Dyson has added a twist to everyday electronics since its humble beginnings over three decades ago—from bladeless fans to bagless vacuums.
While the tech company might have many a feather in its cap, its founder and chairman, James Dyson, still considers himself “a failure,” and he says he enjoys it, he told the Wall Street Journal.
“Mine is a life of failure,” said Dyson, who is worth $17 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. A furniture designer by training, Dyson likens himself to other artists for whom it takes many attempts to find what works.
Dyson thinks success is not as good a teacher as failure is. That’s perhaps why he thinks experience and finding solutions easily are overrated.
“If something works, it’s less challenging, it’s less interesting,” he said. “If something’s gone wrong, you want to know why it’s gone wrong.”
Dyson started the namesake tech company in England in the 1990s, creating a suite of home appliances such as vacuum cleaners and the viral Airwrap hair dryers. Over time, Dyson became a heavyweight in its own right, competing with the likes of Miele and Panasonic.
Despite softer demand affecting many consumer goods sectors, Dyson delivered £1.4 billion in profits in 2023, up 9% from a year earlier. In 2024, the company said it would cut a third of its 3,500-person U.K. workforce.
Many of the company’s appliances have become a hit with consumers, but a handful haven’t seen the light of day despite Dyson betting big on them. The company’s electric-car project is one example. The magnate scrapped the project in 2019, two years after it was announced.
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But that hasn’t stopped Dyson from diversifying into new ventures. The company makes headphones and owns a sprawling farming business in the U.K., aimed at reducing the need for food imports.
In the spirit of innovation and learning, Dyson also said he prefers hiring relatively inexperienced people.
Dyson’s argument is simple: Any new employee in the 14,000-strong company must be trained to understand its wiring. If new talent starts from scratch, Dyson can shape what they learn.
“Experience means that you’ve seen how something’s worked in the past or you’ve seen solutions to problems,” Dyson said. “But the world is changing so rapidly, and we’re trying to innovate and pioneer anyway. So, actually, experience doesn’t help us very much and, in fact, it can get in the way.”
The founder himself is a case in point. One of his earliest design prototypes was a high-speed landing craft, which he knew nothing about. This required him to learn how such vehicles worked from scratch, ultimately landing him his first gig of making and selling the “Sea Truck.”
Dyson said the electronics maker hires undergraduates and trains them at the Dyson Institute so they can apply their skills to the company’s challenges.
“The experience with our undergraduates is wonderful. They don’t do the obvious thing; they don’t do what should be done. They start doing something else, which is much more interesting,” the tycoon said.
The process at Dyson lets employees experience things, regardless of whether they’ve dabbled in them before. Before the company launched an expensive hair dryer in 2016, its engineering team of mostly male members learned to blow-dry hair professionally, according to the New York Times.
