Dyson: The Extended Life's Work Interview

[Guest guest]

Dyson: The Extended Life's Work Interview

by Alison Beard

Dyson famously went through 5,127 prototypes of his Dual Cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner before settling on the model that would make him a billionaire. His eponymous company now also makes bladeless fans and energy-efficient hand dryers, and operates in 49 countries. Dyson stepped down as chairman this year but remains the sole owner and chief engineer.

Editor's Note: A shorter version of this interview appeared in the July-August 2010 issue of the magazine.

How do you describe your profession? I’m sometimes called an inventor. But actually there’s no such thing. You’re

an engineer or scientist who develops technology to create something new and better. I’m also keen on design; I started as a designer. I see them all as one, joined-up profession. You’ve said that your father’s death, in 1956, when you were nine, made you who you are today. How so?

Not having a father, particularly at that time, was very unusual. I felt different. I was on my own. I can’t quite explain it, but I think subconsciously I felt a need to prove myself. Something like 80% of British prime ministers since Walpole lost a parent before the age of 10. So there’s something in it. I’m certainly quite driven. You’re also the third child.

Yes, I was always competing with [a brother and sister] who were more developed and more educated. That made me not particularly worried about

making mistakes or looking foolish, because I was used to it. And it was quite a thrill, being five years younger, when I got to an answer quicker or was as good as they were at football or cricket. What did your first boss, Fry, teach you?

When I went to work for him, I’d never designed a product. I’d never sold anything. And he put me in charge of a company manufacturing a high-speed landing craft. So he taught me that someone doesn’t have to grow into a job. If you allow them to make mistakes, they’ll learn extremely quickly. He also taught me to mistrust experience. He was far happier to have young people working around him who had freshness and an

unsullied approach. Why did you go through so many prototypes developing the Dual Cyclone?

Air movement within a cyclone is highly complex. So you must make one change at a time and test it, and only by following that methodical process can you determine the best design. You produce tables of results, and then graphs from which you observe trends. It’s the failures that you learn from. When big manufacturers rejected the Cyclone, why did you press on and produce it yourself?

I just felt that if I gave it up and did something sensible, I’d always

regret it. As a user of vacuum cleaners, it was what I wanted. If the bags and loss of suction really annoyed me, surely they would annoy other people. You’ve launched a few related products, such as fans. Would you like to try more new things?

Oh, no. I would have been quite happy to solve all the problems with vacuum cleaners for the rest of my life. Continuing to improve something

— doing a better invention — is a much harder intellectual process than

flitting from one thing to another. How do you foster a culture of creativity at Dyson?

I think it’s entirely down to the way you react to things, what you say to people every day, your attitude, your body language, your enthusiasm for coming up with new things and not making compromises and not making decisions based on business reasons alone. That's a culture that catches on by osmosis. I’ve heard all Dyson employees have to assemble a vacuum cleaner on their first day of work.

They might be nonexecutive directors, who are knights of the realm, but

they still have to. It gives them confidence in the technology. They know what’s inside. And they keep the ones they build. It’s to emphasize

that what we do is make products that people use. Can you describe how the office is set up?

Everything is as open-plan as possible, including a lot of the labs, which is unusual in a research company. We’ve taken the view that everybody should know what's going on everywhere, so they pick up things

and are stimulated. And we encourage engineers and scientists to do their own tests, to build their own prototypes, because they learn so much more than they would if they had a technician doing it. Tell me about the product-testing process.

We have an extraordinary number of testing regimes, mechanical and human. We have laboratories where we breed dust mites; we have a full-size house to vacuum. We test product to break them, to wear them out. If you drop something from an enormous height and it breaks, when you look at where it's broken, you can often figure out how to stop it breaking, not by making it out of heavier, more expensive material but by making some tiny, clever structural design change. You recently announced that Dyson is doubling its R & D staff from 350 to 700. Why? And how can you afford it?

We've had a very good recession. We have a lot of products we want to make, a lot of technology we want to develop and you need a lot of people to do it. Now we've just got to find them. You’re also stepping down as chairman. How involved are you in the business side of the company?

I was in the beginning, but now I've got a very good team who handle that much better than I ever could. Most of my time is spent on new products, new technology, and I wanted to use the time that I would have

spent doing my chairman's duties down with my engineers and scientists.

I also felt the company ought to imagine a time when I wasn’t around, to be used to running without me. I could go under a bus. Have you ever considered taking on financial partners?

No because I like that we don't have to worry about shareholders. We can take a long-term view. We can invest heavily in research and development, in something which might take 15 years to come to fruition.

You're famous in the U.S. for appearing in your own, simple commercials. Why did that work so well?

Well, all I want to do really is explain what it is we've done and why we've done it. It wasn't my idea to actually sit in front of a camera and do that; it was a filmmaker friend’s. But I thought it was a good one.

On your company website you list your heroes: Faraday, Buckminster Fuller, Edison, the brothers,

Goodyear, Isambard Brunel. What do all those men have in common? They all are highly pragmatic. They all made

what they engineered. They were all unafraid of doing something strange and different. And were happy to go right out on a limb and risk their own reputation, their own livelihood, even their own life to try and make something work. Your wife said that the best word to describe you is “stubborn.†Do you agree?

Absolutely, stubborn. Determined. Mad would be the wrong word, but I can become fanatical about things. I hope in my old age I'm slightly more measured but in order to make something work you often have to often exclude anything else. There may be more intelligent people who don't have to do that, but I have to. It’s a single-mindedness.

As an adviser to the British Conservative Party, you’re advocating new policies to boost innovation in the UK. How does education factor into that? If you look at schoolchildren doing a subject we have called design and technology, from age 10 to 14, they love it and they’re brilliant at it. But somehow

that gets drilled out of them. And, really, the government is responsible. Britain produces far fewer engineers than the Philippines, Mexico, or Iran, not to mention India and China. So we’re not setting ourselves up very well for the future. And children are missing out on something they could have enjoyed. Exeter did a study that showed engineers are the happiest of all professions. It’s enormously absorbing.

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