Michael Dell > Quotes

“growth covers up a lot of sins.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“Ideas are commodity. Execution of them is not.”
― Michael Dell

“Sometimes it's better not to ask-or to listen-when tell you something can't be done. I didn't ask for permission or approval. I just went ahead and did it.”
― Michael Dell, Direct from Dell Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry

“if you have a business that generates lots of cash flow very consistently, a stock buyback could turn out to be a very good thing.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“If you want to sustain excellence over a long time, you'd better come up with a system that works well. Anyone can sprint for a little while, but you can't sprint for forty years.”
― Michael Dell

“The way I describe this when talking with businesspeople is that the domain of technology is no longer in the IT department; the whole company is technology. I’m talking about all companies. If you’re trying to make cars or medical devices or any kind of product at all, and you want to have new customers, technology is the fulcrum of progress in everything you’re doing.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“— I don’t know why people aren’t more curious, and why curiosity isn’t considered a more important leadership trait. A journalist once asked me if I was ever bored as a kid. I only had to think about it for a second: I never was, not even for a minute, because I was so curious. Every day I’d wake up excited by all the new things there were to learn about.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“A corporation is a living organism. It has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“I think we’re going to see a whole new wave of rapid industry transition—unlike the slow transition of, say, transportation, in which it took many years to go from rail to air travel. In this transition, you will see traditionally structured companies being seriously challenged by new, smaller, more efficient entrants—right away. The logical extension of the Internet’s cost efficiencies means that market share will flow to the most efficient companies, not the largest or the richest—companies that can deliver the greatest value to their customers will earn a higher profit while requiring far fewer assets. The productivity of their capital will be significantly improved over the traditional model because they will have replaced physical assets with information assets.”
― Michael Dell, Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry

“As you start your journey, the first thing you should do is throw away that store-bought map and begin to draw your own.”
― Michael Dell

“It's not enough to hire to fill a job. It's not even enough to hire on the basis of one's talents. You have to hire based upon a candidate's potential to grow and develop.”
― Michael Dell

“How successful you are is really a function of how well you deal with failure—and how much you learn from it.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“And with a forty-five-year-old genuine grown-up and experienced entrepreneur as president and CFO, we now had access to all kinds of working-capital credit we couldn’t get before. Unlike the twenty-one-year-old CEO, Lee Walker could go to people like Frank Phillips at Texas Commerce Bank and say, “Look, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto—all these companies, not to mention the US government—they all owe this company money. Give us a loan based on all these receivables.” And the bankers would say, “Okay, Lee, we don’t know about the kid, but we trust you.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“You have almost no chance to succeed, even in a meritocracy, if you don’t have access to good schools or health insurance, cannot afford nutritious meals, fear for your physical safety, or lack broadband connectivity or devices for doing homework or participating in the economy.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“I started the business with a simple question: How can we make the process of buying a computer better? The answer was: Sell computers directly to the end customer. Eliminate the reseller's markup and pass those savings on to the customer.”
― Michael Dell, Direct from Dell Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry

“Real transformations of major tech companies are extremely rare: I think because companies develop a particular capability, and a set of customers, and change is hard. You can’t take the stripes off a tiger. If you’re born a dog, you don’t die a cat.”
― Michael Dell, Play Nice But Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader

“People have often told us that what we wanted to do couldn’t be done. Our success is due, in part, to not just an ability but a willingness to look at things differently. I believe opportunity is part instinct and part immersion—in an industry, a subject, or an area of expertise. Dell is proof that people can learn to recognize and take advantage of opportunities that others are convinced don’t exist.”
― Michael Dell, Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry

“Our lean beginnings created the strategic management principles that define our culture: Less is more. Information is better than inventory. Ingenuity is better than investment. Execution is everything. No excuses.”
― Michael Dell, Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry