Sir James Dyson doesn't accept how things are. He never has. He's an inventor, an engineer, and someone who has devoted his life to solving problems through new ways of thinking. But you can't get around designing things that you think other people might like. You've got to make your own mistakes.
What followed was a multi-billion dollar global enterprise. Creative people are told they can't run companies. When I was trying to raise money, which I failed, I significantly failed at. They said, 'We're not getting you because you're an engineer yet.' I mean, the entire politburo in China are engineers or scientists, and they understand the importance of manufacturing and creating products.
And as he once put it, his real advantage wasn't genius. He was being willing to fail longer than anyone else.
You've got to take risks. You've got to come up with new things people don't trust or don't like. That's Sir James Dyson. Welcome to the Business of Creativity series brought to you by Amazon Ads.
James, what a pleasure. I mean, it is first of all fantastic to be here. I tell you what's interesting is when you know somebody, not that I know that, but we met a number of times and we sat on committees and boards. But when you see somebody in their environment, it always tells you a lot more about them. And I have to say, the success of Dyson is phenomenal. But that's the thing that I wanted to talk about, because this is about trying to inspire young entrepreneurs, trying to get them to understand their business. And I think in a way, for me, you're almost the perfect example of a brilliant bit of innovation, invention, brilliant engineering, and then great design, and putting all of those together to create something that is truly, I think, well, I mean you've changed the way people feel or think about all kinds of implements. But I think those three things I call my holy trinity—always making these religious observations—make it so kind of powerful. But what I'm going to do, I'm going to start with going right back to your childhood, how you developed, how you got into here now. I know very sadly your father died at the age of nine, and I'm not saying this, but a lot of people you interview who are hugely successful, they've had some moment in their life when something's happened and it makes them think hard about life, even if it's someone who finds they're dyslexic or has something. And that moment in your life was obviously very, very hard, and it stays with you, doesn't it?
It stays with you. I mean, psychology would say that I suppose I have nothing to lose from that point onwards, so I'm able to take risks in life and live on the knife edge because nothing could be worse than losing your father at the age of nine. That must have been absolutely traumatic.
Yeah, well, at nine, I think it's slightly less traumatic. I think you feel it over the years rather than immediately. I think if I'd been older—my sister was 15—I think it hit her much harder.
But that moment kind of, and that's a lovely thing to observe, if that's happened to you then, you know, a business closing down, so what?
Yeah, yes, exactly. And I also think it makes you very independent, self-reliant.
Because I mean, no one gave me advice. Well, if they did, I didn't listen to it. But I mean, there wasn't someone anxious to give me advice to see me through. My mother was a great mother. Managed, you know, to be both parents. But nevertheless, you know, I didn't have a father. It also made me feel very different because there weren't that many divorces then. So everybody else at school had a father and a mother, and even if they were divorced, they came together and behaved together. So I felt very different. And I think that was sort of slightly isolating but also a good thing, because again it made me suddenly feel different, and feeling different made me want to be different and do different things, not what everybody else was doing.
I love that thing also of being slightly an outsider. I think if you look at so many great people, I'm absolutely fascinated with Leonardo da Vinci. I think the man was just a genius, obviously genius we know that, but when you look at him, he was a complete outsider. He was illegitimate, he was homosexual, he was left-handed. Got a lot to live up to. But that sense of being an outsider, I think it helps you observe. It helps you stand outside and look in. Much more so than somebody who is surrounded. So there you are. And I have to mention this. This is absolutely genius. At the age of nine, you get a prize in the Eagle comic. For those who remember, but people of a certain age will remember the Eagle comic as this brilliant thing.
It was a wonderful comic.
Wonderful. I loved it. Absolutely loved it. And a painting by yours, Blakeley Point, got a prize along with four other people. And you still got the painting.
Still got the painting. Haven't got the prize, which is a radio. But I mean, interestingly, Gerald Scarfe and David Hockney both won Eagle competition. Did they? Yes. And all three of us went to the Royal College of Art. So there is a sort of connection there. But that happened three months after my father died. So, well, it gave me confidence.
Gave you confidence. Yeah. I think this is a national competition through creativity. Isn't that brilliant?
I don't even remember entering it, funnily enough.
So you go essentially to art school and then obviously onto the Royal College of Art.
I was the first person from my school, a public school, to go to an art school. So I didn't go to it as a career. Instead of doing Voluntary Service Overseas for a year, I decided to go to art school in London to see what it was like, to see whether it was for me. So I didn't go there intending to do a full degree course or thing. I just went there for fun. But it turned out to be wonderful fun. I think what's lovely about art school—I went to Hornsey—the thing I loved about it, I sensed it the instant I went in, that here were people who were just interested in doing interesting things. They didn't care where you came from. They cared where you were going. And I found that a really exciting atmosphere. I found it a kind of culture that was really exciting to be in, and it opened you up. I think that's the genius about art school. But then from there, you leave the Royal College of Art, you become an engineer. That's a kind of interesting thing that happened because I was doing architecture at the Royal College, and our structural engineer lecturer was Tony Hunt, who did all the work for Foster and Rogers. And there's this thing called engineering, and I thought when I went to the first lecture it was going to be really boring, and I was just riveted. He actually showed us how and why structures stay up, and actually how calculating that is very easy. And suddenly engineering became very interesting. And he introduced me to Buckminster Fuller. I don't know if you know him. He was revolutionizing architecture. Instead of architecture being concrete or brick buildings, he was making these very light, low use of materials, aluminum structures of enormous roof spans. And they're very beautiful. It made engineering beautiful as well as being very ecological. So there were several of us at the Royal College, including Anton Furst, who were sort of devotees of Buckminster Fuller. It was the right time. And so I really got into engineering, and I did a Buckminster Fuller type structure, except mine was a sort of shape of a mushroom for Joan Littlewood's theatre in Stratford. And I went to see the only other person who'd ever built a building in Britain out of this aluminum structure, Jeremy Fry, for a company called Rotork. So I went down to him to ask for money to build this theatre, because I was told he was a millionaire. He said, 'I'm not giving you any money, but I think you're quite a good designer. So will you design a boat for me, a high-speed landing craft?' Which I did in my final two years at college, and then went on to run the business. But it's there.
It sounds like that one's 45 years old. But that light bulb moment though—and you also hear people talk about the light bulb moment. What was it that spurred you? One's lucky if you get that, because people don't. And I think again I would go back to art schools and that openness I had. They would get all kinds of people in talking about all kinds of things. That gives you a chance to experience that path. And the kind of people who are teaching you—it was lucky timing for me. It was the swinging 60s, 1965 in London. There was Concorde. There was the amazing Citroën car. Phenomenal. There was the Mini. And then there was fashion. Yeah. And painting. Everything was completely different. It was a real renaissance. So I was very lucky in the timing. And although we had no reason to be confident, somehow we were all very confident about what we did, with no particular reason to be. I suppose it's throwing off the shackles of the post-war years in Britain, which were pretty grim. There was nothing to lose. I mean, I had nothing to lose. I'd lost my father. So becoming an entrepreneur and pursuing—it was this strange thing. I'd grown up in the hothouse of design at the Royal College of Art, but I slightly rebelled against it. I think I discovered engineering, and everybody else was going off to be a designer. But I thought, I don't want someone telling me what to design. I want to do the technology as well as the design. And actually I want to make it as well, and actually I want to sell it as well. So I had this strange, very overconfident thought that I wanted to do everything, sort of megalomania, and control everything. And I don't know where it came from. That's why I think it's a sort of confidence that you got at the Royal College of Art then, and that was alive and bubbling in London at the time.
But that's the first thing I would say about anybody starting a business. You've got to have confidence. You've got to have faith in what you're doing. You have belief in it. Now you might be wrong and it'll fail. Fine. That's okay. But if you start doubting, then you start listening to all those siren voices, and then it becomes sort of mediocre, and you lose that sharpness that a great idea has. It's funny actually because I went to do painting, then I went to do graphic design at London College of Printing, and I had a very similar thing about designers, because I thought, well, where's the idea? And designers don't do the idea. I want to do the idea. Well, I was really lucky because Jeremy Fry is very interesting because he was an entrepreneur, he founded the business. And when we designed the Sea Truck, we were about to build it and go out and sell it. I said, 'I better go and do a bit of research.' And he said, 'What on earth for? We've done something. We like it. We think it's good. Just go and make it and sell it.' And there's a huge amount of truth in that. Because if it's a revolutionary boat as that was, how are we going to comment on it?
Well, what they all said was a Welsh dresser on water, and that's not a boat. So it was a very strange looking boat that did different things. It's like a landing craft. You just go out and sell it. You be a pied piper. You lead people forward with your idea, and you inspire them.
Hopefully it's quite difficult to inspire people actually, but at the beginning, so what I learned from that was that there will be naysayers all around you. And if you do market research, it will tell you it won't work. You know, that's not the type of boat people buy, or some type of vacuum cleaner people buy. People want bags. But you just got to ignore all that and do what you think is right, and check it out with a few friends.
And I think that's a brilliant point to make, because we live in a world of data, data analysis, algorithms. We've got so much information, but I think we forget—and I would use the word—part of your job is there to inspire people. Oh, I didn't think of it.
Yes, yes, you can give them what they want.
Give them something better, something they hadn't imagined.
I worked a lot with a number of car companies, for Audi for a very long time, and obviously Audi was owned by Volkswagen. And I always say to people: the most successful car ever made was the Beetle, but only 10% of people liked it, but those 10% loved it. I'll take 10% of the car market anytime you wish. And I think it's a very important point that you get analysis and measurement and all of these things which I can see why people do it, but in the end it weighs you down and it stops the idea growing and developing.
I'll give you a very good example: the clear bin on our vacuum cleaner. No one had ever done that before, and the retailers said, 'We can't possibly sell that with a clear bin where you can see the dirt. It's disgusting.' So we did some market research and everybody said it was disgusting. You can't do that. But we engineers loved it. We loved seeing the dirt. So we just decided to completely ignore the market research. And now every vacuum cleaner has made it. But also, it became a bit of your trademark, didn't it? It became the yes. And we refused a trademark on it. Quite badly actually. We deserved a trademark on that.
Yeah. But I think again I go back to my thing of the genius of this—and I am going to use that word if you'll excuse me—I have to give lots of talks. I often refer to Dyson, I refer to Audi, and I refer to Apple. But I think the genius of taking a vacuum cleaner and turning it into a must-have object is incredible. I think you have to stand back from that. Now we see them all over, but you forget how incredible that was. I used to say I never sat around with friends over drinks and said, 'Vacuum cleaner, do you?' But all of a sudden you turned need into want, and that was through this combination of those three things: brilliant idea, engineering, and design. But we forget the importance of that, to put desire into the things that we make. And I think that comes from the design. It comes from the way things are made, the way they feel, the way you touch them. And I'm going to go back to it because I featured it: your pencil vacuum cleaner. I just think I wanted to start doing the vacuum cleaning. Really, you know. And children want to do it as well, which is good.
So we all know the story that you went to all kinds of people—Hoover—and they said this will never work. But there was a tremendous, how did you sustain your belief that this is going to work? How did you sustain everything?
Well, during the four or five years when I was developing the technology as opposed to trying to license it, I didn't know it was going to work. I mean, when you do research, you don't know if you're going to succeed. So that's one hurdle you've got. And then there's the: will people buy this sort of thing? That's another hurdle. So there are two bigger hurdles you have to overcome, and then you have to make money out of it. So that's roughly how it goes. How do you keep going? Well, as you're borrowing more and more, you have to make it work. Because you're getting so much into debt. I was trying to think of a word: when you're doing research and you don't know you're going to make it work, what is it that keeps you going? I suppose it's partly pride that you don't want to fail. But it's also the killer instinct. I'm going to make this work. There isn't a word for that. The only word I can come up with is killer instinct.
Yeah, which is slightly odd. But we're not sure about that.
But it's not pride. I mean, I say I'm not going to fail at this. That's not pride.
No. Because you don't know.
You don't have that it will work.
No. No. You haven't got belief at all. It keeps failing. I'm going to go again.
So I don't think it's determination, stamina, but there's something else and I don't know what it is.
I've read, I think this is about five years ago, maybe even six years ago, the book on Elon Musk and his development of his reusable rocket. And again he had that thing about 'I'm going to' and he was down to his last whatever, already dying probably. To get it, in the last attempt it worked. And that, you know, if he'd stopped before... But you do have to have something there. Because I think sometimes you can see it in your mind, you see it. But no, your belief ought to crumble because everything you thought, everything you've tried doesn't work. It gets more and more depressing. So the answer is getting a bit more debt and then you have to succeed. You have to succeed.
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I sometimes worry when people—I mean, it's easy to raise money now to start things. And I slightly worry about that because I had to borrow it all, so I had to make it work. Whereas someone who is given money by venture capitalists or whatever they call now, private equity, it's not their money.
Yeah, that's a very good point. And it goes back to your thing about when you did a design, it was you liked it. That in a sense gives me faith. I like it, and therefore I hope it's going to work.
Well, you can't go around designing things that you think other people might like. You can't do that. You can't be true to yourself. You can't do that.
You've got to make your own mistakes.
I always define creativity, for instance, as an expression of self, because we're all creative, but it's you expressing yourself. So therefore you have to believe in it if it's going to work.
Well, I do because I had to believe in it. Because I couldn't... well, but you didn't know you'd be successful. No, never did. But I had to believe in it. But I think if I'm not successful, then so what? I suppose it's almost like an artist.
So there you are. It takes off. It begins to work. Then you say to yourself, I'm about taking things and I'm about making them. How could that be better? What? So how did you move to your next idea? Did you have a kind of parameter for it?
Oh, it's very easy. A lot of things don't work properly. Or they're just good enough. Shoelaces don't work. They keep coming undone. Well, you put Velcro instead. So, I mean, you know that there's a solution. Well, you hope there's a solution to everything. There are so many things that don't work well or could be made to work better or could use fewer materials or whatever. Now, because of the green movement, there are endless more opportunities. Before, you had to make things faster and bigger and more powerful. Well, the obverse has happened now. You want to make things less powerful but equally effective. For example, vacuum cleaners were 2,200 watts, the big German competitors. We made this one over here that was 200 watts, a tenth of the power. So you're reducing the power, making it work better. That constant improvement. But that wouldn't have worked 20 years ago because no one would be interested. They all wanted the biggest, most powerful one. That's how they thought. But now people think ecologically. It's added a whole lot more opportunities to invent.
That's a interesting point to make too. The environment also creates opportunities. Not just the green environment, but the world you're working in does create opportunities. We're talking now about green technologies, making them green. Well, then what?
See this is a vacuum that's state-of-the-art Japanese vacuum cleaner motor. There's only half of it there. And that's one of ours.
Good god. So that versus that. I mean, that's just, you've got to get... That is brilliant. That's before and that's after. That's phenomenal.
And you're getting out of this the power, sufficient power because of your more efficiency. More power. That's 2,000 watts and this is 200. And that's a hairdryer motor, right? That's a hairdryer motor, which is why they're so big. That's ours.
Can we get a picture of this? I'd love that.
No, I'm going to move this out of the way and go. That's a conventional hairdryer with that. And that's what we did.
Yeah. Which is why it's in the handle.
Which is why it's in the handle. So this is sort of boring thing. Electric motors to everybody else are boring. To us, they're very interesting because you can change a product.
