The strength within

PB. As we’ve grown up as a company, we at Dell have learned more and more about the importance of developing our leaders and the value that can be gained from each of us as leaders concentrating more effort to developing capability in the people around us. In the early days, we were such a fast-moving entrepreneurial company that our focus was almost exclusively on the operation side and because the rate of growth and change in the company was so exponential people gained massive amounts of experience. Especially in the last five years, we have certainly become much more structured in developing people and we’ve seen it work very well. We’ve also discovered that people are hungry for it, that people genuinely want to become good leaders and feel from their teams that t hey are helping that team to become successful. It’s not just about the operating results but about the team feeling great and feeling that they have made a valuable contribution. So my experience is that, I don’t know if people aren’t innately born with at least some of the capabilities to be a good leader but we have certainly found that we can make huge improvements in people’s ability to lead organisation by focusing on developing that as a skillset.

CXO. As the tools used by businesses today change at such a fast rate, has the ability of employees to innovate become more important, perhaps even more so than their existing skillsets?

PB. We certainly look for an adaptability and flexibility in people because of the fast-changing nature of business. We seek out people who are natural learners, who don’t simply want to execute the same skills they have been for years. We want people who get bored doing that; the kind of people who are looking to learn about a new marketplace, product area or customer set; who have the ability to learn so they can flex with the company as we change so rapidly. We sometimes refer to this as the ability to ‘accept or do well with ambiguity’.

CXO. With technology now playing such an integral part in pretty much every part of a business, it’s not just the IT department that needs to be tech-savvy. Is a high level of IT skills becoming a prerequisite in employees throughout a business today in order to use the tools available?

PB. Emphatically no, because while the software and computing and the communication tools used in business are becoming more widespread, they are also becoming easier to use. Real efforts have been made to be more intuitive with interfaces, while in the hardware side of things there has been much progress in applying open standards and enabling different component technologies to work together. Of course, we still need the real experts who make all of this happen in the infrastructure of the business, but the rest of the employee base do not need such a high level of skill.

CXO. And what tools would you say have made the biggest impact to Dell’s own business in recent years?

PB. Our business model is best summed up by the word ‘direct’ – we deal directly with the end users of our equipment, rather than going through middlemen. The most important communication, interaction or relationship for Dell is with our customers so we leverage IT very heavily in order to achieve that. This is primarily in the form of our online capabilities. People don’t buy from Dell in stores, they do it online – to our customers, we live and breathe in cyberspace and that’s where they look for us. Therefore, the innovations we continue to make are associated with improving that online experience so it is easy and quick and works to our customers’ expectations.

The other aspect of our direct relationship is with our supply chain, where we have perfected a bill–to-order model. Every one of our products is built to a customer order, so it’s essential we manage a very rapid and efficient supply chain. Through web-based tools, we are able to provide excellent communication to all of the people involved in that process, giving them instant access to the information they need to keep the supply chain efficient.

CXO. I understand Dell’s approach to innovation centres on customer requirements. What does that mean in reality – do you simply respond to feedback or is it more proactive than that?

PB. It’s both of these things. From medium-sized business up to larger accounts, we have dedicated accounts people who are responsible for managing our customer relationships, enabling them to really get to know them. In many cases, customers also have their own dedicated websites called ‘premier pages’, where they can find information about their relationship with Dell, such as services they are involved with or products they have ordered. We have various ways that we can reach out to our customers, provide information and options and make things as easy as possible for them to get the products and services they need from Dell.

When it comes to the smaller accounts – individual home users and very small businesses, which have traditionally been served by the retail channel by our competitors – it is here that we are doing our work with websites, as I described earlier. We aim to make it easier to navigate the sites, to find what you are looking for, resolve a technical question, or find the right part or product quickly. When you’re dealing with a larger marketplace of smaller entities, it is a question of trying to facilitate that self-help notion.

CXO. Innovating is clearly vital in keeping a company relevant on the market. But what other core factors do you believe are most essential for a business to have staying power in Europe?

PB. There are many, but from experience I’d say that the anchors are understanding what the customer needs and how well they think you’re doing. It is great being a ‘direct’ business because it enables us to reach out to customers all over the world, large and small, and get great information from them. We talk to them everyday and try to really understand what they really need, because as the technology itself evolves, so does what people actually want. You have to stay very closely in tune with that.

It’s also important to then translate that feedback into operational reality – to build infrastructures and work processes, or to hire people and put them in place. That’s where the innovation comes in, in making sure that we are responding to real customer needs. It’s important to make that distinction because, while the technology industry changes all the time, we should remember that there is also a lot of hype that needs to be distinguished from reality. Technology is a very rich and creative area to work in and people are always making forecasts about what the world will look like in five years time. But most of them are wrong. It means we must be very careful to address and apply innovation to customers’ real needs – more productive technology that is easy to use and reliable and that it is easy to interact with the company supplying or supporting that technology. It is these fundamental principles that we at Dell go back to and that have made the company such a success over the years.

CXO. I understand you aim to partner with policymakers in the future – what do you hope to achieve from this? How do you think it will enable you to advance the industry or your own offerings in it?

PB. There are actually two sides to this – working with policymakers in the technology industry itself and in the government. In the former, we have been champions of open standards technology. We consider this to be a very important distinction in our industry, because there are companies that try to establish proprietary standards or technology, which can only be obtained from them. At Dell, we have always said we want to work in a world where everyone competes on a level playing field, using the same standards.

We have a huge opportunity to influence how that shapes up through the governing bodies established by the industry. It’s in this way that standards are governed – representatives from different companies get together and establish how technical standards work so that those developing the technology can work in the same way. That is a huge advantage to customers because it enables them to mix and match our technologies, as well as getting lower costs.

Our work with government policymakers has been to simply recognise that, while we may only be 21 years old, we have become one of the biggest 50 companies worldwide and as such have a huge responsibility. We are taking that very seriously, engaging with public policymakers on technology related issues.

CXO. What other plans or priorities do you have for Dell over the next few years?

PB. We’re a large company and one going through a lot of change, so we have many plans. These can mostly be categorised into customer and product type initiatives. For the former, we have a major focus on expanding our market globally. Dell’s rise was a bit of a big bang phenomenon, starting as a small company in the US and then getting a toehold in various other countries. We therefore have very high market share in the US, but very low market share in other parts of the world just because we haven’t been there very long. The international expansion and development of both our people and our capability in countries throughout EMEA represents a huge opportunity and focus for the company.

We also see expansion on the product side. Historically, our roots have been in products such as PCs, desktops and workstations, but we have been extending our presence into ‘data centre’ computing technologies. This is at the very heart of a business, which runs the software across the network and serves the technologies out to end users across the business. While this used to be the domain of mainframes and very expensive proprietary technology, in the world of open standards our server and storage solutions are making tremendous inroads. This is passing on huge benefits to the customer, who is seeing real cost savings and the ease of use that comes from being able to put standard building blocks together for their technology solutions.

Lastly, we’re also entering new product categories, such as peripherals, diversifying the company’s product and service offerings and greatly expanding our international reach.

CXO. Any closing remarks?

PB. Going back to the earlier issue of leadership, I’d just like to add that a key reason people enjoy working at Dell is that we are very operations and results focused. Because we have metrics for all kinds of things here, we can offer our employees a very objective and fair measurement of their performance, enabling them to really see the impact they are making. I believe at Dell we have a very low quotient of politics and this use of metrics is at the root of that.

Secondly, we try to enforce a system of meritocracy so that those that are good leaders create an environment where people really want to work with them. I think it’s these fundamental factors that create a good foundation on which to build effective leadership capability.

About Paul Bell

In his current role as Senior Vice President, EMEA, Bell is responsible for all business operations and manufacturing activities across the region, which for Dell’s business is made up of over 12,000 people in 28 sites in 24 countries. These include sales and service centers and the European Manufacturing Facility in Limerick, Ireland.

Prior to his current role, Mr Bell served as Senior Vic, where he was responsible for all sales, marketing and customer service activities and shared responsibility for manufacturing and product development.