Learning resiliency and modern invention from James Dyson

This post is about learning life lessons from one of the best modern technologies inventors, Sir James Dyson.

James Dyson is one of the British great modern inventors as well as designer, manufacturer and entrepreneur. He is one of role models for modern technology inventor.

I really enjoy and amaze with products from Dyson especially their vacuum cleaners. Dyson doesn’t sponsor me to make this post or saying good things about them.

This is just my pure personal experience and respect to Mr. Dyson from reading his story in his book as well as using Dyson’s products.

I am just a happy Dyson’s customer!

Although seems to be pricier for the initial investment on Dyson products compared to other brands, the price matches the product value.

I do have two Dyson’s products and I love them so much due to their value for money. I get more than what I paid for the products.

Here, at least, are my personal opinions of why I personally like Dyson products:

- The products are reliable, robust, functional and no gimmicks. I feel every shape, even the colour, of Dyson’s products have specific functions. The product design as well as material selections are well thought.

- The company’s philosophy values design, engineering and especially manufacturing when others think manufacturing is a “dirty factory”. The company promote refurbished products as well as provide repairs of Dysons products at a reasonable cost – increasing the value we can get by a long use of the product!

- The company, especially James Dyson, is care about education for future designer, engineer and manufacturer. They make their own technology institute with engineering degree apprenticeship where student get paid during their study and no tuition fee at all! Also, the company support schools to promote engineering, science and art. By buying their products, I feel like I also support the training and education for the future generation of engineers to make a better world!

In his book, James Dyson had failed hard multiple times, including losing a job at his own company and when other companies stole his product idea.

However, he kept getting up and move on!

Let’s discuss what we can learn from James Dyson’s book [1].

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Resiliency: Fail hard but keep getting up and moving on (improving)

Resilient is the foundation for thriving and success. In addition, resilient will yield determination, patience and hard work.

James Dyson had gone through a lot of pains to become what he is now. However, many people only see his success without knowing his struggles, setbacks, failures, trying so many things one after another.

Struggling and risk taking are certainly there in every journey toward success!

Related to risk, from James’ wheelbarrow story, he started commissioning the tooling for the plastic Eva ball for wheelbarrow without knowing whether the Eva ball will work like a pneumatic tyre. This story teaches us sometimes we need to take risks without knowing the true answer.

When James Dyson developed his first cyclonic vacuum cleaner which has two main advantages over traditional bagged vacuum cleaners: no loss of suction and bagless, he had faced many failures of trying ideas and products.

For his first cyclonic vacuum cleaner, he has done a total of 5127 prototypes!

Meaning, he has failed 5126 times before arriving at the 5127th prototype version he satisfied to manufacture and launch.

He kept repeating and improving the prototype development after so many failures.

Here, we can learn that having failures is important when we take lessons from those failures. From each failure, we learn something to improve in the next iteration.

Other failures in James Dyson’s life are in the effort to licence his patent on the cyclonic vacuum cleaner.

On one occasion, a big company try to purchase his licence but then cancelled it. Then, after a year or so, he found that the company cancelling the licensing agreement with him copied his vacuum cleaner design.

He didn’t give up. He fought the company by legal battle which took his time, energy, mind and effort for five years until he won the legal battle.

After trying to sell licence of his vacuum to companies, he decided to establish his own factory to make his vacuum cleaner, this option is also not easy!

He found difficulties to find capital as well as factory to manufacture his vacuum cleaners. After putting very hard effort finding capital and factory, he finally established his own factory to produce what we know one of the bestselling and performing vacuum cleaner based on cyclonic technology.

Another huge setback on Mr. Dyson journey is Dyson’s electric car project. The project was terminated after many years of effort, development and huge capital spending of around £500m.

Technically the project is excellent. They can create an electric car with solid state battery technology capable of running up to 600 miles without any charging. In 2018, this electric car is superior to any other electric cars manufactured by mainstream car companies.

However, commercially, the car production was not feasible at that time as more and more mainstream car manufacturers produce inferior electric cars just to prove they can produce electric cars with a huge loss for each sale of the electric car.

This situation caused Dyson cannot sell their electric cars at the price where they can have profits.

From this Dyson electric car story, we can define failure in two conditions, technically or commercially.

The Dyson’s electric car project is basically a huge technical success. However, commercially, due to other unfair competitions from mainstream car manufacturer, they couldn’t sell the car at profit hence it was a commercial failure.

For a product to be called successful, the product should be excellent in both technical and commercial (profitable) aspects.

Another story about the £20million loss Dyson has absorbed to provide thousand of ventilators (design and manufacture) for covid patients to support the Uk government facing the covid pandemic.

This story shows us that very often, we must do something even though it is not profitable. But we should do it because we believe that it is the right thing to do!

James Dyson has a greater number of failures than successes. However though, these small number of successes (compared to the amount of his failures) can recover all the cost for failures, build profits as well accumulated knowledge and skills (know how) which are essential for the next invention!

At the end, the main motivation James Dyson created Dyson Ltd is because he desires to do so instead of chasing money. Hence, we must have a correct and compelling motivation or reason when we do something.

If we create value, money will come. So don’t chase money!

Creativity and ideas: Multidisciplinary

One alarming aspect from Dyson’s book is when he said current higher education fails to teach creativity!

Current education puts too much emphasis on academic and logic with the expense of creativity.

Creativity requires combination of knowledge at various disciplines as well as experiments which requires, creates and improves skills.

One interesting aspect I observe is both James Dyson and Steve Jobs have some sort of knowledge in arts. Also, we need to meet and talk to many people with various backgrounds to get ideas.

Maybe the combination of engineering and arts can produce creativity?

Cross inter-disciplinary is a powerful tool. In the current days and ages, the combination of science, engineering (such as mechanical, electrical and artificial intelligence) and art (such as good appealing and ergonomic designs) are the ingredients to create the best product competing in the market!

In addition to creativity, we need to be able to explain complex ideas in a straightforward and clear manner. Only by then, we can convey our ideas and move people to realise our ideas.

After ideas, the next step is to take actions! Planning is important but action is even more important. We need to take actions, very often, under uncertain situation. Because, we don’t know yet the “full answer” of a problem or invention partly because maybe we don’t have enough tools or knowledge or experience.

However, what me must do is to be innovative and creative!

Innovation is never ending. We must innovate continuously and never stop on one successful product or result. Because they will obsolete in near future for certain!

Believing and having confidence in our ideas are essential. When James Dyson presented his cyclonic vacuum idea, people was sceptical and said if his idea is good, Hover and Electrolux should had made it long before.

From this story, other people opinions should not discourage us to explore our idea. James Dyson has strong confidence that his idea is promising and kept working and developing his idea.

It turned out that perhaps or most likely the reason of why the mainstream vacuum cleaner manufacturer did not make new inventions or improvements over the conventional bagged vacuum cleaners is because they enjoyed status quo of having profits from selling the traditional vacuum cleaners without worry about new developments as well as another big business of selling the filter or bag for the vacuum cleaners, that is spare part business.

Another interesting story of James Dyson in pursuing and developing his cyclonic vacuum cleaner, James Dyson always had curiosity about what is the current state of cyclonic related technologies.

To this aim, he met experts in cyclonic technologies. One expert said to him that the latest state of cyclonic technology was only able to repel particles at certain sizes. Small particles lower than a certain size cannot be repelled by the centrifugal force from the cyclone.

From this story, it is important to ask expert opinions. However, we need to think the opinions as an opinion and not as a decision to go or not to go!

In giving opinion, experts tend to be confident as if they have all the answers. We need to be careful, this is a good lesson for us, that this too much confident can kill new brilliant ideas.

James Dyson realised this situation that experts know many things deeply, but it does not mean that they know everything, there will always gaps that can be improved!

James Dyson kept experimenting by developing prototypes. He did empirical testing from each experiment, noted and analysed the results and made an improved version for the next prototype.

This empirical or experimentation approach can overpower analytical results although experiments very often require relatively a long development time.

That is, empirical tests are always important and sometime can disprove and/or improve theories!

Lessons learnt are we need to challenge orthodoxy and status quo, perform analyses and experiments, take calculated risks, stand on the edge of error, put things right and continue to ask questions.

Last but not least related to ideas is the important of patenting our ideas.

Remember, patent is for something tangible or physical or system, we cannot patent arts or software. For arts and software what we can do is to have a copyright.

One important lesson from James Dyson for patenting is we have to make sure we are the patent holder instead of a company. Then, we can either sell our patent license or become the manufacturer of our own products.

Another lesson from James Dyson regarding patent is that in a patent and confidential information law case words matter more than anything such as the drawing of the patent.

That is why inventions claims are described in patents by words rather than drawing. In any dispute cases, wrong wordings or synonyms can make our patent invalid!

Manufacturing and sales

Manufacturing is one of the best ways to create wealth. In addition, manufacturing should go hand in hand with sales!

Manufacturing creates a significant number of jobs for society.

We also need to assess manufacturing benefits in a long-term basis and not in short term.

When in 2002 Dyson moves the factory form Malmsbury to Malaysia and Singapore , initially Jobs in the UK disappear, but in the long run, when the company produce a lot of profits, the company can re-invest in the UK and even created more jobs in the UK for engineering and scientist than before.

Products either goods or services need constant improvements to make them better and cheaper than the previous version.

In designing a product, especially physical product such as Dyson products, we must stick to fundamental design principles which are every component, shape including appearance should carry a specific useful function to the product instead of only gimmicks!

Design and engineering are essential steps to translate inventive idea into a product which is useful and can be sold.

In manufacturing, ideally, we should be able to make all the parts in-house for quality assurance and logistic advantages. However, very often, this is not the case.

In situations where we cannot make, we should subcontract parts that are generic (not the core or critical components). That is why, we should put serious investments in R&D to develop and manufacture core or critical components in our products.

In principle, we should outsource components to external manufacturer as little as possible to reduce variations and maintain qualities.

In case we must outsources some components, it is important we must apply a dual sourcing of supplies. By dual sourcing we can reduce risks in case of stoppages in one supplier as well as to maintain our competitive edge over suppliers.

James Dysan feels unfortunate that Britain started forgetting manufacturing focus since 1970. In fact, manufacturing creates real products and real wealth. Unfortunately, in Britain, currently manufacturing is considered as a “dirty job” and people wants to go to clean job such as finance and software. These fields are important too but should be not with the expense of manufacturing!

As mentioned before, for manufacturing to generate wealth, we need to able to sell our product. Selling requires special knowledge and skills.

James said manufacturing and selling are the two side of the same coin! We cannot and must not separate manufacturing and selling.

To sell product, we must explain what the product is, how it works and how it is useful or beneficial and how it can help people finish their tasks.

James Dyson said we should understand the arts of selling. For example, in marketing especially in our current era, journalist and user opinions and comments are far more important and believable than conventional advertisement in television.

In selling, we must ask what customer wants, what their problems are, what they are looking for, what their job are instead of too much focus selling our product. We must know and ask customer what they think they want and suggest solutions for them.

However, great marketing can never ever replace great products!

The first principle in selling is that we need to sell something that is really wort to sell: high quality, high performance and easy to use and maintain.

To make a great product, the product should have gone through many prototypes’ iterations.

Why a product should be great? Because a great product causes the products to be difficult to copy!

A product with high performance and material qualities will tend to have less probability to have a cheaper copy of it.

why?

Because for others to make a cheaper copied version, to have similar quality, they will need the same amount of cost, such as using the same materials or using the same sophisticated manufacturing methods so that they cannot reduce cost and cannot sell significantly cheaper than the original!

If we compared hi-tech products with luxury fashion products, such as bag, shoes, clothes, etc, these luxury fashion products are expensive due to their branding in addition to their material and craftmanship quality.

These luxury fashion products are high quality too, but the difference is that a big chunk of their pricing comes from their brand.

Other fashion companies can made similar products, with similar design and material and craftmanship qualities, to luxury fashion products and sell their products much cheaper because they don’t charge the “branding” fee, and hence we can see similar fashion products with only a fraction of the price of its luxury branding counterpart.

The point is that a hi-tech product, acquired due to its performance and material quality, will have an inherent resistance to be copied for a cheaper price!

Dare to fail, challenge status quo and embrace new opinions in development

In any inventive development efforts, risk is an antidote to inertia. We can’t avoid risk, but we can manage risk. We must dare to take risk.

That said, entrepreneurship spirit is essential to take risks needed for invention of new products and bring the product to market.

We must dare to fail, and learn for the failures, improve it and move on as what James Dyson did for his cyclonic vacuum and other products.

Buckminster Fuller said we can’t change things by fighting the same reality. We can’t expect different results by doing the same thing.

To change something or make an invention, we must build a new model that cause current models obsolete. By then, we can make a plausible improvement.

Dyson really dares to take risks in their journey.

After the first huge success of their vacuum cleaner, they took risks by heavily investing in the development of their own digital motor. This digital motor became a massive success of their products, and they can expand into new products such as a robot vacuum, air purifier and hair dryer. In addition to digital small electric motor, Dyson also developed their own battery technologies supporting their successful handheld vacuum cleaner products.

For developing hair dryer products, Dyson spent around £55million during 4-year development involving 103 engineers.

This story tells us eureka moments don’t come suddenly. Instead, it only comes through a relentless process of development with huge capital and man-hour investments.

However, we know that not all R&D development will be a success. The question is when we need to stop.

James Dysan said that we need to stop our development and find other ways when we face with at least one of these two conditions:

- Technical condition: we face technical limitations after trying everything within our means or capabilities, i.e. the ideas really doesn’t work.

- Commercial condition: the technical innovation is not commercially available (such as we cannot sell the inventive product at profit).

In presenting and developing new ideas, very often, people hesitate or reject entirely the ideas. That is why resiliency and confidence in our ideas are very important.

We should never stop or satisfy when we arrive at one success point. What success is just another milestone to pursue the next idea. There is no greater danger than satisfaction causing status quo.

To find and improve new ideas, we must embrace new opinions, even from people who are not experts.

James specifically pointed out we must be careful with experience and expertise!

Because, in most situation, experiences tell what we do, what to avoid and how things should be done. That is, experiences steer us to do something we already know.

However, if we want to pioneer new things and make new inventions, we need to step into the unknown areas and very often, our past experiences may be the barrier!

That is why James likes to hire and promote new and young engineer because they usually have new perspectives rather than past experiences that dictate their thought.

Important advice that James said when pursuing our new ideas is that we must accept criticism and turn it into improvements and advantages, don’t copy the opposition, don’t worry too much about market research.

We must follow our own stars.

Continuous learning and go to the field/shopfloor

It is very important to have a mindset for continuous and lifelong learning. One best method to change our mindset is through education!

Continuous learning is very important because technology, science and engineering always evolve toward a better understanding.

Most importantly, learning by failure is very important! It will give us wisdom and useful insight about particular aspects.

To learn practically and from failure, we should periodically, by ourselves, or often go to the field or shop floor and observe how things operate, how things are made, what the cause of a process bottleneck is, talk to the machine operator what processes are difficult and what skills they need to improve and others.

Going to the shop floor is called “Genchi Genbutsu” in Japanese production system. Management should not only sit at their office. Rather, they should visit by themselves the shop floor and ask direct feedback from operators and observe what process should be improved or what the real problems at the production are.

READ MORE: All we need is to be resilient before others

Don’t blindly follow what market research says

Charlie Munger always says we must apply the law of inversion. This law tells use instead of asking or thinking how we can achieve our goals, we should think what things causing we can’t achieve our goals.

Like research, we should think how wrong our results are!

Research results are not 100% accurate or true due to many reasons. For example, the test has limited samples, the instrument has an inaccuracy in gathering data, the environment causes random effect on the process and other causes.

inaccuracies also exist in the results of market research.

We must carefully analyse the results provided market research and compare with our thoughts, estimates and predictions.

James Dyson said we need to be careful to with market trends data and we must dare to challenge market trends.

For example, when James finalised his first cyclonic vacuum cleaner, which are bagless and no loss of suction, market research said that people don’t want to see the dirty dust inside their bagged vacuum cleaner as well as they only want to spend a small amount of money for a vacuum cleaner.

However, James responded against the market research and decided that his vacuum cleaner will have a transparent bin because it gave him a satisfaction seeing the hard work of their vacuum cleaner. Also, customer was happy to spend more money for a high-performance vacuum cleaner because it is an important home appliance and part of our house daily life.

Another story about the inaccuracy of market research in James’ book is a story where British Motor Corporation (BMC) refused to make two mini production lines and only make one production line instead.

This is because BMC blindly followed what the market research said that people would not buy car with small wheels.

It turned out that mini demands were very high and they couldn’t catch up demands making customer turned to other cars and losing high potential profits.

James thought us to having faith in your idea and believing in progress is so very important!

The importance of skills

Skill is very important. Perhaps, it is more important than theoretical knowledge, somehow.

We can’t acquire skills by only reading or attending classes, we must practice skills for a long period of time and collect experiences.

Regarding the important of skills, James Dyson though us that we must:

• Learning by making things is as important as learning through an academic route. Hands on motoric experiences are essential. So, make our hand dirty on it.
• Learning as you go and just do it! Make a plan but action is more important.

The point is the world needs engineer to design, build, fix and execute something useful for people and make the world a better place.

James argues that universities should teach people to make something as well as to think creatively addressing problem from different angles.

We need to build capability on people so that they can think creatively, take action to realise their idea and perform real works!

Final thought and conclusion

James Dyson really is one of the greatest British modern technology inventors. From his book, we can learn many things related to life and R&D.

Some important lessons from his book are resiliency, creativity and ideas, multidisciplinary, manufacturing and sales, dare to fail, challenge status quo, embrace new opinions, continuous learning, visit shopfloor, don’t blindly follow what market research says, follow your own star and be confident, the importance of skills and many more!

This post cannot do justice to describe or explain many lessons extracted from James Dysin life story, finding success after success trough many failures.

After all, there is one statement, with all due respect, that I disagree with James Dyson’s statement in his book about our ancestors some 3 million years ago discovered tools and then found way to cloth, feed and shelter them. In my believe, human is special and created by God with already given essential knowledge and skills set, such as how to make cloth, farming, irrigation, and shelter and develop from there instead of evolving from the mentioned ancestors million year before.

Reference

[1] Dyson, J., 2021. Invention: A life. Simon and Schuster.

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