Founders - #25 Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson

Episode Date: April 22, 2018

What I learned from reading Against the Odds: An Autobiography by James Dyson---I am a creator of products, a builder of things. [0:01]This book is the story of 15 years of struggle to finally invent, own, and sell his own product. [1:35]This is the exposition of a business philosophy which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. [2:11]The first 75% to 80% of the book is just struggle after struggle. [2:47]Dyson had a bunch of people that he looked up to that motivated him as a young man. Thomas Edison is one of those people. [4:51]Such reverence has been accorded to the miserable wheel —that perhaps that alone can account for the fact it was never improved. Perhaps millions of people in the last few years had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having an idea. [6:10]The look of the product —the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another—is still closest to my heart. [7:04]After the idea there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape long before I understood how it worked. [8:09]The greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come. The actual making of money. Paper stuff in thick wads which they finally give to you because you have done something good. [8:40]The best kind of business is one where you could sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes. That type of investment is long term, high risk, and not very British. Or at least it looks like a high-risk policy. It is not so likely to prove hazardous to one’s financial health as simply following the herd. [9:25]Difference for the sake of it. In everything. Because is must be better. From the moment the ideas strikes, to the running of the business. Difference, and retention of total control. [10:39]This is not even a business book. If anything it is a book against business, against the principles that have filled the world with ugly, useless objects. [11:37]Everybody told James over and over and over again “Who are you to think that you could invent a better vacuum cleaner? If that was possible Hoover would have done it already." [12:44]We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it. What follows just happens to be my way.  [13:15]I have been a misfit throughout my professional life, and that seems to have worked for my advantage. Misfits are not born or made. They make themselves. [13:45]I took on the big boys at their own game, made them look very silly, just by being true to myself. [15:56]There was no dad to teach me how to run. There was no dad to tell me how great I was. Herb Elliot was a big name [in running] at the time, so I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen the leg muscles was to run up and down sand dunes. This suited me fine. I would get up at six in the morning and run dunes for hours, or put on my running kit at ten o’ clock at night and not reappear until after midnight. Out there alone on the dunes I got a terrific buzz knowing that I was doing something that no one else was—they were all tucked away in bed. I knew I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to do.  [18:14]Running is a wonderful thing. It isn’t like a team sport where you depend on other people. There is no question of your performance being judged. You either run faster than everyone else or you do not. In running your performance is absolute. I was out there [on the sand dunes] learning how to do something, and getting a visible result. [19:34]As I started to win by greater and greater margins I did it [run sand dunes] more and more because I knew the reason for my success was that out on the sand dunes I was doing something else no one else was doing. They were all running around the track like a herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come in first. [20:50]I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning how to overcome nerves, and as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind, I trained harder to stay in front. To this day it is the fear of failure, more than anything else, that keeps me working at success. [21:31]The only way to make a genuine breakthrough was to pursue a vision with single-minded determination in the face of criticism. [22:26]Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. The mere fact that something had never been done before presented, to Brunel, no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible—he was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible to imagine in this feckless age. I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life when I have encountered difficulty and self-doubt I have looked to his example to fire me on. [22:55]I have told myself, when people tried to make me modify my ideas, that the Great Western Railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man, pursued with dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Throughout my story I will return to Brunel, and to other designers and engineers, to show how identifying with them, and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life, enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has. [24:59]Remember that I am celebrating only my stubbornness. I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule. [25:42]So my dream was to be a Isambard Kingdom Brunel. [26:40]The public has been easily convinced by advertising, and receptiveness to revolution has dwindled. Such ‘invention’ as is now allowed is the prerogative of multinationals, not people. Where are our Wright Brothers? Where have the Edisons gone? And the Henry Fords? They are not here. We have broken new frontiers, but where are the names? Who invented the space shuttle? The nuclear submarine? The wind farm? When you go for backing for your crazy scheme it is not enough to be a man, you have to be a group of men. And where is the fun in that? [26:56]I learnt a crucial business principle: The only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new, that has style value as well as substance, and which they cannot get anywhere else. [28:03]College had taught me to revere experts and expertise. Jeremiah Fry ridiculed all that; as far as he was concerned, with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible. It was mind-blowing. And as we proceeded I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. The more I observed his method, the more it fascinated me. [31:07]I learned one of the most crucial business lessons of my life; to stint on investment in the early stages, to try to sell a half-finished product, is to doom from the start any project you embark on. [32:13]People do not want all-purpose; they want high-tech specificity. [34:11]You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great new idea, let alone two, or even several. [34:20]Only by trying to sell the thing that you have made yourself, by dealing with consumers’ problems and the product’s failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done. Only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others, and demand a heavy price, with all his heart. [35:52]It was an interesting lesson in psychology, teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer. [36:26]Editorials are the very best way of convincing the public. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements. [39:20]One fo the strains of this book is about CONTROL. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, then you will be the better able to sell it and then, reciprocally, to go back to it and improve it. From there you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness. To see it through all the way to its optimum point. To total fruition, if you like. [42:04]I was stopped by one of them with the words I was to hear over and over and over again for the next ten years. ‘But James, your idea can’t be any good. If there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner, Hoover would have invented it.' [48:07]We always want to create something new out of nothing, and without research, and without long hard hours of effort. But there is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence—and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap. [51:38]A vacuum cleaner designed entirely by me, incorporating innovations up to the very latest point at which my technology had arrived, to be produced and marketed and sold under my own exclusive direction was, to be frank, what this whole thing had been all about. [1:02:48]It was a fantastic environment to work in, for it was just engineers and designers, and no one to mess us around. There were no salesmen, no advertising people, no marketing managers, to interfere and try to guide us in their direction. We had nothing to do but deduce our own dream product. [1:04:48]Everyday products sell. Although it is harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed there is no need to create a market. Try out current products in your own home, and make a list of things that you don’t like about them. I found about 20 things wrong with my Hoover Jr. at the first attempt. [1:07:19]Total control. From the first sprouting of the idea, through research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings, tooling, production, sales and marketing, all the way into the homes, it is most likely to succeed if the original visionary (or mule) sees it right through. [1:11:43]On 2 May 1992, I found myself looking at the first, fully operational, visually perfect, Dyson Dual Cyclone. I was thirty-one years old when I tore the bag off my Hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole. 2 May 1992 was my forty-fifth birthday. [1:12:24]We were selling more vacuum cleaners than anyone else despite costing twice as much. [1:14:32]In other words: if you make something, sell it yourself. And so we did. And absolutely nothing went bang. Except, of course, everyone else’s market slice. [1:17:57]Encourage employees to be different, on principle. This is part of my anti-brilliance campaign. Very few people can be brilliant. Those who are, rarely do anything worthwhile. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by being brilliant. And if you can’t be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think. [1:21:18] ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

I am a creator of products, a builder of things, and my name appears on them. That is how I make a living, and they are what have made my name at least familiar in a million homes. I lay no claim to the epithet household word, though I harbor a secret dream of synonymity and occasionally imagine a time years from today when Dyson replaces Hoover. Detached from me to such an extent that most people will have no idea that there was ever a man called Dyson. I like the idea of a child in the 21st century telling his friends he can't come out for a bit

because mom wants me to dice in my room. Long after my bones have crumbled and I am no more than a potential clogging irritant for lesser machines. Okay, so that is from the introduction of just an absolutely wonderful book. I don't know if I've ever highlighted a book more than this one out of the 20 or 30 that I've read so far for this podcast. So that book is Against the Odds, an autobiography by James Dyson. So as you can see from that short little paragraph, his personality, I think, is more apparent in this book than I would say almost any other founders has been. Keep in mind, obviously, it's an autobiography

where most of the books we cover are written by other people. But just this line, I am no more, he's talking about his bones are crumbled, and he's no more a potential clogging irritant for lesser machines. He, rightfully so, he's very proud of his products, and this book is the story of 15 years of struggle to finally invent, manufacture, and sell his own product. So let's get back into it. I don't want to, I want to cover as much of this as fast as possible. I do have a lot of highlights here.

So let's see where we're going to go. So I'm going to stay in the introduction. It's where I start. It's where I immediately started reading. And I'm looking at the few pages now. And it's just, it's like I highlighted the whole thing. So let's go back to the introduction. Okay, so this is gonna tell you

why you should read the book. He said, this is also the exposition of a business philosophy, which is very different from anything you might have encountered before. So you're gonna see here as we cover more of the book, he's not a typical businessman. He wasn't even interested in that. He wanted to be an artist and then later a designer and then finally an engineer,

which is, if you talk to him today, is what he considers himself. He uses the word engineer. He still owns Dyson. And he's worth about, his estimated net worth is around $5 billion to this day, or currently rather, which which is gonna be really surprising when you consider the first, I would say, 75%, 80% of the book is just struggle after struggle after struggle, which I think is actually the most interesting parts

of these books that we're talking about because a lot of people can look at people like James Dyson or Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or any of these other people that we've talked about, like, wow, that guy's really special. But when you read their early lives, you realize,, no, they didn't, they didn't, they didn't just wake up and be that way. They had to make themselves into that person. And you definitely see that with him. So he talks about the exposition of a business philosophy,

which is very different from anything you might've encountered before. It's because he has a lot of interesting ideas. And, and one of my favorite parts, and we'll get towards, towards the end where actually talks about his, uh, his business philosophy. That's actually how this podcast is probably going to close. Okay. So let's skip to the next page. It is all happened. He's still talking about, um, like he's looking back before he gets into the story of his youth and who he was, uh, at a younger time. Uh, so he's talking about like, how the hell did he wind up here? He goes, it has all happened, I really believe, because of the intrinsic excellence of the machine. He's talking about the Dyson vacuum cleaner, the digital cyclone,

which he owns the patents on. Because it is a better vacuum cleaner than anything that has gone before. And because it looks better than anything like it has ever looked. The brand Hoover, and his main competitor, obviously, is Hoover Vacuums, and it's the machine he was using, which irritated him so much that motivated him to try to make a better, to design a better vacuum cleaner to begin with. The brand Hoover became synonymous with this machine,

and countless other industrial giants got rich on it. If anyone was going to step in and shake this global Farago up a bit, it was very unlikely to be me, an Englishman who wasn't a qualified engineer without even a physics degree to my name, riding on the crest of one moment of Edisonian illumination. So that Edisonian, he's obviously referencing somebody we've talked about on the podcast and somebody I want to read another book on because he's so fascinating. That's Thomas Edison.

Dyson has a bunch of people that he looked up to that motivated him as a young man to become an inventor, become an engineer. And Edison is one of the people that he constantly references. And he likes Edison's approach to invention, which is just to try something and to keep trying until you figure it out.

So there's that famous quote. He's like, I didn't fail. I just found 10,000 ways it didn't work. That is very much Dysonian. I think he made, I'll cover it in the podcast shortly but i think like 5 000 or 12 000 different prototypes before he manufactured his first vacuum cleaner so uh he's definitely um definitely in the edisonian school of engineering uh continuing now and yet that was how it turned out the bag bag, meaning the bag,

the vacuum bag, the bag was discarded forever and replaced with a little typhoon that spun at the speed of sound in a chamber that couldn't clog. And the vacuum cleaner was in total control of its own awesome potential. I own it exclusively. And with it, you might say the key to every household in the developed world. Still in the introduction, this is funny. So he talks about such reverence. He's talking about other inventions in history. Such reverence has been accorded to the miserable wheel that perhaps that alone can account for the fact that it was never improved. Perhaps millions of people in the last few years had had ideas for improving it. All I did was take things a little further than just having the idea.

So what he's referencing there is he partially owned a company, but was the inventor of something called the ball barrel, which when he was building like a farmhouse in the English countryside, he was like, how the hell do wheelbarrows suck this bad if everybody uses them every day? And he couldn't turn, it would sink in mud and do all this other stuff. So he designed basically a wheelbarrow that instead of having a wheel, it had a ball. Then therefore you had greater control and you had 360 degree movement

and it didn't get stuck and it didn't sink. This is just on the next page, this is a random sentence i highlighted that's uh interesting the look of the product the intangible style that sets one thing apart from another is still closest to my heart so he's talking about the dual cyclone uh when when it first started getting uh after he produced it and once he started store started buying it you'd walk into the store and you'd see 10 other vacuum cleaners that all looked the same and then his.

And he did that obviously intentionally and we'll go into a little bit more about the design of that. My own success has been in observing objects in daily use, which it was always assumed could not be improved. By lateral thinking, the Edisonian approach, there's that word again, it is possible to arrive empirically, another word he uses constantly, at an advance. Anyone can become

an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners, both of which he designed and he never had previous experience with. After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology. My first cyclonic vacuum cleaner was built out of cereal packets and masking tape. Long before I understood how it worked. After that initial eureka, it was a long haul to the dual cyclone, so-called because an outer cyclone rotating at 200 miles per hour removes large debris and most of the dust, while an inner cyclone rotating at 924 miles per hour creates huge gravitational force and drives the finest dust, even particles of cigarette smoke, out of the air. But the greatest lesson for aspiring inventors was yet to come. The actual making of money. Paper stuff in thick wads, which they finally give to you because you've done something good.

He's really, I really, he's just funny, man. He's funny. Well, I don't want to read that part because it's not going to make sense in isolation. It talks about how retaining control of the patent is so important. And he goes into detail about how he, in a few chapters, how he messed up at one point. And when he was a young man inventing things, he would sign the patent over to the company

instead of himself. So he wound up starting a company, inventing. He started a company based on an invention of his and then signed the patent over to his invention. And then he gets kicked out of the company. So this is his, I would say his ethos. The best kind of business is one where you could sell a product at a high price with a good margin and in enormous volumes. That's what Dyson does. For that, you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than existing one.

That type of investment is long-term, high risk, and not very British, or at least it looks like a high-risk policy. In the longer view, it is not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd. Amen. Now, this is interesting. Difference for the sake of it in everything. Okay, so let's go back to that. So it's not really high-risk, he's saying. In the long review, it's not half so likely to prove hazardous to one's financial health as simply following the herd. Difference for the sake of it in everything. So this is the first time I think I've been introduced to this idea where I do believe in contrarianism and trying to be different, but to be different

so it's better. He arrives at doing a better vacuum cleaner because it's different, but it's better. But he's saying, even if it wasn't, you should be yearning to be different for the sake of it. That's a very interesting thought and something he explores a little bit later. Difference for the sake of it in everything, it must be better from the moment the idea strikes to the running of the business. Difference and retention of total control. If you could, if there was a way to have a one sentence summary of this book, it'd be right there. Difference and retention of total control. Like most founders, James Dyson, which I don't know if he was like this his whole life, but after reading this book, I would say most likely arrived to this conclusion based on experience,

what he would call empiricism. But he was a control freak and he encourages you in whatever you're working on to be a control freak as well. This is not a glib guide to instant wealth or effective management by Californian style happy talk and company outings to assault courses. This is not even a business book. It is, if anything, a book against business, against the principles that have filled the world with ugly, useless objects, unhappy people, and brought the country to its economic knees. So what he's talking about there is just similar. If you recall the podcast I did on Jim Clark based on Michael Lewis's book, The New New Thing, where Jim Clark, he believed in the idea of new growth theory that the people actually, the makers, the engineers, the people that are actually creating the products and services that we're all using should be the ones that are chiefly rewarded. And everybody else should be secondary to that. I would say James Dyson definitely holds that view as well um and so he

constantly throughout the business uh so excuse me throughout the book trashes like the thought process of quote-unquote businessmen and suits and what he means by there is people selling you know a commoditized undifferentiated product and most of those people are what he calls fucking idiots um and we'll see why because a lot of of them, everybody told him, I mean, over and over and over again, that, oh, James, who are you to think that you could invent a better vacuum cleaner? If that was possible, Hoover would have done it already. And that kind of thinking that is kind of, in my opinion, pervasive, rather, in most of the books that we read, when you see that the objections that these founders

all have to deal with, all seem have to deal with when they're very, starting out when they're very young. And this is wrapping up the introduction here. We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it. What follows just happens to be my way. The first paragraph of chapter one, he goes, though writing an autobiography, I am not so terminally afflicted by solifism as to think you will want much of my parents' birth and what J.D. Salinger called all that David Copperfield kind of crap. I have been a misfit throughout my professional life

and that seems to have worked to my advantage. So what he's talking about there is he talks a little bit about his childhood and like the things that influenced him, like his father dying, which we're gonna get to in a minute, but it's not, you can read it in 10, 15 minutes. So it does not take a long time to read at all.

Okay, so he goes, I've been a misfit throughout does not take a long time to read at all. Okay. So he goes, I've been a misfit throughout my professional life. And that seems to have worked to my advantage. Misfits are not, I love this part. Misfits are not born or made. They make themselves and a stubborn opinionated child desperate to be different and to be right encounters only smaller refractions of the problems he will always experience and he carries the weight of that dislocation forever so he's describing his experience trying to go against the grain um so his dad he's nine years old he's got two older brothers and his dad uh he said uh my father died of cancer in 1956. Combined with the loss of my father, this made me very competitive. And in the wider picture, there is

really not so great a difference between a rampaging industrial giant trying to sue you out of business and a hulking great 15 year old trying to knock you off a rock or duck you in the sea. So he was bullied by older boys. And something I think played heavily on him is that his dad died so young, so no one really taught him how to be. He looked to other male figures for inspiration, and a lot of those happened to be engineers and business people, which plays heavily on the trajectory of his life. So he becomes very competitive.

He's kind of like a troublemaker, like most of these entrepreneurs are. And I'm going to skip over a bunch of this, but I do want to cover something that he picks up, this interesting parallel. Before I get there, let me read this one paragraph. To take things back, though, for I am in danger of leaping straight into my inventing life at the first opportunity, I should go through a few little epiphanies in my childhood that might have contributed to my story, which is ultimately about how I took on the big boys at their own game, made them look very silly just by being true to myself. I do not plan to give you the whole biography.

Thank you very much. I am not quite so involved in my own self-importance that I imagine a day-by-day account of my life will hold your attention very long. Still, I think there is an odd thing in my growing up which might be illuminating. Okay, so I love this part. It's on the very next page,

and we're gonna get into some of that. So he's trying to, again, he's growing up without a father. It's just his mom raising three boys and he's looking for outlets to his competitive nature. And well, let me just read this. Another thing that happened about that time was that I discovered I was good at running. But just when I started to win some long distance races, puberty took a grip of my fellows, and they all got huge. I was a very late developer, and so suddenly I was crap again. Back to the ignominy of second rate academic performance, few friends, and no dad. The first race I entered after my own balls had dropped was a revelation.

I was 14 years old, a terribly mopey adolescent, and went into it expecting to come last. But as the race went on, over about three miles, all the other chaps started to come last. But as the race went on, over about three miles, all the other chaps started to slow down. This puzzled me a bit because I had been jogging along thinking about this and that, rather enjoying the running, and wasn't tired at all. I had the impression that they were all running backwards, and suddenly the leading pack was only a few yards in front. I gritted my teeth and ground out every last bit of energy I had to battle past them before we got to the line. This success delighted me no end. I was not doing very well at school and suddenly I had something in which I could kick people's asses occasionally.

I entered more and more races and won them all quite easily. Just as it had been with the bassoon, there was no one to teach me how to run. There was no dad to tell me how great I was, and it became a very introverted kind of obsession with me. Herb Elliott was a big name at the time, so I read a few books about him and discovered that his coach had told him that the way to develop stamina and strengthen the leg muscles

was to run up and down sand dunes. This suited me fine because I had nothing else in Norfolk, that's the city he lived in, because if I had nothing else in Norfolk, I certainly had sand dudes. I like the idea, and maybe I'm selfish for including this in there, but the fact that he gets this idea from reading books. So he's interested in running, so he reads about other runners, and then he winds up getting good ideas from there. He complied with his own

life. That kind of is the reason why I'm reading these books as well. Let's go back to that. So this is what he does. I would get up at six in the morning and run off into the wilds of Norfolk for hours or put on my running kit at 10 o'clock at night and not reappear until after midnight. Out there alone on the dunes, I got a terrific buzz from knowing that I was doing something that no one else was.

They were all tucked up in bed at school. I felt like a pioneer or an astronaut or whatever kind of lone adventure felt right at the time. And I knew that I was training myself to do something better than anyone else would be able to do. Running is a wonderful thing. It isn't like a team sport where you depend on other people or they depend on you. And there's no question of your performance being judged. You either run faster than everyone else or you do not. In running, your performance is absolute. I was out there learning how to do something and getting a visible result. I experienced in that sense a very similar set

of responses to the ones that made me move out of the arts later on and into a technical field where my drawings would not be better or worse than other people according to some spurious set of subjective criteria, but simply right or wrong. So he talks about this, that you don't want to go into a field where you need to rely on the subjective opinions of other people. So think of like somebody trying out to be an actor or like a singer on American Idol or something like that. Another way I've heard people put that is like, I don't want to rely on the good graces of other people. So if he's building a vacuum cleaner, it is either better or it is not. And if it's better, then it logically follows that people

will buy it. The act of running itself was not something I enjoyed. The best you could say for it was that it was lonely and painful. But as I started to win by greater and greater margins, I did it more and more because I knew the reason for my success was that out on the sand dunes, I was doing something that no one else was doing. Apart from me and Herb, no one knew. They were all running around and around the track like herd of sheep and not getting any quicker. Difference itself was making me come first. You see, I'm 18 pages into the book at this point,

and he's constantly pounding this being different, being different, doing things that other people are not doing. And this is the summary of this entire part. In so many ways, it taught me the most significant lessons in all my youth. I was learning about the physical and psychological strength that keeps you competitive. I was learning about obstinacy. I was learning to overcome nerves. And as I grew more and more neurotic about being caught from behind I trained harder to stay in front it is a horribly labored analogy and it is flavored with the fickle seasoning of hindsight but to this day it is the fear of failure more than anything else which makes me keep working

at success okay so now we're skipping ahead. He graduates high school. He goes to an art school in London, and he's thinking he's going to be a painter, and then he starts studying interior design and engineering. But this section is about people who inspired him. So one of them is Buckminster Fuller. Mocked in the early stages of his career, Buckminster Fuller knew well that the only way to make a genuine breakthrough was to pursue a vision with single-minded determination in the face of criticism. If you try to change things, then you upset the establishment, which is why invention and vilification have always gone hand in hand. Here's another person that he inspires. And by the way, you could easily replace James Dyson,

or excuse me, replace Buck Mr. Fuller with James Dyson in that paragraph, and it would still be accurate. The next person is, Isambard Kingdom Brunel was unable to think small, and nothing was a barrier to him. This is somebody else that he looks up to. The mere fact that something had never been done before presented to Brunel no suggestion that the doing of it was impossible. He was fired by an inner strength and self-belief almost impossible

to imagine in this feckless age. While I would never lay claim to the genius of a man like that, I have tried to be as confident in my vision as he was. And at times in my life, when I've encountered difficulty and self-doubt, I have looked to his example to fire me on. I think that's a natural, uh, it's human nature, uh, looking at these people and realizing that if whatever, like whatever you're going through, other people have gone through worse. And if you seek out those kinds of examples, like kind of what we're doing here on the podcast, it keeps you going and realizing that it's not impossible. Okay. So a couple more paragraphs down, he's still talking about Brunel here. So he says, I have tried in my own way to draw on Brunel's dream of applying emergent technology in ways as yet unimagined. He was never afraid to be different or shocking. He never shrinked the battles with

the money men, and he had to overcome the most incredible resistance to his ideas. When he applied the system of the screw propeller to a transatlantic steamship, he actually filled a boat with people and sent them across the sea. I have asked people only to push my inventions around, not to get inside them and try to float. And so I have sought out, here's, again, I'm gonna keep hammering this because I think,

if he repeats something over and over again, which you'll realize if you read the book, I wanna include it as much as possible in the podcast because it's obviously very important to him. So he goes, and so I have sought out originally for its own sake. I have sought out originality

for its own sake and modified it into a philosophy which demands difference from what exists even if only to redefine a stale market. And I have told myself

when people tried to make me modify my ideas that the great western railway could not have worked as anything but the vision of a single man, pursued with a dogged determination that was nothing less than obsession. Throughout my story, I will try to return to Brunel and to other designers and engineers to show how identifying with them

and seeing parallels with every stage of my own life enabled me to see my career as a whole and to know that it would all turn out the way it has. By which I am led to believe that, in the case of inventors, for vision one might equally well read stubbornness. Remember that I am celebrating only my stubbornness. I am claiming nothing but the virtues of a mule. So he talks about why looking up to people like Burnell and Buckminster Fuller, and then eventually Jeremiah Fry, I think is his name. He switches from art to engineering. And this is him talking about not relying on human judgment once more. In art, you place yourself at the mercy of human judgment and

its odious courtiers, human error and human weakness. In engineering and design, you are at the mercy only of natural law, physics, and the market, both developmental capital and income generated by response to the product. They are cruel taskmasters, but at least they are visible ones. The artist is equally enslaved to the market. The industrialist is just more honest about it. So my dream was to be a Brunel, but this was never an age of invention. It has been an age when the great monopolies, companies, have been able to dictate that progress has ended. And they did this when they were satisfied not with their product, but with their control of its market. The public has been easily convinced by advertising and receptiveness to revolution has dwindled.

Furthermore, such invention as it now allowed is the prerogative of multinationals, not people. I love this part. Where are our Wright brothers? Where have the Edisons gone? And the Henry Fords? We have broken new frontiers, but where are the names? Who invented the space shuttle? The submarine the wind farm when you go for backing for your crazy scheme it is not enough to be a man you have to be a group of men and where is the fun in that so he talks a little bit about he was just trying to find ways to make money to pay to earn extra money ways in school so

he starts selling um his friend was like producing cheap wine and so he was importing it and then going uh from southern spain and then going around and selling it to other british people and uh he's like i was making reasonable pocket money flogging it by the case to the student union staff and and i suppose it was here that I learned the crucial business principle that would guide my later attempts at making money from invention. The only way to make real money is to offer the public something entirely new that has style value as well as substance and which they cannot get anywhere else.

Okay, so I'm skipping way ahead. He goes to work for this guy named Jeremy Fry. as well as substance and which they cannot get anywhere else. Okay. So I'm skipping way ahead. He goes to work for this guy named Jeremy Fry. And Fry was a local millionaire businessman and inventor, but he wasn't like the rest of the business people that, that James had interacted with up until that point. He would actually like get his hands dirty and he was involved in the engineering, and very much, I would say, the precursor to how James Dyson organized his own career. And so this is a little bit about how Jeremy Fry works.

He did not, when an idea came to him, sit down and process it through pages of calculations. He didn't argue it through with anyone. He just went out and built it. So it was that when I came to him in the midst of my efforts with the sea truck that summer to say, I have an idea. He would offer no more advice than to say, you know where the workshop is. Go and do it. But we'll need to weld this thing, I would protest.

Well, then, get a welder and weld it. That's Jeremy Fry. When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about it, say hydrodynamics, he would say, the lake is down there, the Land Rover is over there, take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind a boat, look at what happened so he's uh he does this design for uh something that he just referenced there called a sea truck so he's trying to make imagine

if a uh if a flat bottom fishing boat and a pickup truck made love their offspring would be the sea truck, which looks just like somebody put a truck on top of a flat bottom fishing boat. And he's trying to figure out how to make it lighter and faster and do all these other things. And the idea is they could sell it for all kinds of things. A lot of people, a lot of different militaries buy it. Farmers buy it. But you're driving, right? Or excuse me, you're're boating and you could pull it's so flat you can pull right up on land and then people could get out easily um and it

so people use it like uh i think he talks about it where uh just like sheep farmers would use it like to move their sheep it's just all kinds of interesting things but uh right after that, I would say this next paragraph really hits on Dyson's complete lack of respect for experts. So he talks about, okay, Jeremy Fry is saying, hey, you want to test something, then the lake is down there, the Land Rover is over there, take a plank of wood down to the lake, tow it behind the boat and see what happens now this was not a modus operandi that i had encountered before college had taught me to revere experts and expertise fry ridiculed all that as far as he was concerned with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible it was mind-blowing. No research, no workings, no preliminary sketches.

If it didn't work one way, he would just try it another way until it did. And as we proceeded, I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. The more I observed his method, the more it fascinated me. So that paragraph really sets the little kernel of an idea that, hey, Fry's doing exactly what I want to do. He's got his hands in all kinds of businesses based on products that he created himself. And he doesn't go around asking people how to do it or for permission. He just goes and sees what he can figure out on his own. Here's another crucial business lesson that James wants to tell us about. But I learned then one of the most crucial business lessons of my life. To stint on investment in the early stages, to try to sell a half-finished product is to doom from the start any project you

embark on so this is happening because they they design and start to try to sell this thing called the c truck and he realized that uh he they needed a cabin like he wanted to get like right it just looked like uh like somebody put like the base of a truck on top of a boat and he felt that he was having a problem selling it because they didn't finish the actual product and so he's he's asking uh these p like the people running the business hey i need to let's let's make this this um like let's get a cabin for it and they start setting all these fake boundaries on them like oh okay sorry Dyson, we want to see four sales a month, and then we'll take that money and reinvest in a cabin. And then once he hits that, okay, sorry, we need eight sales.

And they just keep moving the goalposts. And then it winds up, he goes, I got my cabin in the end, and sales took off. Okay, so this is something he pounds on a lot. And I think this is even more important in the internet age than even when he was writing these words and in the 90s so he's gonna talk about this this this idea a lot but he goes my big mistake had been presenting the same craft he's talking about the sea truck to each customer and telling them this can be adapted to suit your needs.

If someone wanted a driving boat, I would explain that it could be fitted with compressors, heaters, and a very slow diesel engine. If an oil company wanted a crew bus, I would tell them that suitable seating and a faster engine could be fitted. To the military, I said, I would bulletproof the sides and engines. To constructors in search of a bridging tug, I said, special buffers, high power engine, no problem. I convinced not a single one of them. People do not want all purpose. They want high tech specificity. And this goes hand in hand. So he's always talking about narrowing what your product does because people are not mixing your messages, which is kind of the same thing.

So one is the actual creation of the product and one is the marketing of the product. But he's saying people cannot understand more than one idea at a time, much less seven. So let me give you a real world example. The Dyson vacuum cleaner is the best vacuum cleaner in the world, right? No bag means that the suction is, you get 100% suction 100% of the time. There's nothing clogging and leaving all the dirt and dust that you have in your house on

the floor. But it also is very good for dry cleaning clothes. They never ever marketed it as that. People found that out later on, on their own, because when you introduce multiple messages, they don't understand. They're like, okay, so am I buying a vacuum cleaner or a dry cleaner? So this is what he has to say about that. You simply cannot mix your messages when selling something new. A consumer can barely handle one great idea, let alone two or even several.

Why tell them this thing was universally adaptable when universality mattered to the individual consumer, not a wit? It was for the same reason that when I put the dual cyclone on the market that I kept more or less quiet about its potential as a dry cleaning tool. How could I expect the public to believe that this was not only the best vacuum cleaner ever made, but also something completely different? And so with a quite respectable product to present, I set off around the world to start selling

it properly. It was time spent away from designing, but it was to teach me above all else that only by trying to sell things that you have made yourself by dealing with consumer products problems and the products failings as they arise, can you really come to understand what you have done to bond with your invention and to improve it conversely of course only the man who has brought the thing into the world can presume to foist it on others and demand a heavy price with all his heart okay so skipping uh way ahead in the timeline um he decides instead of working for other people with the c truck he wants to go out and do

something on his own so this is where he invents the ball barrow and he stumbles upon something that winds up being extremely important to the rest of his life uh he's going around he has an invention that's clearly better than wheelbarrow it works better but when he tries to sell it to the people that sell wheelbarrows like other stores and stuff they're they're just they're resistant the same thing i said earlier it's like who are and stuff, they're, they're just, they're resistant. The same thing I said earlier, it's like, who are you? Like, why do you think James Dyson that you could make a better wheelbarrow? That's very strange. And he goes, so even if it worked better, they,

they didn't, they wouldn't stock it because why are we going to stock it? The wheelbarrows we have now work perfect and we sell them just as is. So he says, based on this experience, he goes, it was an interesting lesson in psychology teaching me that the entrenched professional is always going to resist far longer than the private consumer and he puts this into practice because no one's no stores will buy the ball barrel from him so he's like oh i'm screwed he goes in a desperation i turned to the newspapers i did a nice little drawing of the ball barrel and slapped down some direct response ads among the baldness cures and incontinence pants for the ball barrel from kirkland dyson designs

19.95 i say dollars but everything's in pounds, but I'll probably use them interchangeably, but just know he's writing in pounds. And for some reason, when I look at that, I say dollars. So Kirk, Doug, Kirk Dyson designs is the company that he founded with other people and their, their main goal is to sell the ball barrel. And they start inventing, he starts inventing other products too, but that's what's going on. So just to make sure I'm clear they're having no success

getting stores to buy it from them so it's like you know what just go in the newspaper I'll put it in the the the book actually shows you know just a tiny little ad maybe a hundred words and then it shows the drawing in black and white so it's like alright well if the stores aren't gonna buy let me see if the people will and so he says okay the ball Bar barrow and it's $19.95 or whatever. And what do you know? The checks started rolling in. I was astonished. This was the same object that had been rejected completely by builders and retailers who had been able to see it in the flesh and it was being brought bought up by members of the public who were sending off checks for 20 quid to a company no one had ever heard of all on the

strength of a weedy little drawing in a tiny newspaper advertisement it was fantastic we were getting a good class of customer from ads in the Sunday Times and the Sunday Telegraph, and the business began gradually to show a profit, producing up to 30 a day and shipping them off by post. From here on, things snowballed. Something he picks up on later, a few paragraphs down, some journalists saw this ad and started to write about it. And he talks about the difference between an editorial and an advertisement. And he talks about this later in great detail.

He has an entire chapter later on about advertising. So he's not a big fan of it, but he does run some ads that are relatively famous. So he goes, it is also the very, it's talking about the editorial. It is also the very best way of convincing the public. One decent editorial counts for a thousand advertisements. Next page, he continues on this idea that he never lets go of. He goes, you need to be direct to your customer. I need to, I guess, back up and explain before. So this makes sense. So he has a board of directors for this company. He's got other investors. He's got other people.

And one guy comes in to be head of sales, and he convinces them to not do direct response ads anymore. And Dyson at the time objects, but he's overruled, and he's mad about it. And he says, but in following his advice to abandon direct selling and supply shops via wholesalers, we began to lose that contact with the customer that was the basis of our success. So he talks about that over and over again. He's like, listen, you, person reading this book, whatever you're building, whatever you're creating,

keep complete control over it and sell it yourself. Market it yourself. Do not outsource that. Do not, he basically wants to be completely vertically integrated. He does not not and you understand why when you read the book like he just all the a lot of his problems where he's being let down by other people and they have a very different business philosophy than he does

so what happens after this the business became cash negative and we started to find ourselves sinking into debt what was the response of the board board? To expand. He's not happy about this either. And he goes, the problem with that was that we were doing it all on borrowed money. So he went from a cashflow positive little business that was growing slowly but steadily to one where they abandoned the direct selling method, starting to outsource control of the customer to retailers, and then deciding, hey, we're not making enough money, so we're expanding. And that's one of the takeaways, where it's like the only time you expand a business is when it's actually doing well,

not when you're just losing constantly money and then barring against it. Because he finds himself in really dire economic times. They're paying like interest rates of about about 25 on their debt at the time which winds up crippling the company so here he's talking about um he gets betrayed by his brother-in-law they throw him out of the company we're gonna get there in a minute but um he uh he talks there's just two things that he learned in this failure. One of the strains of this book is about control. If you have the intimate knowledge of a product that comes with dreaming it up and then designing it, I have been trying to say, then you will be the better, you will be, you will be the better able to sell it and then to go back to it and improve it from that's a weird word

of sentence from there. But the point stands from there you are in the best possible position to convince others of its greatness and to inspire others to give it their very best efforts to developing it and to remain true to it and to see it through all the way to its optimum point to total fruition if you like this is the part i mentioned earlier that he's basically explaining to you the reader uh the mistakes he made in his first company furthermore i weep to recall it i had in my in my naked naivete assigned the patent for the thing meaning the ball barrel to the

company rather than to myself i had no rights at all to the invention I had created and labored over for so long. It was not a mistake I was ever to make again. It wasn't a money thing, by the way. It had nothing to do with me and my family being suddenly deprived of my $10,000 a year salary, nor the fact that I had been pickpocketed by my friends and family. It was a bigger loss than that. To lose my invention was like losing a limb. No, it was worse than that. It was like giving birth and then losing the child. And I was completely shattered by it. Okay, so I'm going to skip ahead. This is right before he gets kicked out of Kirk Dyson. And this is when he already has the idea when he was at home. And he's just that kind of personality.

He's annoyed at how bad the Hoover Junior vacuum cleaner is he was using, and at the time, he was learning about industrial design and manufacturing because the ball barrel was so popular, and he learned about something called a cyclone, and one night he goes to a factory after they close, hops over the fence, and kind of tries to inspect it without getting caught by security to try to see how the damn thing works. And he realizes he spends an entire weekend designing a cyclone for a vacuum cleaner,

which is what he was referencing earlier when he made one out of masking tape and cardboard. So he spends the entire – he's doing this on Saturday night and Sunday. And he's like, this is amazing. night and sunday and uh he's like this is amazing like we're this is gonna be a really good idea like it's gonna turn the the the fortunes of kirk dyson or yeah kirk dyson the company around because now we'll have a new product we can sell and uh this is this is what happens next and the note I left myself is don't make your products too wide. Narrow it down. He's constantly harping on that fact.

After the amazing weekend, I could hardly wait to get back to the office. Horrible though it was. It was an unusual feeling for me for I had been sometime growing tired of life at Kirk Dyson for all the reasons I gave earlier and was, though I didn't know it of course, approaching the termination of my relationship with the company. They just kicked him out. They had a meeting one day and he was out. But on this particular morning, I was returning to work having just made the first steps in developing what I felt, what I felt sure was to be one of the inventions of the decade and which could solve all of Kirk Dyson's problems at a blow. As I drove in, I turned over in my mind as you do the conversation that would

follow my revelation. The board would be bound to object that the vacuum cleaner was not a gardening product and that we had better stick to the market we knew. Boards of directors are predictable like that. We had come to realize some months before that we needed to diversify. The selling operation, management structure, factory, and enormous bank overdraft that we needed to finance the company could no longer be supported by sales volume and profit margins of the ball barrel but we were still thinking purely of the gardening market by way of diversification we had been developing a hydroponic drip watering system that involved a network of thin plastic pipes running under the garden, delivering water directly to the roots of the plants so that nothing was lost by evaporation,

and you watered only the plants you wanted to without encouraging weeds or slugs and snails. Sadly, for it was a fine product, we had made a major marketing error. What we were attempting to offer was a panacea to all of your gardening troubles. But rather, as had happened with the C-truck, consumers were simply not able to grasp so many improvements in one fell swoop. And the thing was too universal to all purpose. Had we begun it, say, as a greenhouse watering system with a single time-saving benefit thus appealing to a specific need it would have bedded down nicely into the real market so there's that that thought again stay narrow i felt that the gardening market was simply too small for the sorts of things i believed

i was capable of producing i thought we should be making a higher value product retailing for 100 200 even 300 that sold in enormous quantities throughout the year, not just in the summer and to every kind of household, not just the ones with gardens. Something like, oh, I don't know, like a vacuum cleaner, for example. And so it was that when I sat down with the board, I was ready to defend myself against their objections that the vacuum cleaner was not a gardening tool. But even as I was doing this, I was more than somewhat miffed that they showed so little excitement about my invention. As directors of a manufacturing company, they should have been hopping about in delirious glee at the discovery that one of their

colleagues had invented something that could instantly dominate an enormous market, save the That's that system he was designing until in the height of my harangue and the moment is as fresh in my mind as if it was happening even as i write i was stopped by one of them with the words i was to hear over and over and over again for the next 10 years but james he said smugly simpering like a father patronizing an over-enthusiastic child your idea can't be any good if there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner hoover would have invented it i think that qualifies for induction into our critics don't know shit segment so now we've reached the main part what i would say uh constitutes the majority of the book um and that's the beginning of he finally gets in the vacuum cleaner business so the board laughs doesn't like his invention.

A few weeks later, they kick him out. So then he goes and he decides, you know what? I think this is a good idea. I'm going to do this. So he goes back to Jeremy Fry. They form a partnership. They both throw in some money, even though James doesn't have a lot of money at this point. He puts his house as collateral, which he does several times in the book, which is crazy.

And they go about trying to sell a Cyclone vacuum cleaner. So let's jump into that. He goes, my fingers numb with chill. I huddle like Bob Cratchit over a single candle and prepare to hammer out another prototype Cyclone. There is some way to go yet. You will have noticed, if not by the weight of the pages in your right hand, then by the fact that I have said somewhere before that before I went into production with the Dual Cyclone, I had built 5,127 prototypes. So far, you know only about one, the cardboard and tape thing that I tossed together on the kitchen floor. Well, this little room in the coach house is where I built most of the other 5,126.

So the coach house is on his property at home. It's a little house with no plumbing, no electricity, no anything at the start. He eventually winds up putting all that stuff in himself, but that's why he's working by candlelight. And all the while I was making cyclones, acrylic cyclones, rolled brass cyclones, machined aluminum cyclones. For three years, I did this alone. I could not afford anyone to help me. And what would have been the point when I could do it all myself? When you start out, you just don't think it's going to take that long. Time passes by and it's always manana. This is his son.

Sam grew up and started walking, then talking, and all the while I made cyclones. Deidre, that's his wife, did everything else. Sometimes I would lose control completely when a model went wrong after weeks of planning. And Jacob, this is his other son, told me only recently how well he remembers the sound of sheets of acrylic shattering out in the coach house or down in the cellar and me exploding in a typhoon of verisophous profanity. Now he's going to go a little bit more into this, the Edisonian principle of development. This is what development is all about. Empirical testing demands that you only ever make

one change at a time. It is the Edsonian principle and it is bloody slow. It is a thing that takes me ages to explain to my graduate students at Dyson Appliances. But it is so important. They tend to leap into tests, making dozens of radical changes, then stepping back to test their new masterpiece. How do they know which change has improved it and which hasn't?

There is no such thing as a quantum leap. There is only dogged persistence, and in the end, you make it look like a quantum leap. While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say that it's all you need to succeed, the truth is that it demoralized me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day in the coach house exhausted and depressed because that day's cyclone had not worked there were times when i thought it would never work that i would keep on making cyclone after cyclone never going forwards never going backwards until i died so he eventually gets a working prototype going and he says you know what

i like designing and building things. So that's how I want to spend my time. Him and Jeremy agree that, hey, why don't we just, we build it and then we can just license it to other people. So what would happen is they would retain all the rights and then other people sell it, take care of all the customers and everything else. And they wind up getting, you know,

would get like hypothetically 5% or 10% royalty for the life of it. And some people are really successful doing this. So that's why they thought they could do it. Um, in one example, the book, I think, uh, they're licensing one of the vacuum cleaners cause it's also country specific and, and, and they're completely like a customizable, the license agreements. So I think at one point there, uh,

one company is doing like 100 million in sales, and they get 5% of that. So they were making 5 million a year, quote unquote, doing nothing, which he took umbrage to, because he's like, I'm not doing nothing. I spent years inventing this thing and giving you a product to sell. But just so you know where we're at in the book, he's going around and he's meeting with all these companies all throughout Europe, trying to get them to license the product. And this is the results of some of the meetings. It really was extraordinary and quite unexpected. Every single one of them seemed to miss the point that here was an innovation

of real benefit to the consumer, a massive leap from a crappy old carpet sucker to a cleaner of total efficiency and undiminishable power. For each manufacturer in turn it represented an opportunity to bring out a new product with a major technical advantage over their competitors. The most ironic in this respect was Goblin who had trouble finding time to see me because they had their staff on a two-day week because sales were so low. As if it were better to save time by not seeing me rather than buying something better than anything their competitor

had, starting to sell again and going back to work full-time. All anyone could ever think of to say was, ours works perfectly well, ours works perfectly well already. People are used to bags, and we like selling bags. And if they weren't repeating these little trite objections, they were sighing or looking the other way or smiling conspiratorially to each other, even laughing. Enough of this could drive you mad. When he tried to license technology

even to other existing manufacturers of vacuum cleaners, well, yours doesn't have a bag, though. And he's like, yeah, that's the entire point. He's like, then their response is, well, we make a lot of money selling bags. Like, that's the problem. So it's really interesting because you see this play out. And it's just humans. We've seen this play out in different industries, in different books,

in different time periods. But it kind of stays uh constant and i think that's where the opportunity is for us to to build and design things where there's big holes by the already existing players um he has no success anywhere america germany britain nowhere. Japan was his saving grace, where he finally is able to license one of these things to Japan. And so this part is called Japan Gets It. Let's just read a little bit what's going on here. In fact, they thought the machine was wonderful.

Unlike anyone I had met so far, they understood. Let me just back up. All this stuff is is taking place over several years so it's not like it was quick that he that he arrived at being able to sell a license to japan and we find out wind up finding out it's not even that lucrative in fact they thought the machine was wonderful unlike anyone i had met so far they understood exactly what i was trying to do and knew exactly how to sell it and within three weeks we had signed a deal by which i get front money of $35,000

plus design fees of $25,000 on completion of the drawings and then a 10% royalty with an annual minimum of $60,000. So this front money, which I've never done a license to, I didn't know anything about it. So one of the most important things, especially because usually the inventors are trying to license these things to larger companies, is when you're negotiating, you have to negotiate a large upfront payment

because that's going to get you through the development. Because even if they buy your license and you sign a license agreement, it might take them years to start actually manufacturing and selling the thing, which means if you're only getting the royalty, by the time you get the royalty, you might have been out of business or went bankrupt or whatever the case is. And then real quick,

I want to point out on this deal where they talked, the royalty was an annual minimum of 60,000. That's all he ever gets from these people because there's no way to prove how much they're selling.

And they wind up giving him like reports and it's all like handwritten. It's just, it's really weird. Okay, and so they're calling his vacuum cleaner the G-Force. From the beginning of 1985, the G-Force became all consuming. It had to be. I had lost Amway.

I had lost Rotorque. And I was heavily in debt and had to survive. Interesting story that I'm not going to include on the podcast because it takes place over many chapters, really long. But the summary of it is Ann Waco, this really friendly guy, seeks out James Dyson after seeing the dual cyclone or what becomes a dual cyclone in a magazine. He said, hey, I know you're having trouble with all these other companies selling your product. We love it. We want to do it. They kind of rope-a-dope them. They wind up signing an agreement and he tells them all his ideas and gives them the information and he doesn't hear from them for a while. Then they sue him for fraud, saying he lied to them, which he didn't. And that goes on.

He's spending tons of money going deep into debt because Amway is a multibillion-dollar corporation at the time. And he's just some dude living in the outskirts of England. And they did all this just so later on they made their own cyclone vacuum cleaner. So they took his technology basically and stole it. Later on in the book, he winds up getting retribution for this. But at the time, it almost killed him. So that's what he means, I lost Amway. And he goes in, he goes,

I knew that if I had a product that was being sold successfully in Japan and which clearly worked, it would lift the Amway stigma and convince people that the cyclone had work and not that we had duped anybody. So not only that, after the Amway sues him, again, they're suing him on false pretenses, but the people that he's continuing to try to sell to afterwards are like, oh, this guy's duped Amway. Basically, they believed what Amway was saying without any proof, and it was really to sell to afterwards like oh this guy's a you know this guy's duped amway basically they they believed what amway was saying without any proof and it was really damaging to him so it's really just shady um i spent much much of the next year living in japan in stints of six weeks at a time

designing the g-force and seeing it into production it was mentally and emotionally draining it was professionally quite amazing. They worked all day and all night. I could give a model maker a drawing at 8 p.m., and 24 hours later, he would come back to me with a perfect working model, something that could take weeks in Britain. And there was none of the British attitude that makes a team sit down before any work is done and say, right, how many problems have we got? The only difficulty was that if there was ever a problem, then, for the sake of honor, we had to overcome it without attaching blame to anyone else. And so by August 1985, I had completed the drawings. And in March 1986, the G-Force went on the market at a cost of $1,200 per machine.

And despite or perhaps because of its enormous price, it soon became the must-have domestic style item for the fashionable man or woman about Tokyo. Did they ever use it? Who knows? The Japanese as a nation prefer cylinder vacuum cleaners and had never bought uprights in any great number. They don't really have houses, so there was no identifiable need for this full-size cleaner, and there isn't much store space for it in their tiny homes, which is why the upright, meaning the upright vacuum, that had sold there had been ones with an attachable tabletop so that when not being used, it could be disguised as a coffee table. It may be, I suppose, that the fact that it looked so good was what made

it attractive to a people who are not going to be able to shut it away. Nor do the Japanese go for wall-to-wall carpet in a big way, and though I had included on the G-Force a special attachment for cleaning tatami mats, the suspicion in the design world was that this futuristic pink machine, they wanted him to produce it pink, by the way, half spaceship, half vacuum cleaner, just stood in the corner in most Japanese homes and generated oohs and ahs. But it stood in a lot of corners.

And though it took off only gradually, within three years, it was making sales of $12 million a year. So he's finally having success. What I want to point out there is he finishes the drawings in 1985. It goes into production in 1986. He started this, the idea of getting in the company now in 1979. So from 1979 to, it took till 1986 before he made his first sale.

And this isn't even the Dyson company. This is a company he has with Fry. Fry winds up getting old and decides he doesn't want to be in business anymore. And that's when Dyson actually starts Dyson, which I think happens in 1987. But my point being is that when he talks about that, he has – earlier he was saying I'm not trying to brag about how great I am. I'm just saying that my virtue is that of a mule. That's probably accurate.

Six years and just constantly – like having a product you know is working and yet being unable to sell it. So this is a few years later. This is now. He's like, you know is working and yet being unable to sell it. So this is a few years later. This is now he's like, you know what? Like I'm just going to go it alone. And it wasn't, I don't think it was an acrimonious breakup with Fry. Fry was just getting older. I think he was 65 or 70 at the time, maybe 75.

And just, you know, he just didn't want to be involved in building the company. Okay. So this is now we go back to this theme, which makes James, I think, so happy, and that's complete control over his invention. And he talks about this is the Dyson dual cyclone. This is what he becomes, what sets the company on its path to the success it has today. A vacuum cleaner designed entirely by me, innovations up to the very late latest point at which my technology had arrived

to be produced and marketed and sold under my own exclusive direction was to be frank what this whole thing had been about i had gathered around myself a small team by this time who i was able to pay out of the royalties from japan and America, and we worked together in the coach house at the end of the garden, which had been so unpromising when I first moved in, deprived of power, water, light, and heat, but was by now a rather impressive workshop and office, which I had built and restored gradually over the years of development. We were a band on a mission to design a vacuum cleaner that would challenge the world, and it was bloody exciting. With this team, at last, I could put into unhindered practice all the things I believed about the interdependency of

design and function, about the way in which aesthetic perfection could be generated out of the engineering principles of the work, rather than being used to hide them, and about enabling the consumer to understand the technological benefits of new products by using them to make the product fun. The thing about inventing is that it is a continual and continuous process, and it is fluid. Inventions generate further inventions. In fact, that is where most inventions come from. They very rarely come out of nothing.

So while it was the dual cyclone that was the basis of my first vacuum cleaner, as I went on to develop it over the next 12 years, dozens of other innovations were generated along the way. Upstairs was the office. We designed every detail on computers and downstairs in the factory, quote unquote, we made our models. It was a fantastic environment to work in for it was just engineers and designers and no one to mess us around. There were no salesmen, no advertising people, no marketing managers to interfere and to try to guide us in their direction.

We had nothing to do but deduce our own dream product. There was no market research and there was no focus groups. It was to be frank, a designer's wet dream. It was unique. The world just isn't like that. You are not supposed to do things like that. Just go ahead and do it all on your own and then order a million pounds worth of tooling.

It felt almost naughty. So I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. He has two sections in the book that I think are very just practical that is worth that alone worth buying the book and it's a he lays out his design philosophy over a few pages and then his business philosophy and I'm gonna cover the design philosophy right pages and then his business philosophy. And I'm going to cover the design philosophy right now. And then we're going to see the culmination, whatever that word is, of, well, you'll just see how insane. So first, you know, I'm jumping ahead.

Let me focus on the design philosophy and then we'll get to the insane part. I have often over the years been asked what my design philosophy is, or my philosophy of invention, and have occasionally tried to put it on paper for those who do ask. It is a difficult thing to reduce to simple points because so much of it exists in my mind,

a weird concoction of things I have seen and learned. But it might look something like this. I'm not going to cover all of them. I'm just going to cover ones that stuck out to me. But heavy highlighting ahead. Okay. Number one, no one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board. So do not do this. I have always rather liked Francis Bacon's analogy of the spider and the bee. A spider, he explained, works entirely upon himself and from within himself and produces only poison, whereas a bee works on raw materials, deriving his product from nature at large and produces honey. At any rate, Bacon always got his ideas from walking in

the countryside and observing nature, rather than sitting in his study. So get out and look at things and when an idea comes, grab it, write it down, and play with it until it works. Don't sit and expect ideas to come. Always bear in mind though that Bacon died of pneumonia trying to invent frozen chicken. Number two, everyday products sell. Although it's harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed, there is no need to create a market. As before, thinking in a vacuum is not going to help. Try out current products in your own home and make a list of things you don't like about them.

I found about 20 things wrong with my Hoover Junior at the first attempt. Three, new technology. It may sound obvious, but many of the things that people write to me saying that they had invented, interesting and useful though they are, are only modifications of existing technology and can thus be copied by anyone under law. The thing about truly new technology is that it makes your invention patentable

and then no one can copy it. You will find that in the case of almost anything you dream up, someone, somewhere, may have done something vaguely similar before. This being the case, your job in seeking a patent is to point out how original and unique what you're doing is, compared to what they did. This is often extremely difficult, particularly at the U.S. Patent Office. I had a particularly difficult examiner who kept having time off for mental problems of some kind. She would agree that what we were doing is unique, thus paving the way for the patent to be approved.

And then we'd get a rejection letter from her six weeks later and had to start all over again. It cost us $150,000 in patent attorney fees just to get that one patent through her. This is an interesting point. He continues. I'm going to skip a little bit. We're still talking about technology and patents. So we're still on number three.

The terrible tyranny of patents, however, is that the costs do not end when you get your approval. Thereafter, you will be charged enormous sums to renew your patents every year, up to $2,000 per country per year in some cases. And this is money that you, as a small inventor, are unlikely to be able to spare because you will not have turned your invention into a profitable business yet.

I believe that an invention is a piece of creative art, like a book or song, and those don't require annual renewal fees. If I cannot afford an annual renewal fee, which is simply some spod stamping a piece of paper, why should the patent office be able to steal it from me? on technological breakthroughs. But that is patent rubbish, quite literally. The whole thing is clearly stacked in favor of the big companies to whom the fees mean relatively little and against the small innovator. This is, I believe, a human rights issue. And I am, at time of writing, taking the DTI to the European Court of Human Rights over it.

That's pretty crazy. Okay, so number four, we're back at the Edisonian principle. Engineering is a state of mind, or at least a method of working. You can become an expert on anything in six months, but steer clear of projects that require too much maths and stick to empirical things. You can achieve major breakthroughs by a bit of lateral thinking, and this approach will often lead to new inventions being born of each other. Just as, for example, the dual cyclone came out of the ball barrel. Keep testing and retesting and believe only the evidence of your own eyes, not to formulate or of other people's opinions. You may have to fly in the face of public opinion and market research. This is an important part. They can only tell you what has

happened. No research can tell you what is going to happen. Constant Revolution. I'm just going to read one sentence from this section. The only way to keep possession of your invention is to keep strengthening it. So I'm going to skip ahead to a couple of other of his design philosophies. Actually, there's two more that I want to cover. The first one, stamina and conviction, which we've kind of hammered on today. Painful but true. Breaking the mold will upset people. Challenging sitting tenants will be tough.

It will take longer than you ever imagined. 10 years of development, question mark. Do you fancy that? And then negotiations on a knife, on a knife edge, a shoestring and hanging by a thread. It will take balls. And the last design philosophy, our principle, total control. You're not surprised by that. From the first sprouting of the idea, the research and development, testing and prototyping, model making and engineering drawings,

tooling, production, sales, and marketing, all the way into the homes of the nation, it is most likely to succeed if the original visionary, our mule, sees it right through. And then this is the insane part I referenced earlier. And this is how he ends this chapter. As I have often said, I aim not to be clever, but to be dogged. And my doggedness had got to me so far, had got me rather, so far to a point where I had my very own cyclonic vacuum cleaner at last. On May 2nd, 1992, I found myself looking at the first fully operational, visually perfect Dyson dual cyclone.

Now here's the crazy part, okay? I was, so he talks about, remember the whole thing that started this was he was pissed off at the Hoover vacuum cleaner, ready? So this is the most insane part and why I think this you need to read this book i was 31 years old when i tore the bag off my hoover and stuck a cereal packet in the hole may 2nd 1992 which was when he got his first vacuum cleaner was my 45th birthday so the idea happened when he was 31 years old, and he didn't get it to the point where he had complete control over his own product

until he was 45. That's insane. So he talks about they go from not existing in January of 94 to being the number one manufacturer and seller of vacuum cleaners and three years later in 97 but he was having it took a while because he'd have like small retailers willing to sell his product but the big ones wouldn't and he said that their reluctance has been threefold we were too small they felt to compete with multinational regulars our product was so different unusual that they feared being made to look foolish.

And in an industry where everything is about discounts and price slashing, ours being double the price of anything else made the idea of high sales seem ludicrous. So I'm gonna skip over this part because there's a graph on the page which shows like, looks like a mountain. Like it just goes straight up a mountain,

which is his sales. But I love how he puts this part here in the final paragraph. He goes, what we were doing, to put it another way, was selling Mercedes or Porsches in Ford Escort quantities. And all Hoover could do was call it a passing phase and describe the dual cyclone as a niche product. So even after he was kicking their ass, they were very dismissive them they never stopped being dismissive of them and then they eventually tried to copy them in june we got into another store called argos and by september we had hit the number one slot selling more vacuum cleaners than anyone else despite costing twice as much if if this if we were a niche product what were hoover a crack in the floorboards? Throughout the whole book, he's constantly,

I kind of like that he has this cheeky personality where he's not arrogant. I mean, some people might read this book and consider him arrogant. I just think that he built a better product and he's proud of it. And then when his competitors try to diss his product, he fights back, which I think is a really good idea.

Just another random sentence that I highlighted because he talks about a lot and I think it's important. He says, you can't sell more than one message at a time or you lose the belief of a consumer. So this is in a chapter that's actually really interesting. And I'm not too sure how to present it on the podcast. And it's all about advertising. And he talks about the difference between bad advertising and good advertising and the importance of overseeing all aspects of your business yourself and never, ever, ever giving a penny to advertising agencies. So I would definitely read that part because it was a little counterintuitive, but he has

examples where he thinks the people at ad agencies are basically their fake creatives. And he winds up working with an agency but not with the create like he's like I don't want to talk to executives or salespeople I want to talk to the actual person and he's like you can't do anything like you have to have a dialogue a conversation and so he's the heat the way he set this up is he talked to one person every day for a week on an ongoing discussion about what the vacuum cleaner meant to him, why it was so important.

And this is how they come up with one of their ads, the ads that were so famous, which was like getting, we said goodbye to the bag. And there's pictures of them in the book, but you could also Google it and see that Dyson had some very, just a very unique way of communicating and advertising when they were first getting going. So I'm going to skip over all that part because I do want to get to his business philosophy.

But there is something, he talks about this book that he read. And just keep in mind, these are not the words of James Dyson, but they might as well have been. Who is it that gets neglected? The inventor, that's who. The designer, the engineer, the chemist, the brewer, the boffin. The people obsessed by the product who will willingly accept that the sizzle is important but who get their kicks trying to make an even better steak. Car companies used to be run by people who love cars. They knew how to make cars themselves and were always trying to make them better. Retail companies used to be run by people who love shops. And a hundred and something years ago, George Stafford Parker

was nutty about fountain pens. As businesses got bigger and more complex, these obsessive, impractical, product-driven enthusiasts couldn't cope. They had to be helped by money men and lawyers and marketing persons with advertising agents. From that moment, the status of the maker in this country had been in decline. This is in Britain. And the rise of marketing persons through no fault of their own has done nothing to help. It might even be, I think, that the erosion of our manufacturing sector and the rise of our service sector is in part connected with the decoupling of making things from marketing things. This is why he's saying you should market your own product.

And then, so that's the end of the excerpt that he wanted to share with you. And then this is him summarizing. In other words, and I think this is really important. In other words, if you make something, sell it yourself. And so we did. And absolutely nothing went bang, except, of course, everyone else's market share. So pretty crazy, just random. I'm not going to read. But in 1993, they were doing sales of $3.5 million a year. By 1996, that number was up to $85 million.

Another famous quote of his, companies are built, not made. I love that. And now I'm going to get to the end. This is going to be a little longer, but this is, keep in mind, like I say on every podcast, I'm skipping over massive parts of the book. It's not meant to summarize. It's meant to, even if you don't read the book, hopefully give you some ideas and some inspiration that you can then use, but hopefully to also entice you to buy the book.

Okay, so this is his business philosophy okay so he has like a heading and then i'm describing it right so i'm just going to read the heading of one everyone who starts work at dyson makes a vacuum cleaner on their first day so he's writing these words dyson's already um you know multiple hundred million dollar company so his success has been solidified since the time the book was written to now it's a multi-billion dollar company. But everyone who starts work at Dyson makes a vacuum cleaner on the first day. Engineering and design are not viewed as separate.

Designers are as involved in testing as engineers are in conceptual ideas. Everyone is empowered to be creative, knowledgeable. It's a little vague. So let me get into the more specifics. So this one's really interesting. No memos ever. And then he describes this. First of all, memos are just a way of passing the buck, avoiding the issue and abdicating responsibility. Secondly, memos only generate memos. Then memos responding to the memo, responding to the memo. And then I could go on, but it would be as boring as a memo.

Thirdly, and most importantly, however much they multiply, nobody ever reads them. Dialogue is the founding principle for progress. Talk to people. They listen. Monologue leads only to monomania. Memos are also tacky, soulless, and get lost. I would rather people did less if it means doing what they do properly. And a memo, though quicker than a conversation, is more likely to

lead to misunderstanding. Another, skipping out another one of his business philosophies, no one wears suits and ties. Now it may be that not wearing of suits has taken on an importance for me that is greater than it really is. It should not, after all, become a stricture because that is just to make the practice as much a uniform as the miserable outfit it is trying to avoid. The fundamental principle is this. I do not want my employees thinking like businessmen. I do not want them sitting around a table with me or with anyone else and coming out with the same old crap as you would expect from a businessman. As soon as they start thinking like businessman, they will think that the company is all about

making money and it is not. I have no time for businessman. This sounds just like Jim Clark, doesn't it? They are all the suited pen pushers who have always endeavored to stifle creativity. And while what I chose to wear is entirely up to me and not open to question, I have chosen also to discourage my employees from wearing suits because it seems to me the best way to instill in them my own heartfelt conviction in the theory of difference for the sake of difference.

That's probably what, the third or fourth time we've heard that? The difference in the sake of difference. And he's gonna go back onto that. I'm going to skip a couple of pages. And this is another subheading. Encourage employees to be different on principle. This is a really, so he's mentioned this a bunch of times, but this is where he, in a few paragraphs, he kind of lays out like a very, like why that's important. Encourage employees to be different on principle. This is part of my anti-brilliance campaign.

Very few people can be brilliant. Those who are rarely do anything worthwhile, and they are overvalued. You are just as likely to solve a problem by being unconventional and determined as by bringing brilliance. And if you can't be unconventional, be obtuse. That's a great sentence. have been taught to think. If you go in and be illogical, then half the time people will laugh at you. And half the time you will strike up something interesting because you have stopped everyone else from thinking logically, which has failed to provide a solution. Be a bit wacko and you shake people up a bit. And we all need shaking up. methodologically, it even makes a bit of sense in that to bastardize a dictum by Mr. Sherlock Holmes. When you have eliminated the logical,

whatever remains however illogical must be the answer. So why not start there? I probably only think this because I can never be bothered to think anything through logically, but we'll let it go. At any rate, to be different is something we try to instill in all of our staff because for the reasons given above, we don't want people behaving like businessmen, but behaving like normal human beings and treating the customer as a friend. I love that idea. This is the last one real quick. Employ graduates straight from university. The basic reason for this is they are unsullied. They have not been strapped into a suit and taught to think by a company with nothing on its mind but short-term profit and early retirement. We are trying to do things differently from anyone else. So it's easier to teach fresh graduates this

new way and enable them to challenge established beliefs than to retrain someone with quote unquote experience. Sometimes some of our staff do lack knowledge, but there is now a cadre of experienced and talented managers. And this combination provides an extraordinary energetic and intelligent stratum of managers, which is what gives Dyson's its strength. I began employing graduates because I was so appreciative of the opportunities given to me when I was younger by Jeremy Fry. He, after all, had taken me on when I was still an undergraduate. And as soon as I had graduated, he gave me carte blanche on the C-Truck project and entrusted me with running the business from the start. I enjoyed and benefited from the responsibility of learning things by doing rather than being taught by superiors. That was what made me feel I was a pioneer. So when I first set up Dyson to develop

the vacuum cleaner, I started employing engineering graduates from the Royal College of Art. And now we have about 20 RCA graduates in Mamesbury. That's where his company is located. It never occurred to me that they wouldn't be able to do everything brilliantly. And they did. That is where I'm going to leave it. If you want the full story, look in the show notes on your podcast player for a link. That is one of the best ways to support this podcast. Like I said at the beginning, I include Amazon affiliate links for every book that I've done a podcast on. So you can buy this one or any of the other ones. Just check out the list below. You can just go to founderspodcast.com and get the links there. You'll get a great book. Amazon will send me a tiny percentage of the sale at no additional cost to you. All right. I appreciate your support and your time. Thank you very much for listening this

far. I'll be back very soon with another podcast about a book or excuse me, another podcast about a company builder who they wrote a book about. Have a good one.