Michael Dell

Michael Saul Dell was born in 1965 in Houston, Texas. Where his life as an entrepreneur began at a very young age. While he displayed intelligence and ingenuity from an early age, he had little interest in school. At the age of eight, he sent away for information on taking a high school equivalency exam, which, if he passed, would make him a high school graduate without having to endure the remaining years of school. His parents insisted he stay in the classroom, and Dell invested his considerable creative energy in after-school ventures. When he was twelve years old, he operated a mail-order trading business for stamps and baseball cards, earning $2,000. While in high school, Dell took a job delivering newspapers for the Houston post. His aggressive selling strategies resulted in earnings of $18,000, which enabled him to purchase his first BMW at the age of 17. By the time he entered college in 1983, the business bug had already bitten him and he had his sights set on making the big bucks. He entered the University

of Texas at Austin as a student of biology, but quickly saw a major business opportunity that led him to start a business out of his dorm room selling RAM chips and disk drives for IBM PCs.

He had found some local computer dealers that were receiving more IBM PCs than they could handle due to IBM’s requirement for them to buy large monthly quotas, which usually exceeded the demand. At the time he was only 19 years old, Michael Dell had a simple but powerful vision that personal computers could be built to order and sold directly to customers. This followed from his belief that the PC, made up of little more than software from Microsoft and chips from Intel, was rapidly becoming a commodity product. Dell's new approach to the PC business had two advantages:

1: Bypassing distributors and retail dealers reduced marketing and sales costs by eliminating the markups of resellers.

2 : Building to order greatly reduced the costs and risks associated with carrying large volumes of both and finished goods.

Dell realized that he could assemble computer parts, skip the step of selling to a dealer, and go directly to the consumer. That way the consumer could buy the product for less, and Dell held on to every penny of the profits. Dell thus combined his knowledge of computers with his well-developed business sense and began his own business, assembling upgrade kits for personal computers.

Dell had decided that he needed to focus all of his time on his business, and he dropped out of college. His company, then called PCs Unlimited, began building PCs, starting with parts from such established computer companies as IBM and Compaq and adding elements to make the products unique. Dell continued to sell directly to consumers, a strategy that paid off in vast sums: by the end of 1984, his company had earned $6 million. Dell was off and running, leading his company to enormous growth year after year.

By early 1985, at the age of twenty, Dell had thirty employees working for him. During the summer of that year, the company began producing the Turbo PC, its first computer made entirely from scratch, rather than a customized version of another company's machine. In 1987 Dell changed the name of the company from PCs Unlimited to Dell Computer Corporation. .In 1987 it added an international sales office. In 1988, the year Dell went public; they began to sell to government agencies and added a sales force to serve larger customers. In 1990, Dell began to expand their international scope by establishing their first international office in Limerick, Ireland. Since then Dell has expanded and opened international subsidiaries in 33 countries around the world, and its 29,300 employees serve customers in over 170 countries and territories. In 1995 Dell started offering notebook computers using Intel Pentium chips. Then in 1999, the company began selling a $999 PC despite a history of shunning low-cost markets. In that year Dell made its first acquisition by announcing that it would buy Converge Net Technologies, a maker of storage area network equipment based in California, in a $340 million deal. 1

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The leadership and entrepreneurial skills of Michael Dell and his influence over his organization's success. His leadership style is a true leader who inspires his team constantly with a shared vision of the future. Michael dell set the rules for his organization and his employees which give‘s the clear road map. We believe our continued success lies in teamwork and the opportunity each team member has to learn, develop and grow. His leadership approaches are

• Command Skills

• Motivating Others

• Integrity & Trust

• Building Effective Teams

• Strategic Agility

• Drive for Results

• Deal with Ambiguity

• Intellectual Horsepower

• Customer Focus

. He is very good communicator’s and ability to motivate people. He has ability to forecast the feature very well. He is a leader who led by example and made a very strong commitment like

We value accountability and reward those teams and team members who continually improve their capability and contribution.

Developing, retaining and attracting the best people, reflective of our worldwide marketplace.

Hire and promote based on performance, capability and qualifications as key criteria. Look first to promote from within Dell.

Providing training and learning opportunities to maximize team and individual performances.

Investing in our People Leadership capabilities as a competitive advantage.

Managing our talent as a key asset.

Utilizing job assignments across and within regions to build global leadership capability.

Promoting an environment that values individual differences, engages people in decision-making and encourages employees at all levels and across all parts of the company to work as a team.

Maintaining base pay and benefit programs competitive with successful companies relevant to our marketplace.

Understanding and respecting all nations’ laws, values and cultures.

Profitably growing our business in all markets.

Promoting a healthy business climate globally.

Contributing positively in every community that we call home, both personally and organizationally.

References

Book “direct from dell” author Michael dell

www.dell.com

www.hoovers.com

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadership