The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller

Robert W. Marks's book is a clear verbal-and-pictorial explanation of Buckminster Fuller's 'anticipatory design science' — the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion house and car, and the world-view behind them — assembled with Fuller's cooperation. It doubles as a concise history of how Fuller's ideas developed from the 1920s to the point where the once-dismissed inventor finally won international recognition, and it introduced Fuller's thinking to a generation of designers who had no formal engineering pedigree.

Dyson read Fuller in his student years, on a recommendation from the engineer Anthony Hunt, and it reset what he thought was possible. Two ideas carried over into how he built his company. The first is permission: Fuller had no conventional technical training, which told the young Dyson that formal credentials were not the price of admission to invention. "The value of dreaming was the first thing that I learned from him," Dyson said.

The second is the most-quoted line in Dyson's whole philosophy of business, and it comes straight out of Fuller's world-view: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." That is, almost exactly, the Dyson strategy — don't argue that bagged vacuums are bad, build a fundamentally better machine that makes the argument for you. For any founder tempted to win by criticizing the incumbent, Fuller (via Marks) is the corrective: spend the energy on the replacement, not the critique.