Comments on: my conversation with dell

By: MarillaAnne

MarillaAnne — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:27:43 +0000

What I'm hearing from their customers is "They lie and their customer service is a farce." Yeah... so how does one re-invent that? Good Luck with them Texans (LOL yeah I know it's my home state and I'm dieing to go back home to visit ... They talk different, They walk with a determination, They know they're a nation unto themselves. ... They're dang stubborn ... and If they are convinced an idea is suppose to work, they'll not let go until the last second ... but this is only true of the natives. Be certain you're lining this info up with a native. Imports & 2nd gen-ers are another story.)

By: Len

Len — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 06:37:13 +0000

Hugh, I’m curious what exactly they want you to do? Their direction or lack there of baffles me.
Although a reinvention can be many things or have many meanings, setting the course of a company the size of Dell is a tall order. A tall order that a CEO and a board of directors are paid to envision and carry out.
Companies hire consultants all the time, that’s not a big deal, however it strikes me that if they don’t have an idea of what direction they need to go in, the management needs to change before anything meaningful can occur.
It would be a different story if they had an idea and needed expertise in getting there, but it’s completely another when they ask someone to tell them where they need to be. The old quote from Wayne Gretzky applies here. The reason for his success was that he didn’t chase the puck, he skated to where he thought the puck was going to be.
Clearly their present leadership is unable to do this, so unless you plan on taking up permanent residency at Dell, they’ll still have trouble long-term. That is unless they have a clear vision and just don’t know how to get there (enter Hugh), which takes me back to my opening line/question.

By: David

David — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:10:05 +0000

They need to satisfy customers, to do that they have to innovte process. Right now they are empty PR.

By: Heidi Miller

Heidi Miller — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:35:53 +0000

Your comment about reinventing a company being as tough as reinventing a person struck a chord with me. Change is hard for most of us when it happens around us, and it can be doubly challenging when we are actually making a conscious effort to take our lives or our businesses in a new direction. Recently, I asked the question What is your relationship with change? Even those of us in Generation X and Y, who tend to embrace change, have to admit that it can be a frightening prospect when we admit that the direction we chose might not be where we end up, both in business and in life. Still, it takes guts to try instead of doing what you've always done to get what you've always gotten. Life rewards those who move in the direction of greatest courage.

By: ewes

ewes — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:27:56 +0000

buy — rent — give away free. they should head in this general direction i reckon

By: phil jones

phil jones — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:25:18 +0000

Seems to me that it's the usual branding vs. commoditization problem. As long as Dell make commodities (PCs) they have no social object to hang a story around. We know what a PC is and what we want from it. Either Dell give it to as cheaply as possible or they can't. If Dell want a social object / brand makeover they have to make products that are differentiated in a way worth talking about. With English Cut and Stormhoek you had a novel story : "a tailor / wine that blogs". With Dell, "a computer company that blogs" isn't going to fly. Who's making a differentiated PC today? (Apart from Apple who are at a whole other level.) Basically Asus. They have great stories : a whole new form-factor, a whole new price, new technologies (solid state disks), Linux really making things cheaper, etc. Dell used to have two good stories : "cheaper because we sell direct without dealers" and "you can customize on our web-site and our super-lean process will build to your design in a day". The first story is probably no-longer available. Doesn't *everybody* sell direct? The second seems to have gone AWOL. "Customizability" could be an idea that Dell still owns. The right web-site, a cute user-interface, could turn computer shopping into an intensely personal Build-a-bear kind of emotional experience. Dell could offer wider variety of peripherals, accessories etc. They could invest in and promote their supply-chain, gain green credentials through offering you the chance to build "low carbon footprint" PCs from local or lower-polluting sources. They could create an Etsy-like market for casemodders etc. But they need to have *something* to tell a story about.

By: Keith

Keith — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:45:04 +0000

Hugh:
A most excellent post. This is the kind of commentary that keeps us thinking all day–and creates its own “conversation.”
Keep this flow of stimulating conversation coming. I’ve missed it.

By: Will Ross

Will Ross — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:33:02 +0000

“the feint of heart” — what a poetic phrase!
I feint love
You respond with affection
I CRUSH YOU WITH FULL FRONTAL RAGE!!
Can the heart really feint?
Having worked at DEC/ Digital/ Compaq/ HP for 20 years, I really should have something useful to contribute. But from the trenches, each new general comes along with their new ideas, they all look plausible and then suddenly something works.
Hard to tell why, though one can always rationalise. I have two rationalisations for our recent uptick:
1. luck
2. better discipline in execution, including a clear choice of how the company will organise and what it will and will not do. (It’s surprising how IT can delude a company into thinking it can organise by some sort of matrix rather than clear lines of responsibility. Reporting and management are not the same!)
Why SHOULD a company continue after its Mission is Accomplished, anyway?
Because it has built a capability that is valuable in another context. It is easiest to start with a deep understanding what the company is capable of. Then look for a market. This seems to be the approach that Lou Gerstner took with IBM and Mark Hurd with HP.
So the first conversation is corporate psychoanalysis.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:04:45 +0000

Great to see the first comment coming from my friend and forensic accountant Francine.
I guess I don’t need to tell you this but the big problem with companies like Dell is that they have a long history of success and often take the risk averse approach — ie — If it ain’t irretrievably broke, don’t fix it. See it all the time.
And actually, they’re not doing badly at the moment. Their direct outreach program has gone really well and they’re getting favorite status in some of the cloud computing environments I see cuz they can turn on a dime where the likes of Sun are leaden footed.
It ain’t all about marketing though — they need to step up to the plate in a lot areas, part of which Francine identified. Lots of other stuff they could be doing.

By: george christodoulou

george christodoulou — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 15:06:12 +0000

I call it as improving the old one. I will have one idea on my mind which is already invented. I try to add many things to it like making it more useful. Cadillac arrived like that.
It is same as reinventing know?!

By: Dan

Dan — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:23:50 +0000

Hugh
Beautiful — difficult — questions. As to Number 6, the big one, an easy answer would be to adopt the criteria for leadership articulated by Peter Koestenbaum: Vision, Ethics, Courage, and Reality. Which is lacking and needs to be bolstered. If any aren’t there the “window” of greatness closes.
A tougher answer might be this: can the company handle its “discrepancies,” the gaps between the way it says it gets things done and the way it really gets things done. What are the “undiscussable” issues at Dell, the ones that people are afraid to talk about with those who can actually address the problem? Reinvention is a product of facing the lack of internal congruence between an illusion of a certain identity and actual performance. I bet you are just the guy to help people find the courage to face what is. That’s the transformation. Just finding, accepting, and dealing with…what is.

By: vruz

vruz — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:02:33 +0000

what’s next ?
once all you have within the borders of the western borders is a saturated market, with exhausted people who can’t take a single bit more of propaganda, all that remains is the outside world.
but the outside world is way more difficult, wild geographies, languages and tantrum-throwing governments.
it’s more difficult for sure, but the rewards can be immense.
Europe wasn’t in a good shape 50 years ago.
can we stop being so fucking lazy and start constructing the rest of the world ?
the idea that there’s little else to do is false, there’s plenty to do, and plenty of money out there to be made.
we only need to start moving our lazy asses.

By: Pete Steege

Pete Steege — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:47:30 +0000

There’s something missing here…something about Dell knowing who they are and what they want to be. Without that, the re-inventing conversation results in a generic answer/solution/reason for being.

By: Pete Steege

Pete Steege — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:47:24 +0000

By: Michelle Greer

Michelle Greer — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:01:03 +0000

I worked at Dell five years ago. Perhaps some has changed since then, but I wouldn’t know.
When I was at Dell, people were rewarded for making profit. Every metric, every meeting, everything was centered around it.
A change wouldn’t come easy. Metrics are deeply ingrained in the culture there. We were told to help the customer, but we were rewarded monetarily by doing the opposite. For example, if we had an escalation that we could solve, we were told to help the customer right then and there so as to leave them with a good experience. Our paychecks depending on metrics that were profit based though, so helping the customer actually hurt our efficiency and therefore our pocketbooks. The highest paid sales reps tended to have a lot of escalations they did not solve. It was really annoying.
I know meeting quarterly projections is important, but if the result of this profit-based culture is a high number of incidents that lead to bad PR and lost business, perhaps this should be reexamined.
I left Dell because I wanted to help people, and I was tired of solving issues created by other sales reps while watching their paychecks get fatter.
Not sure how much of this has been resolved in the past five years, but that’s just my two cents. I care about Dell because it is an Austin company and I know a lot of people who work there, so I hope your evil plans work, Hugh.