Ministering to the art of invention
By Rosalind Gray
Doing it the hard way
Once sales took off, they gathered huge
momentum. But looking back over the trajec-
tory of Dyson’s story begs the question: Why
had it taken quite so long for Dyson to go from
idea to accolades? Why did he inch his way
toward success through 5,127 time-consum-
ing, fully functional prototypes? The short
answer is that the long, hard slog is exactly
how Dyson thinks it should be. “Our society
has an instant-gratification thing,” he says.
“We admire instant, effortless brilliance. I
think quite the reverse. You should admire the
person who slogs through and gets there in
the end.”
Dyson was joined at times by various
assistants and partners, and ceaselessly sup-
ported by his wife, but there were long peri-
ods of physical and professional isolation. The
Connection wondered if the self-confessed
“misfit” is also something of a
happy loner and if this was a
necessary ingredient in his
eventual success. “I’m OK
alone. I’m quite happy
alone,” he says. “If you’ve
got a burning ambition, an
idea, you’ve got to work it
out on your own; I was
quite prepared to do that. It
was quite formative, I think,
making all the decisions
myself and working out what
experiments to do next. It was
good experience.”
For a man who takes such
delight in the process of invent-
ing, how much of a wrench was
it to go from utter absorption in
a single beloved product to
handing over control for dozens of new prod-
uct pipelines as he does now? He responds,
“When you’re doing it all yourself, you have
complete control, but with 1,300 engineers,
there’s a lot going on that you don’t see.
Celebrating mistakes
IMAGES COURTESY DYSON LTD
Dyson credits one of his lifelong heroes,
Thomas Edison, with inspiring his painstak-
ingly iterative approach. It is an ethos he tries
to infuse his organization with today. “I don’t
care how long things take,” he tells The
Connection. “Failure is to be celebrated—
that’s how we learn. At Dyson we’re a univer-
sity. We invest in and rejoice in failure, and
we stick at it. I learned from each of my mis-
takes. That’s how I came up with a solution.
So I don’t mind failure.”
You might expect a perfectionist streak in
an inventor whose approach is so meticulous.
You’d be wrong. Dyson is actually surprisingly
pragmatic: He notes, “ ‘Perfect’ is in fact com-
pletely the wrong word to use. You start with
a goal and you make the best possible version
you can make at that moment. You give the
customer the best available at that moment,
and then you set another goal and start work-
ing on it again.”
CONTINUED ON PAGE 28
supplier profile
Sprinkling of Dyson dust
Perhaps this passion for depth and detail
is also behind the Dyson product strategy:
Company: Dyson Ltd. Founder: Sir James Dyson Employees:
3, 100 Headquarters: Tetbury Hill, Malmesbury, Wiltshire Contact: 1-866-693-9766;
www.dyson.com;
questions@dyson.com Products at Costco: DC33 (#765200); DC40 (#630640—exclusive to Costco). Fans arriving in summer 2012. Selection varies by location. Comment about Costco: “We’ve worked
with Costco for eight exciting and successful
years. As well as selling our machines, we’re
delighted that Costco also uses them—our
Dyson Airblade hand dryer can be found in
many Costco warehouses.”—Sir James Dyson
MAY 2012 ;e Costco Connection
27
