philanthropist, investor, and author.
He’s the founder and CEO of Dell Inc.
One of the world’s leading sellers of personal computers.
Forbes estimates his net worth to be 19.5 billion dollars.
He’s Michael Dell and here are his top 10 rules for success.
(swoosh)
– You know you have to think about the point of impact.
If you’re running a business with 100 people,
the point of impact for the leader is very different
than if it’s 1000 people or 10,000, 100,000.
And so that’s the frame of reference
that I’ve always used to say okay,
if I’m leading this organization,
what are the things that actually I can do
to cause it to be successful?
If it’s 1000 people, it’s very, very different
than it is for me today.
Today I’m a lot more focused on strategy,
because that’s the point of impact
on 110,000 person company.
On a hundred person company, you’re sort of doing
any job in the organization.
You’re doing every job in the organization, potentially.
And that might be okay at that point.
One of the things I see in new businesses,
is they’re often looking for perfection.
And I think this is a really big mistake.
I think you ought to be looking for experiments.
And quick experiments and it’s okay to have little failures.
And what you want to do is learn
as much as you can very quickly.
And try things.
And certainly when we were a small business,
you know, we’d go out and try all sorts of things
to find what would work.
And then we found something that would work,
we’d do that 100 more times or 1,000 more times.
We still do that today as a large company.
When I was 16, I got this job working
for a newspaper in Houston.
And my job was to sell subscriptions
to the paper on the telephone.
And I realized two things when I was doing this.
I realized that people that were buying the newspaper
generally had two things in common.
Either they were moving to a new residence,
or they were getting married.
It turns out that you could go find information
about both of those things in enormous quantities.
So the state that I lived in, in Texas,
when you want to get a marriage license,
you have to file with the state and it’s public information.
Particularly the address you want the license sent to
once it’s issued.
So I hired all my friends, and went to every county
in the surrounding 16 counties in Houston,
captured the addresses of all the people
who applied for marriage licenses
and sent them a direct mail offer
to offer them the newspaper for a free trial
and then a subscription.
And I ended up making a fair some of money for a teenager.
In our situation where we were
creating a new way of doing business,
that was actually part of our culture as well.
And as we wanted to attract people
from let’s say related spaces,
we didn’t actually want them to bring
the culture of the other companies.
We might want some insights from their
experience and that sort of thing.
But we had to be very explicit about
the Dell culture was really all about, what the values are,
particularly as we expand around the world.
You know, these aren’t necessarily American values,
these are the Dell company values.
This is incredibly important,
and this is the way we operate our business.
One of the things that people do instinctually
when there are tough times, is they kind of do nothing.
(laughs)
And you know they kind of hunker down.
– Is this sort of the frozen rabbits
in the head lights thing.
– You know, it’s kind of completely stunned into inaction,
and I think that’s actually the worst thing to do.
I think times when everyone is confused and kind of stunned,
present the most enormous opportunity,
because no one is really doing anything.
So, you know, I think this is a time
where the seeds of really successful
new businesses will be created.
In fact, if you look in our industry,
which I’m most familiar with, you know,
the greatest companies kind of came out of,
and were formed in some of the
most difficult times in the industry.
When no one was really looking,
and everyone really thought
the whole thing was going to go south,
all of a sudden a whole new breed of companies emerged.
So for example if you look at when Dell was formed,
in the early 1980s, 1984,
this was pretty dark time in the US economy.
The personal computer industry
had just gone through a big down cycle.
And the prevailing wisdom was that
all electronics would be dominated by the Japanese.
– Yeah.
– That we had this big boogie man called Japan Inc.
And that no one could compete with Japan Inc.
Especially in something like computers.
But it turned out to be completely wrong
and there was enormous opportunity,
and huge waves of productivity were unleashed,
with the computer industry flourishing.
Be willing to experiment and fail.
A lot of people go into business
and they’re looking to never make any mistakes.
That’s not the way to succeed.
You have to be willing to try things, experiment,
ask a lot of questions, don’t be stuck on any one position.
And most importantly, to listen and look for breakthroughs,
you know, and ideas that haven’t been out there.
As a business grows, the natural tendency would be
to take fewer risks and to be cautious
and to have contingency plans,
but in business is changing very quickly,
or one that you want to grow,
you actually need to be explicit about accepting risk.
One of the people who work with me,
kind of describe it this way.
I was sort of encouraging this person,
hey why let’s try this, why don’t we do this,
how about this?
At some point he came back and said,
“So, what you’re telling my is
“you want me to try to do ten things,
“and if I only get eight of them,
“you’ll be okay with that if I don’t get all ten.”
Versus, having five things and doing all five perfectly.
That’s exactly right.
We want to accept some experiments.
If you just dissect the IT sector,
you know, look at the whole thing,
you’ve got roughly three, three and a half
trillion dollar industry.
And there are about ten companies
that have more than one percent of the three trillion.
We have two percent.
But nobody has like more than five or six percent.
It’s a quite fragmented space.
So, we work extensively with partners across
the ecosystem and it’s a big part of how we evolve rapidly,
go quickly, reach new customers,
gain access to the latest ingredient technologies.
Whether it’s in semi-conductors, or software ingredients.
So the partnerships and alliances
are incredibly important part of how we grow.
If you really don’t know what it means
to be an entrepreneur, may be you are one.
So, I think there’s a bit of self initiative,
and self-starter that is an incredibly
important part of entrepreneurship.
And no one can tell you how to do it,
you have to sort of have an instinctual feeling,
an idea about something.
And you got to be passionate about it.
I think people that look for great ideas to make money,
aren’t nearly as successful as those who say
what do I really love to do, what am I excited about,
what do I know something about.
When we have had failures, those have ultimately resulted
in some of the greatest successes we’ve ever had.
You talk about those, particularly when someone
comes to see you and they say,
“Yeah, I’m feeling really bad,
“because this didn’t work out.”
Okay, well let me tell you about some other things
that didn’t work out that we learned a lot from.
And let’s pick ourselves back up,
and let’s figure out what we learned from this
and how we go apply that next time.
You know, when you’re in the zone
of doing things that no one has ever done before,
if you’re only succeeding, you’re not taking enough risk.
– Thank you guys so much for watching,
I made this video because one of you asked me to.
So if there’s a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below,
and I’ll see what I can do.
I’d also love to know which of Michael Dell’s
top ten rules meant the most to you.
Leave it in the comments, we’re going to enjoy the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching.
Continue to believe, and we’ll see you soon.
(swoosh)
”
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