- Involve Customers First to Avoid Disasters
-
Even great companies make mistakes, and Michael Dell admits that his company is no exception. In 1989, Dell introduced a new family of products, code-named Olympic. Olympic was a line of desktop and workstation computers that were able to perform a wide array of tasks. The product introduction—Dell’s biggest ever—turned out to be the company’s [...]
- The "Demand Side" of the Dell Strategy
-
Obviously, the direct model is an unusual approach to distribution that wouldn’t meet the needs of most businesses. Still, other organizations can incorporate vital elements of Dell’s model into their own operations. For example, Dell stresses that during tough economic times, it is especially important to understand and anticipate customer demand—a crucial element of Dell’s [...]
- Accelerating Market Share in Bad Times
-
One test of a corporate strategy is to see how well it performs in bad times. By that measure, Dell’s direct distribution model has proved itself to be a solid success. In the recession that gripped the computer industry in the early 2000s, Dell continued to grow at a healthy rate. Despite industry retrenchment and [...]
- In Search of the Leadership Threads
-
After finalizing my list, I subjected each of the leaders and the company he led to another kind of analysis. The goal of this exercise was different from that of the work that finalized the list of seven. The sole aim of this research was to identify the leadership threads that tied these CEOs together. [...]
- Great Companies, Great Investments?
-
Shareholder returns are one of the most important metrics used to evaluate the performance of a publicly traded company—and, by extension, the CEO who heads it—over the long run. In their respective heydays, all of the companies run by the CEOs profiled in this article have enriched their shareholders over the long term (as indicated [...]
- How the CEOs were Selected
-
The seven CEOs depicted in this article represent the best of a breed of managers who were shaped, in part, by the conditions and challenges that characterized the post-1980 business environment. Several factors changed the rules of the game in the 1980s: intense foreign competition (from Europe and Japan, most notably) and a technological environment [...]