of his early marketing managers, who would always recruit people with 5 or 6 years of experience, when Dyson encouraged her to hire people without any experience. His preference is to take on fresh graduates with limited experience rather than more experienced people. He uses as an example when looking to hire someone to run the Japanese business. The recruitment agents kept bringing him experienced people and he kept having to send them back, expressing his need for inexperienced people. I find this such an incredibly refreshing view, and far removed from the typical recruitment here in the UK and many markets generally, which is so focused on hiring people with experience that exactly matches the role that is being recruited for.
- Engineering-led manufacturers need continuous improvement to stay competitive, and must strive for new and better products all the time. Invention tends to compound invention and companies need to be set up for this.
- When you are solving a problem, only change one thing at a time, and see what difference this change makes. Breakthroughs don’t arrive in a flash of brilliance, or that “eureka moment in the bath”. Test a particular set-up, then make one change at a time to understand what works and fails. This is how you get breakthroughs in unexpected ways. This reminds me of the concept of seat-racing in rowing, where the coaches would change various combinations of rowing boats, and see who would have the most impact in making the boat go faster. Similar concept to doubles tennis where partners are switched around to find the “winning combinations”.
- Follow your own star along a path to question yourself and expert opinion/doubting Thomases along the way. Keep questioning the validity of an established idea. For example, when he brought his vacuum to market, it was priced at £200, which was three times the cost of most vacuum cleaners at the time. Expert opinion said he priced it too higher, but what happened was that customers chose the product for its technological advantage, over existing designs. In fact, on another product, the marketing team advised selling a product for £200 cheaper, as this would lead to more unit sales, but in reality the number of products sold didn’t change.
- Lean engineering is good engineering – Use as little materials or energy as possible in a process, as lighter products need less energy to power them, and makes them more easier to handle.
- Investment in new technology requires many leaps of faith, huge financial commitment, multiple failures, sleepless nights, great deal of frustration, and a few breakthroughs along the way.
- An engineer should feel “permanently dissatisfied”, always searching for improvements along the way.
- Follow your interests and instincts, mistrust experts, know life is one long journey of learning, often from mistakes
- Always strive to be different from others, go against the grain, stand out.
- Dyson was obsessed with both the micro detail as well as the big picture. He was able to take a look at the 30,000 feet view of the business, and future planning, as well as get stuck into the legal documents, whilst fighting a court case in the US against Amway for copying his product, that dragged on for years, where every word in a document was critical.
- At Dyson, “we solve problems every day and we move quickly, failing and learning as we go”.
- Focus on making long-lasting machines that use fewer resources whilst achieving higher performance. This is an effective mission statement.
- Often customers don’t know what they want. Dyson calls this is the Henry Ford conundrum, who purportedly said: if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses (rather than a car). Steve Jobs from apple had a similar outlook.
- Pioneering in business is hard because you don’t know if you are going to succeed. You will stumble and have to pick yourself up believing you will succeed. Dyson never went into business for the money, he created vacuum cleaners, because he found inventing, researching, testing, designing, and manufacturing both highly creative and deeply satisfying.
- Have no fear and be adventurous.
- Learn as you go – start with ideas, understand things, learn and improve.
- Avoid giving advice, because it may be the wrong advice.
- Optimism – believe everything will work out.
- Approach to advertising is to explain things simply and clearly, rather than slick, gimmicky, advertising campaigns. Products don’t walk off shelves. With a new product, you really need to know how to sell it, how it works, and why you might need it. Trust and loyalty come from developing and making high performing products, and then looking after these customers who bought them. This led to Dyson opening their own stores around the world for customers to demo the products and then to buy them direct from Dyson. Although their products are sold in third party retail outlets, the market share of retail is decreasing due to the rise of ecommerce.
- Dyson is deeply critical of the notion that many companies have resigned themselves to the remote working culture, his business requires physical interaction and specialist equipment.
- Dyson doesn’t value market research. He cites an example of BMC (British Motor Corporation), who cancelled a second production line for the Mini, as a result of feedback which said people wouldn’t buy a car with such small wheels. The research was wrong, and they could never catch up with demand from what turned out to be a trend setting Mini.
- Don’t be afraid of change, even if this means dismantling what you have, in order to rebuild it stronger, or even killing a successful product, to replace with a better one, for example in 2018 they took a decision to kill off the corded vacuum models and relace with the cordless, battery powered models.
Philosophies around product development
- Dyson writes about his core technologies and how they have evolved over time. Most important was the development of high-speed motors, which enabled Dyson to make a rapid succession of jumps and quantum leaps in the products offered.
- It was this process of developing small, light, high speed electric motors, rather than a eureka moment, which ultimately led to the development of cordless stick vacuums.
- The invention of the air blades in bathrooms was a leap forward in technology since the machines were much lower uses of energy than the existing machines, which were energy consuming and less effective in terms of hand drying. He notes however the paper towel industry still controls 90% of the hand-drying market, worth billions each year (companies like Kimberly Clark, Georgia – Pacific).
- The invention of the indoor purifiers was developed because of the realisation that indoor air pollution can be 5 times worse compared with outdoor air pollution.
- Dyson developed hair dryers were developed over a period of four years, at a cost of £55m, making 600 prototypes along the way with 103 engineers. Dyson and colleagues would grow their hair whilst working on the product, to enable them to really understand the science of hair.
- Dyson forecasts always tended to underestimate market demand, irrespective of their premium pricing. A key lesson here is that even if you product is priced higher than existing products, customers will buy it, if they deem the technology to be worth the price.
- Their core technologies (digital electric motors, heaters and batteries) are produced in Dyson owned factories, since these products contain valuable IP and know how, but they have arrangements with third party factories to assemble and make the final products.
Thoughts on Britain
I perceived Dyson’s comments on Britain to be fairly critical in general, but more out of frustration with the politics.
- When Dyson started in the 1970s, manufacturing and selling were looked upon as “grubby trades”, and not much has changed in this respect.
- Although invention and manufacturing picked up during WW2, Britian seems to have lost interest in it during peacetime, with little incentive to innovate.
- For much of the 20th century, Britain’s manufacturers had a captive market in its territories around the world, which perhaps made manufacturers complacent, as they didn’t have to fight as hard for their market share. We have seen this change in recent decades with the rise of China and other countries selling into these markets, as British companies have retreated.
- If Britain wants to retain manufacturing, it must reform its planning laws. A manufacturer will only commit capital to a new factory when they can see future sales, but they can’t wait four years for permission and a further two years to build. In Asia, this can be done in four months. Because of planning issues in Britain, Dyson moved to Asia, where he set up in Malaysia and Singapore, as manufacturing businesses moved their operations to China for lower cost staff.
- The 21-year leases are prohibitive, and lease terms need to be more flexible to enable entrepreneurs to flex their arrangements if necessary.
- Britain is not compatible with EU institutions, as they don’t understand their lobbying and workings. Britain has a long history of trading with the commonwealth along with a pioneering spirit, based on free trade. The EU is designed by France and Germany to be a single, closed market, protecting EU manufacturers and companies from foreign imports, by imposing steep import tariffs.
- His observation on British entrepreneurs, is they tend to sell out, or take a company public at the earliest opportunity, citing very few large private companies with the exception of JCB. This contrasts with the USA, France, Germany, and Spain which all have significant private businesses. A reason may be due to the aristocracy who never worked but inherited wealth, or companies which had easy sales to their empire, whilst other companies had to use their industrial might to compete at world trade.
Education
Dyson has done a lot for engineering in the UK, by setting up a university in rural Wiltshire, as well as other initiatives. At the university, students who get on to the programme, commit to a 4-year degree, where they work alongside Dyson engineers for three days, whilst doing class-room style teaching for two days. There is no tuition fees paid, so students can graduate with a degree, work experience, no debt, and possibly a job too at the end. It is competitive to get onto the programme, with a 1 in 25 chance of getting on. This, I feel is what education should be about. I struggle to see the logic for modern university education especially here in the UK, where you graduate with a mountain of debt, limited work experience, and then you still have to find a job at the end.
- A key principle here is learning by doing, learning by trail and error, and learning by failing. He says British schools have missed a trick by not catering to people for whom academia is of no real interest. He advocates for more design and technology classes.
- Dyson is critical of the parrot-fashion style of exam learning, by which students rehearse material and answer a series of exam questions. He is a proponent of problem solving, which is engineering. People who do well at exams, are not necessarily those who do well at work because they don’t learn about problem solving.
- Education should be about problem solving, and not retaining knowledge to pass exams.
- He is critical of the way universities have essentially turned into big businesses, bringing foreigners to the universities for their money, rather than for culture and knowledge.