James Dyson Quotes
101 James Dyson Quotes
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Advertising is the British answer to everything. But that is the way to a fast buck, not real money.
James Dyson
Difference, and retention of total control.
James Dyson
We all want to make our mark. We all want to make beautiful things and a little money. We all have our own ideas about how to do it.
James Dyson
I have been a misfit throughout my professional life, and that seems to have worked to my advantage.
James Dyson
My father died of cancer in 1956. I was only nine at the time… His death put me at a great disadvantage compared to the other boys. It made me feel like an underdog, someone who was always going to have things taken away from him. It made me feel that I was alone in the world – which inevitably, in better moments, will also make a small boy feel special.
James Dyson
[On his father dying when he was only nine years old] Life became something I had to make up as I went along, and I had to work everything out for myself. In crass, psychoanalytic terms, I suppose it made me a fighter.
James Dyson
[As a child] I was always up against people who were bigger and stronger than I was. It raised my standards – in that I was not prepared to lose everything all the time just because I was the youngest – and taught me that I could take on something much bigger than I was, and win.
James Dyson
[On learning the Bassoon at the age of 10] I had merely been obtuse. I had tried to be different on a whim, momentarily regretted it, and now here I was on this adventure.
James Dyson
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.
James Dyson
No research, no ‘workings’ 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… It was to be exactly the way I went about developing the Ballbarrow.
James Dyson
The Sea Truck, God knows, is not the best way to travel across water… But the advantages of it outweigh the disadvantages, and the magic of the thing sees it through.
James Dyson
Magic – the unique way a product does what it does – is never to be underestimated.
James Dyson
You can teach yourself science… but you can’t necessarily make yourself an artist.
James Dyson
I had been very boring, indeed, by no means your typical sixties wild child. I didn’t do drugs, I drank only very little, was pretty well organised and disciplined, and I worked late at night in the holidays on all the projects that I was involved in. I wore the odd flowery shirt, and had quite long hair, but only because I thought they looked nice.
James Dyson
You can’t repeat the past.
James Dyson
That is what development is all about. Empirical testing demands that you only ever make one change at a time. It is the Edisonian principle, and it is bloody slow. It is a thing that takes me ages to explain to my graduate employees at Dyson Appliances, but it is so important.
James Dyson
They tend to leap in to tests, making dozens of radical changes and then stepping back to test their new masterpiece. How do they know which change has improved it, and which hasn’t?
James Dyson
While it is easy, of course, for me to celebrate my doggedness now and say it is all you need to succeed, the truth is that it demoralised me terribly. I would crawl into the house every night covered in dust after a long day in the coach house, exhausted and depressed because that day’s cyclone had not worked. There were times when I thought it would never work, that I would keep on making cyclone after cyclone, never going forwards, never going backwards, until I died.
James Dyson
Looking at it now, in view of the fact that I was making only one change at a time, and working alone, I think that a decent working prototype in four years was actually quite speedy work.
James Dyson
A decent working prototype in four years was actually quite speedy work. It sounds a bit Hare and the Tortoise, but those old fairytales knew what was going on.
James Dyson
What most, indeed all, manufacturers want… is to pay you no money at all at the beginning, have you working for them all the way through the deal for nothing, and then only start to pay you your measly percentage when they start selling the product, and making money themselves – at which point they will think of all sorts of different ways to renegotiate the royalty rate, and pay you practically nothing at all.
James Dyson
We have revelled for years in the apparently bizarre culture and habits of the Japanese, with the result that British businessmen – fed on images of shrieking naked men jumping into icy rivers to eat live squid, after being forced to drink eight gallons of salty water with prizes for the last to vomit or urinate – have developed a neurosis, almost a paranoia, that has made productive contact between the two nations – as industrial powers – a very rare thing indeed.
James Dyson
They believe in progress by stages… the persistent trial and error that allows them to wake up one morning, after many, many mornings, with a world-beating product.
James Dyson
[On the Japanese] All of their success is born out of a theory of gradual development that is the very antithesis of the British obsession with the quantum leap.
James Dyson
I had bigger fish in mind. And it was time to fry them.
James Dyson
Any little design improvement that you try to make will inevitably be used to exploit you by your opposition.
James Dyson
The thing about inventing is that it is a continual and continuous process, and it is fluid. Inventions generate further inventions. In fact, that is where most inventions come from. They very rarely come out of nothing.
James Dyson
There were no salesmen, no advertising people, no marketing managers, to interfere and try to guide us in their direction. We had nothing to do but deduce our own dream product.
James Dyson
There was no market research groups; it was, to be frank, a designer’s wet dream. It was unique. The world just isn’t like that. You were not supposed to do things like that, just go ahead and do it all on your own, and then order a million pounds’ worth of tooling…
James Dyson
A lunch guest of mine in the South of France once thought she had lost her diamond engagement ring out by the pool. I vacuumed around the garden for a while, until, after about ten minutes, I spotted the ring spinning round the cyclone. (Warning: do not try this at home.)
James Dyson
No one ever had an idea staring at a drawing board.
James Dyson
[Francis] Bacon always got his ideas from walking in the countryside and observing nature, rather than sitting in his study. So get out and look at things, and when an idea comes, grab it, write it down, and play with it until it works. Don’t sit and expect ideas to come.
James Dyson
Everyday products sell.
James Dyson
Although it is harder to improve a mature product, if you succeed there is not need to create a market…
James Dyson
Companies are built, not made.
James Dyson
New employees tend to wear suits and ties out of habit, but they go after six to eight weeks. The suits and ties that is, not the employees – I don’t take it that seriously.
James Dyson
A suit is like a biker’s leathers, or a fireman’s protective kit: it is merely protection. People wear one because if you look the part, if you look efficient, look sober and reliable, people will assume that you are, and you can get away with being inadequate. Show up for a marketing meeting in your underpants, though, and you have to be pretty damned impressive to pull it off.
James Dyson
I employ brilliant young graduates with no experience at all. I want free-thinkers who can take the company forward, and have revolutionary ideas.
James Dyson
If you can’t be unconventional, be obtuse. Be deliberately obtuse, because there are 5 billion people out there thinking in train tracks, and thinking what they have been taught to think.
James Dyson
I remind people that the assembly lines need not be in a hurry. Speed is not important, and neither are numbers. The only thing that is important is doing everything carefully, thoroughly, and vigilantly.
James Dyson
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