The Wisdom Wall

“The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company, we may have picked up bad habits. I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you picked up the habits of that company, which may not be the right sort of attitude that we want. This attitude…”

“The real thing I learned is that, um, it's much better to put your own money in. I didn't have any money, I borrowed it, but I was, it was money that had been given to me by a bank, so it was my money, even though I was on the line for it, and my wife had to sign the house away and all our possessions and all that sort…”

“They were selling them at a loss for a complicated reason. Car manufacturers' emissions, which are controlled by law, are based on their overall emissions from their range of cars. So if they had- ... So if they had a, um, a model which didn't emit anything, they could go on making big gas guzzling vehicles in which…”

“marketing would get on selling things, not decide what product should be or how much it should be sold for.”

“not everything is always perfect about something which makes progress, um, and eventually you overcome the problem, but, uh, so not everything is better. Sometimes not everything is better, but the good overcomes the bad. It's much better than the bad.”

“If, if you're experienced, you know how, why not to do something, or how not to do something. Whereas if you're naive, and you're a young engineer, you're disqualified, or you're still training, you, you don't have that negativity towards certain things. And often it's, um, something that hasn't worked previously that…”

“So you, you've got to employ people during the winter when you don't need them, and then the summer you need more people. It, it's just a horror, seasonal business is a horrible business. Avoid seasonal business.”

“At that point, you're right to focus in on that moment because ideas are so fragile. And they're easily knocked away by anybody. Everybody. It's why experts are dangerous.”

“Because if you're doing enough experiments, um, you're trying to be logical what you're doing, but sometimes, uh, something occurs that's not logical. And it works. So you've just got to keep trying. Luck will happen to you.”

“It's partly intuition, but I, I don't believe in intuition is, uh, feeling or guesswork. Oh. I think. The intuition is much more interesting because it's all sorts of influences. It could be, it could be history. It could be all sorts of things that, um, form an opinion. That, that, um, you define as intuition, but…”

“And actually, if you learn that failure is so much more interesting than success, Because failure, you question it. Well, why did it go wrong? And actually, the reason it goes wrong is often very, very interesting. When something works, you say, great, that works, and you don't even stop to wonder why it works.”

“the person who's just starting out, ok, he hasn't got a name yet, but he's probably incredibly enthusiastic and will put everything behind it and work all hours to make it work. So it's the person, not the business, really, that you're backing.”

“And also I think if, if you've lost a parent at that age, uh, life can't get much worse. So you're prepared to take risks because you've started from a horrible starting point.”

“Because you, I, I, our engineers do their own tests and build their own prototypes, um, because there's something funny about the process of actually making the prototype yourself that you learn, and when it fails, it may have been something you noticed as you were gluing it together or machining a part, that the, that…”

“Well, if you get big, there's a tendency to think you lots of people say you can do everything, but you can't. You can't do everything. You can't do everything well. Uh, and you probably can't do anything anyway. So the important thing is to decide what's really the most important thing, and just do that. And there are…”

“And the theory is the faster you make a motor go, Um, the smaller it can be, the fewer materials it can have, and the more electrically efficient it is.”

“And, ah, if you have fairly low volume in your new manufacturer, all your costs are 30% higher. Because you're not buying very many, um, seats from the seat manufacturer, or very many tires from the tire manufacturer, and so on. So all your costs are much higher.”