Dell’s Corporate Culture

Today I was reading upon an interview with Michael Dell, founder and chairman and Kevin Rollins currently ceo of the conglomerate. What catches my eye was the part about the corporate culture of Dell! The secret of Dell’s success goes beyond its famous business model. High expectation and disciplined, consistent execution are embedded in the company’s DNA. Currently the company employs 53.000 people and operates in more than 80 countries.

Hereafter, I will cite some quotes from the interview.

The mind set.
Many companies like to talk about investing for the future. We say the future is today and tonight. Good execution requires a sense of urgency. The notion of investing for the future can become a trap. However, the point is, we don’t tolerate businesses that don’t make money.

On General Managers and Culture.
We’ve had a no-excuses culture from the beginning. Whenever we hear that a business might have to lose money for a while, we challenge the General Manager (GM) to figure out how to run the business better than anyone ever has and not lose money. If you say, “No, we’re going to make this business profitable”, good things happen. I’m not saying we’re the only real men in the world, but we set expectations very high.

And we’re pretty hard on people who miss-not just the two of us but the whole company. When you fail to execute, our culture says, “Fix it. Find what’s wrong, and fix it. Or ask for help”.

We train employees to constantly ask themselves: “How do we grow faster? How do we lower our cost structure? How do we improve service for customers?”

It’s really though to be a GM at Dell. To succeed as a GM here, you have to be smart and you have to be though. You have to be a team player, and you have to understand the P&L.

Breakthroughs.
The fact of the matter is our general managers have succeeded time and time again. When we hold somewhat irrational expectations and convince them they can do it, they come up with fantastic breakthroughs.

New Leaders.
We used to just throw people in the deep end and see if they’d sink or swim. If they couldn’t swim, we’d get someone else. Part of the problem was we were hiring the wrong people-people who weren’t going to be able to swim at Dell. Our promotes to VP and director have shifted from about 75% outside hires and 25% promotes from within to about 30% outside and 70% within. We now understand this yields better results. You know they’ve already got the DNA.

So we now give a lot of swimming lessons. But if you still can’t swim after the lessons, then this is going to feel like a tough place to work.