Dyson: Make It Work, Make It Exciting

David Senra shared the following quote/note from James Dyson’s autobiography Against the Odds. You’re going to want to read the whole thing, but let me highlight these two lines first: 

It didn’t matter how other people did it. It didn’t matter if it could be done better. 

As long as it works, and it is exciting, people will follow you.

It doesn’t matter how anybody else is doing it – just how you do it. If it works AND it’s worth talking about, people are going to follow along. 

Brilliant. 

Here’s the full quote:

“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 

This attitude to employment extended to [Jeremiah] Fry’s thinking in everything, including engineering. 

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.*

When I came to him 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 sure 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.’

Now, this was not a modus operandi that I had encountered before.

College had taught me to revere experts and expertise. 

Fry ridiculed all that; 

as far as he was concerned, *with enthusiasm and intelligence anything was possible.*

It was mind-blowing. 

No research, no preliminary sketches. 

If it didn’t work one way he would just try it another way, until it did. 

And as we proceeded I could see that we were getting on extremely quickly. 

*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. 

As long as it works, and it is exciting, people will follow you.”