Dell

The best things about Dell are the hardworking and smart people who make the company go. Dell is, and has always been, a fast-paced and challenging place to work. My area is focused on technology. Dell is a great place to be if you are interested in technology. Many parts of the company run on cutting-edge products. If you show initiative, you can get involved in a wide range of things at Dell, grow your experience, and learn something new every day. I have done some very big and interesting things in my time at Dell, and I will always appreciate these opportunities.

Dell has grown a lot in the 10 years I have been here.

A lot of the growth has been chaotic.

It resulted in inefficiency at times, and the company made mistakes and took the wrong road on occasion.

Dell is like a person growing from baby to child to teenager, and is now trying to become an adult.

We go through periods of trying many new ideas at the same time.

Some of the ideas do not work, so we have to change direction.

Sometimes we change direction too frequently.

This causes pain to individual employees and to the company as a whole.

Dell is excellent at execution.

Because of this, we set a course based on an idea, and find that we are a long way down the road of execution before we determine the idea is not working.

So then we suddenly pull the rug out from under the idea.

This hurt us, and we continue to operate this way to this day.

The company has to get back to its basics. Step one is to make employee headcount corrections or other modifications that are required to get us in the right position. These actions must be completed very soon. The company is paralyzed by the aggregate uncertainty about what might happen on this front.

The second step is extreme focus on our customers, especially in support areas. We have made some strides in the customer support area of late, but we are not back to the levels that won us loyalty in the past. The customer focus needs improvement from all angles. And we need to be prepared to spend a lot of money on it. The money is worth it.

The third step is product leadership. Again, we are making progress here, but we need to be in a leadership position instead of trying to follow the likes of Apple and HP as quickly as we can, after they make a good move. We have done this before, and have had flashes of brilliance in some areas lately, but this is the differentiator that we must own if we do not want to fade into a seller of commodity contract manufactured computers. Our best future does not lie in winning that role.