Against the Odds - An Autobiography

“viii) Total control From the first sprouting of the idea, through research and devel- opment, 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 (or mule) sees it right through.”

“Magic - the unique way a product does what it does - is never to be underestimated. With the Dual Cyclone's see-through bin, every-”

“i) No one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board So do not do this. I always rather liked Francis Bacon's analogy of the Spider and the Bee (I think it was Francis Bacon). A spider, he explained, works entirely upon himself, and from within himself, and produces only poison, whereas a bee works on raw materials, deriving”

“iv) The Edisonian principle Engineering is a state of mind, or at least a method of working. You can become 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 Ballbarrow). Keep testing and retesting and believe only the evidence of your own eyes, not of formulae or of other people's opinions. You may have to fly in the face of public opinion, and market research. They can only tell you what has happened. No research can tell you what is going to happen.”

“Misfits are not born or made; they make themselves. And a stubborn opinionated child, desperate to be different and to be right, encoun- ters only smaller refractions of the problems he will always experience. And he carries the weight of that dislocation for ever.”

“v) Constant revolution Not an imprecation to espouse a Marxist-Leninist theory of history but constantly to rethink and improve every aspect and function, never being satisfied until you have solved every problem. Do that, and you can be sure of consistently and reliably outperforming the opposition. The thing about solving functional problems at every level, and to as high a degree of perfection as possible, is not only that it will result in greater consumer satisfaction, but that it will lead to further patents. And further patents are crucial. A patent only lasts for twenty years, and that is not as long as it sounds. Look at the way Qualcast, and everyone else, pounced on the flymower as soon as Flymo's patent expired. Now if I had stopped with my initial invention I might be in a similar sort of danger. But by continuing to improve my technology over that time, I have now accumulated over 100 different patents on the machine, many of them cyclonic improvement patents, which will lengthen indefinitely our period of exclusivity. The only way to keep possession of your invention is to keep strengthening it.”

“"We have done what nobody thought we could do: take on the multinationals and beat them, and in a very short space of time, by taking risks and by being different. I hope it gives other people heart."”

“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 harbour a secret dream of synonymity, and occasionally imagine a time, years from today, when 'dyson' replaces 'hoover', pulls that cunning stunt - like biro, tarmac, sellotape - and becomes a noun, a verb, out there on its own and detached from me to such an extent that most people will have no idea that there ever was a man called Dyson. I like the idea of a child”

“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 have done something good.”

“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' - it is possible to arrive, empirically, at an advance. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months,”

“advance. Anyone can become an expert in anything in six months, whether it is hydrodynamics for boats or cyclonic systems for vacuum cleaners. After the idea, there is plenty of time to learn the technology.”

“The best kind of business is one where you can sell a product at a high price with a good margin, and in enormous volumes. For that you have to develop a product that works better and looks better than”

“existing ones. 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. Difference for the sake of it. In everything. Because it must be better. From the moment the idea strikes, to the running of the business. Difference, and retention of total control.”

“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.”

“I had merely been obtuse. I had tried to be different on a whim, momentarily regretted it, and now here I was on this adventure. It was a lesson I never forgot, and in whimsical moments it even occurs to me to reflect on the similarity between a bassoon and a vacuum cleaner. I simply moved from a clumsy great piece of pipe that blows”

“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.”

“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 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 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's according to some spurious set of subjective criteria, but simply right or wrong.”

“Here was a man who was not interested in experts. He meets me, he thinks to himself, 'Here is a bright kid, let's employ him/ And he does. He risks little with the possibility of gaining much. It is exactly what I now do at Dyson Appliances - take on unformed graduates to throw youthful ideas around until they have given all they can and are ready to move on to new things. And I was not the only one - the”

“This attitude to employment extended to Fry's thinking in every- thing, including engineering. Like Brunei, 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've had 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.' When I asked if we shouldn't talk to someone about, 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 and look at what happens.'”

“The root principle was to do things your way. It didn't matter how other people did it. It didn't matter if it could be done better. The”

“get stuck in mud - but it was a way. The trick is not to keep looking over your shoulder at others, or to worry, even as you begin a project, that it is not going to be the best possible example of its kind. As long as it works, and it is exciting, people will follow you.”

“There were times when he was wrong. In business you will be wrong, by and large, 50 per cent of the time. The trick is to recognise when you have gone wrong and correct the damage - not to worry, at the moment of making the decision, whether it is the right one.”

“You can teach yourself science, in other words, but you can't neces- sarily make yourself an artist. Leonardo da Vinci could choose to make a helicopter. A helicopter maker could not choose, in the general run of things, to paint a Mona Lisa. That's an analogy, by the way, not an invitation of comparisons.”

“When I managed that, they upped the ante again, demanding sales of six a month. I was butting my head bloodily against a wall of commercial myopia. By hanging this sword of Damocles over me, the directors hoped to drive me into desperate efforts to sell, presumably unimpressed by my assertions that further investment was required. I was young, inexperienced, and oddly dressed, so I suppose they cannot really be blamed. But I learnt 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.”

“For each function Deirdre designed a brochure, and they began to sell. And it all seemed so obvious: 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. Why tell them this thing was universally adaptable when universality mattered to the individual consumer not a whit? It was for the same reason that when”

“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 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 and to inspire others to give 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.”

“still needed to get ourselves out of the red. Debt, you see, is a terrible thing for a small company. It fosters a bizarre reverse psychology that comes from the darkest depths of the human psyche and makes you even more inclined to overspend. The reason for this, is that when you have no money and are in debt you start thinking about all the things you could do if you had money, and that sets you to dreaming up all sorts of schemes and projects, which lead you into further debt as you try to realise them. When you have money, on the other hand, you tend to be more careful, largely because the occasion does not arise where you sit around desperately trying to think of ways of making money. You just get on with your life without thinking up hair-brained schemes you couldn't possibly carry out. Thus, without an overdraft you are not only freed of the interest burden, but your mind is freed to think more clearly and you can negotiate more effectively with both suppliers and customers, because they can see that you are not stret- ched financially and desperate to make a deal.”

“in the past helped me to understand a little of why it happened. At Rotork, Jeremy Fry was the inventor, owner, principal shareholder and chairman. Some of the other senior executives seemed to resent that his ownership was absolute, and they were, to all intents and purposes, hired executives. At the time I was baffled by this antipathy towards such a charismatic and brilliant man -1 did not feel it myself, because I always knew that I would one day create things of my own.”

“As I began to develop the cyclone, I thought it would be worth having a look at what had been written on the subject, for if there were simple mathematical models for the principle, it would be easy to work out how best to design the thing. This was not a fruitful exercise. I have one book which has at least six different formulae for explain- ing the movement of particles in a cyclone; they all seem to contradict each other; and they are all useless (three of these incomprehensible algebraic confections are shown below, just for fun).”

“You could, theoretically, write a formula which would tell you whether or not a particular cyclone would separate a particular micron size, but that would depend on only one kind of particle, with a single micron size, entering it. In reality, what you get are thousands of different sizes of particle entering. The smaller ones get caught up in the slipstream of the larger ones - indeed, the slipstream of one group of particles will pull along with it whole colonies of much tinier ones - so that much smaller particles than you would expect a particular cyclone to collect will follow the larger ones into it. Like many industrialists, the particle has an insurmountable sheep mentality.”

“When I came to develop the cyclone there would be hundreds of questions that needed answering: Is a circular shaped entry the best way to get the air in? What size should it be? Should it poke in slightly, or not? Should it come in at a pure tangent, or a half tangent? Should it contract as it enters? Should it be angled down to follow the natural spiral down the cyclone? How many entries should there be?”

“I made hundreds of cyclones in the early years, and then thousands of them. Testing all the different styles, I found that the important thing was the entry point, that it should enter peripherally, and at a pure tangent. I tried it with one entry and with two entries, I even made one with 140 entries, just in case it was better, but you only ever got one flow of air. (In the cylinder model, much later, we did actually use two entries, because it is such a squat little thing that you could not get the required cross-sectional area with only one). Then there were questions about the positioning and size and shape of the exit point, and every other part of the thing, and all of them had to be answered by testing. Slow, slow, slow. These things cannot be hurried. When you develop a prototype you have to change only one thing at a time. If you are really going to improve things, and that is what inventing is all about, then you are going to have to be patient. Very patient. I was being so bloody patient that I still had only one cyclone in there. The best was yet to come.”

“But it rankled terribly at the time. It is often very difficult to justify a new product in the very early stages of its development and this leads to a cripplingly vicious circle, for the cost of development is huge, and it is just at this very time that one most needs an injection of outside cash. When you come up with entirely original technology, particularly for something as entrenched in the public imagination as a vacuum cleaner, it is very difficult to argue lucidly for its ultimate success. You can say, 'I think it will be successful because bags are disgusting things and everyone hates them.' Then they say to you, 'What proof have you got that people don't like bags?' 'Well,' you reply, 'none. It is just my personal view.'”

“That is what development is all about. Empirical testing demands that you only ever make one change at a time. It is the Edisonian principle, and it is bloody slow. It is a thing that takes me ages to explain to my graduate employees at Dyson Appliances, but it is so important. They tend to leap in to tests, making dozens of radical changes and then stepping back to test their new masterpiece. How do they know which change has improved it, and which hasn't?”

“This is why development is such a slow process. But the British obsession with the quantum leap holds us back. 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. Ask the Japanese.”

“Any little design improvement that you try to make will inevitably be used to exploit you by your opposition. For example, when Hoover were getting rattled by our success, they decided to claim that their machines had much greater suck than ours. They attempted to prove this by orchestrating a publicity stunt in which they presented a thing they called a suction gauge which they put over the nozzle of their hose, and then over ours. It covered the inlet completely and pur- ported to register a pressure reading. The Hoover won.”

“Upstairs, which was the office, we designed every detail on com- puter, and downstairs in the 'factory', we made our models. It was a fantastic environment to work in, for it was just engineers and design- ers, 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. There was no market research and there were no focus groups; it was, to be frank, a designer's wet dream. It was unique. The world just isn't like that. You were 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. People just didn't know what we were up to, and we occasionally found a severe cred- ibility problem, if no credit problem, such that when it came to buying tooling, or anything at all, we were expected to pay cash up front, to alleviate the worries of more conventional businessmen.”

“his product from nature at large, and produces honey. (Or something like that. I probably failed whichever subject they told me that in). At any rate, Bacon always got his ideas from walking in the coun- tryside 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.) ii) Everyday products sell Although it is harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed there is no need to create a market - something Clive Sinclair's C5, for example, could have done with. As before, thinking in a vacuum (forgive me) is not going to help. Try out current products in your own home, and make a list of things that you don't like about them - I found about twenty things wrong with my Hoover Junior at the first attempt. iii) New technology It may sound obvious, but many of the things that people write to me saying they have '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.”

“vi) Expressive design I think we have established that it is what is inside that is important. To start thinking from the outside is to doom the project from the outset. If your first thought, as a computer designer, for example, is that keyboards ought to be cruciform, dimpled, and purple, with fluffy bits on the corners and a slight smell of rose-hip, then you have probably not come up with anything useful or patentable.”