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Michael Dell
Founder & Chairman, Dell Inc.
Michael Dell: Yeah. I wanted to see how it works, so I took it apart. A good thing about the early personal computers is that they had completely kind of standardized chips, and so you could literally get a book about each chip and read what each pin did, and how signals were processed through the chip. You could design your own circuits and you could modify them, and you could literally see exactly how the thing was working. That was sort of the classroom for me. That was where I learned the basics of how these things worked. Then I kind of became fascinated with, "Well, how could you improve it?" How could you make it do more things? How could you expand it? How could you make it go faster? How could you hook it up to other computers and let your imagination run wild?
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Michael Dell
Founder & Chairman, Dell Inc.
We went off for a few days with some of the really smart people in the company and a few outside advisors. And we said, "Well, what are we going to do with this company? This thing is really growing fast, but we're in a business that's pretty competitive and expanding rapidly. What do we do?" So we had three strategies that we clued in as our growth path for the future. The first one we said was, "We've got to go outside the U.S., because 96 percent of the people in the world live outside the United States, and it's going to be at least half the opportunities -- outside the United States. You can't just be a domestic company." Second thing we said was, "We really want to go after large companies, because they underwrite their purchase of technology through productivity and they can afford the best tools. That, we know, is going to be a lucrative opportunity and we really want to go after that in a big, big way." Kind of an odd thing for a little company like ours to go after, particularly with IBM and others in the field. The third thing we said was, "Differentiating our business is going to be really key, and the way to do that is on service." You've got to have better service than the competitor. So we invented this idea of on-site service for the PC, which had really never been done before. So with those three strategies we kind of marched forward, and that lasted five or six years.
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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
Now, discipline doesn't mean that you're a martinet, and discipline doesn't mean that you have to do everything anyone in authority tells you in lock-step because you can't think for yourself. But discipline means that you've got to organize your life in everything you do, for your own benefit and for the benefit of people around. If the appointment is at four o'clock, you ought to show up at four o'clock. If you're unavoidably late a few minutes, okay. But the person who shows up at five o'clock or six o'clock and doesn't think anything of it, that person is an undisciplined person. Also, that person is a person who says, "Hey, my time is much more valuable than your time." And none of us likes to hear that. So military school taught me that. And really, the basis, I think, of achieving some success in what I want to do today comes from my mother's push to get me to read and to make something of myself from the standpoint of an education. And from a military school which taught me that to fit into society, you can't just do anything you damn well please because it will suit you. And that it's much better to be with the winners than it is with the losers.
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Sam Donaldson
ABC News Correspondent
Later in the day his assistant called and said, "I'm sorry, you didn't get the job." I said, "Why? I was a leading candidate." "Well," she said, "when Mr. Hunt asked you how cheap will you work, and you wouldn't name a price, he wasn't interested, because he thinks everybody should know what they're worth." And she said, "It wouldn't have mattered if you said $1000 a month, or $300 a month." Well, I don't know what the lesson there is, because I -- you know, you name your price. But I guess the lesson is this: If you don't have confidence in yourself and think that you are worth hiring, or whatever it is, you can't expect anyone else to. And if I now call you in for a job and I say, "Can you do this job?" And you said, "Well, I don't know, maybe I can't, but I'd like to try," I can find someone else. Maybe you should be honest and say, "Yes, I can do that job. Now, I've had this much experience. Maybe I need a little bit more experience, but I can get it," and what have you. But I learned that lesson. And what it also did for me was teach me that I should go back to what I knew. I mean, go back to the game you know, go back to broadcasting. I knew that. I'd prepared myself for that.
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