James Dyson: A Profile in Failure
The greatest people in history have been failures. Certainly, we remember these individuals as successes--success stories--and we treat those stories as legends and those individuals as gods. But each of them failed epically and repeatedly, more so than the combined successes of all of humanity.
Failure should not be overlooked in anyone, especially not those we admire. It is through failure that these individuals were able to learn, grow and ultimately succeed. We know this about ourselves but even as we learn to accept our own failures, sometimes we don’t recognize that the most successful people in the world have had an abundance of failure.
Our heroes need to be held to the same standard as the ancient Greek gods: awesome but not infallible. Failure is a humbling exercise, both for the observer and the observed. But learning is a humbling process. Once we realize that our heroes are just like us, we can examine how failure drives success. So I’ve started collecting stories about the failures of successful people, as a reminder that if you’re making mistakes and learning from them, you’re actually on the path to success.
For anyone who has ever had a product idea, Sir James Dyson’s story is surely among the most inspiring. Now one of the richest people in the United Kingdom with a net worth of over $5 billion, Dyson’s privately owned company employs over 1,000 engineers who work tirelessly to develop revolutionary small appliances including fans, heaters, and hand dryers in addition to legendary vacuum cleaners. But in the beginning, as is so often the case with entrepreneurs, there was only one man with an idea.
Not surprisingly, James Dyson wasn’t always interested in household products, an admittedly unsexy domain for a student of art and design. It was a chance move that led him to his first big idea. In 1971, Dyson and his wife purchased a 300 year old farmhouse which, like any centuries-old house, needed many renovations. With only limited finances, Dyson did much of the work himself, and often had need of a common garden wheelbarrow. It annoyed him that the feet sank into the soft ground, that the container spilled its contents too easily, and that it bruised knees and doorways when banged into either. So perhaps egotistically, he decided that the wheelbarrow could be improved upon, and did so. He literally reinvented the wheel--substituting a ball instead—and, after a few other improvements, the Ballbarrow was born.
The learning experience of creating the Ballbarrow was nothing compared to the lessons forced upon him by trying to sell it and set up a business around it. In the beginning, Dyson tried selling directly to home and garden stores, but no one wanted it, so he set up a mail order company and sold the Ballbarrows directly to customers. This method was successful, and the company soon expanded, with a board of directors and a sales team. The sales manager insisted on shifting the sales model from direct to wholesale, which resulted in rapid expansion but significant debt, as the company made less money per unit than they had by selling direct.
Soon the company was drowning in high interest debt, and Dyson set his sights on finding a distributor in the United States, where he hoped that the alternative wheelbarrow market was large enough to pull the company out of debt. But he was stabbed in the back by his sales manager, who stole the Ballbarrow design and sold it to Glassco plastics company to manufacture under their own brand name. Outraged and in complete disbelief, Dyson was determined to fight for his invention, and spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars fighting patent lawsuits. He lost, and the company sank even further into debt.
After losing one such suit, Dyson returned to England to find that his board of directors had lost faith in him. They fired him from the company he had created from scratch. What’s more, Dyson had assigned the Ballbarrow patent to the company instead of keeping it in his own name, so he was left with nothing. In his autography Against the Odds, Dyson explains that he “had no rights at all to the invention I had created and labored over for so long. It was not a mistake I was ever to make again. To lose my invention was like losing a limb. No it was worse than that. It was like giving birth, and then losing the child. And I was completely shattered by it.”
Shattered, depressed, and deep in personal debt… but not out of ideas. During his time selling the Ballbarrow, Dyson and his wife had moved into a home with more wooden floors than carpets and so they invested in a top of the line vacuum cleaner. However, Dyson frequently found himself unsatisfied with its performance. It didn’t suck well to begin with, and was almost completely useless once the bag was no longer new. He took the vacuum apart and realized that the bag was the problem, as it became clogged with a fine layer of dust very quickly after its first use. He came to this realization while he was still with his first company, and ran the idea by several colleagues, none of whom were remotely interested. One of the board members even said “James, your idea can’t be any good. If there were a better kind of vacuum cleaner, Hoover or Electrolux would have invented it.”
Once he had been let go by the board and thus freed him from their negativity, Dyson revisited the idea of a bagless vacuum cleaner with maximum sucking power. Creating it wasn’t easy. In fact, it took three excruciatingly long years and 5,127 prototypes. That number is astounding, not only because it shows how hard he worked, creating several dozen models a week, but because of the sheer stubbornness it took to repeatedly fail, risking it all and living hand-to-mouth with his young family for years. In retrospect he said that there were many times that his “doggedness and self-belief, in the absence of any real evidence that they were justified, were beginning to look more and more like insanity.”
So it is with inventors. They struggle, unknown, for years. “There is no such thing as a quantum leap,” says Dyson. “There is only dogged persistence – and in the end you make it look like a quantum leap.” Finally, after over five thousand attempts, Dyson succeeded in creating a bagless cyclone vacuum cleaner.
And this time, when he set out to sell the vacuum cleaners, he was much wiser thanks to his heartbreaking Ballbarrow experience. He had a hard time selling them at first, but eventually licensed a company to manufacture and sell one model in Japan. With the proceeds from that deal, he was able to start his factory and research and development center in England. The company is now worth many billions and employs over 4,000 people, but it is still privately owned and Dyson himself holds the patents on his original products. Had he not learned so many lessons from his first invention, there’s a good chance that the Dyson vacuum cleaner would either not have been produced or would not have profited its inventor.
Be sure to check out the other articles in the failure series:
Co inventor of DrillBitKit ? , Director of Irons & Stone Restoration Ltd , HD Driver at Iceland Foods
7 年A very interesting article, I wonder how James Dyson ballbarrow sales manager feels now! Being a co-inventor and manufacturer of our products we have had to deal with very similar situations, but we keep learning all the time.
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8 年Loved it
Senior Life Underwriter
9 年I suggest re-writing the title of the series to, "How Ya' Like Me now?"
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9 年Great article and it's nice to remind yourself of this things.