Michael Dell: "Pleased but never satisfied has been part of our culture since the beginning"

Michael Dell, chairperson and CEO, Dell Technologies, at an event in October 2011. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons 2.0)

Michael Dell, chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, has an epic life story with many lessons related to business, philanthropy, innovation and relationships.

More than two decades after his writing debut with Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry (Harper Business, 1999), Michael Dell has written another book - Play Nice But Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader (Portfolio, 2021). Here are some key takeaways:

1. Be curious

Dell’s parents encouraged curiosity. As children, he and his brothers liked “taking things apart around the house to see how they worked.” He tinkered with telephones, televisions and radios. He writes, “Always be learning. You want to have big ears. To listen, to learn, and to always be curious. To be open to ambiguity. Design your company from the customer back.”

2. Prioritize worker safety

While attending electronics shows in Asia, Dell saw the whole supply chain at close quarters and noted that some factories were more focused on worker safety than others. He writes, “One Taiwanese plant I went to had an open gutter with chemicals running right through the middle of the concrete factory floor. That’s not a good idea, I thought. At Dell we had a simple philosophy, one we still have today: No one should ever get hurt working at Dell.”

3. Never underestimate the importance of trust

Customers who trust a company with a particular product may not trust it with other products. While launching the 433TE and the 425TE, Dell assumed that the company’s reputation alone would have customers “clamouring for them.” Medium-sized and big corporations, banks and government agencies, didn’t trust the company with these new products. They trusted Dell with making PCs but Dell had no track record when it came to servers.

4. Remember that price creates perception

Apparently, the price difference between Dell’s servers and Compaq’s servers seemed “suspiciously big.” It appeared that Dell was charging too little. He quotes a customer who said, “Well, what if you left out something?” This question arose because Compaq had beaten Dell and established reliability—"and as always, their high price signalled high quality.”

5. Keep improving

Dell advocates for learning from customer feedback for continuous improvement – kaizen in Japanese – on various counts such as design, features, manufacturability, serviceability, sales, services and support, supply chain, etc. He notes, “Along with kaizen, PBNS—pleased but never satisfied—has been part of our culture since the beginning.” His office has mementos related to the company’s high and low points because he believes that “how successful you are is really a function of how well you deal with failure, and how much you learn from it.”

6. Hire the right people

Looking back, Dell believes that he hired people who could help the company grow and people who knew more about their area of expertise than he did. When his team went from 650 people to 5,000 between 1988 and 1993, he realized that “the people who got us from point A to point B might not be the same people who could get us from point B to point C.”

7. Watch the pace at which you are growing

When Dell hired Tom Meredith (formerly with Sun Microsystems) as his CFO, Meredith was concerned “about the rate at which we were burning through our capital.” Dell writes, “Our mantra, he said, was Growth, Growth, Growth when it ought to be Liquidity, Profitability, and Growth. In that order.” Though Dell initially saw Meredith as an alarmist, he learnt to appreciate that the company needed to slow down expansion and build more capability.

8. Set the right tone as a leader

Dell once had a VP of Human Resources who hired somebody “on the second shift in IT” when the company had no such position to offer. Dell explains, “It turned out that Ted, who was married and had kids, had given a no-show job to his girlfriend the stripper. And the girlfriend decided she wanted more money, so she came to the company and said she’d need a good chunk of change to go away.” The VP was fired as he was stealing from the company. Dell found the behaviour “reprehensible”. He instituted a policy mandating that “if you’re a VP or above, don’t do anything that would reflect negatively on the company.”

9. Take care of your health

Many of Dell’s colleagues and friends died young; this pushed him to take better care of his health. He remarks, “If you don’t have your health, then all else is lost.” For him, the foundation of good health is good sleep. As he travels a lot for work, he has devised “tricks” to ensure that he sleeps well, gets enough exercise, and adjusts quickly to new time zones.

10. Give back to society

Dell writes, “A company’s success, as I see it, means so much more than making money for its team members and shareholders. I believe we can do well by doing good.” His Jewish parents taught him and his brothers about tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (healing the world), so he grew up believing that “giving back” ought to be a key part of his job. This inspired him and his wife Susan to establish the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.