- Geekmaster
- 2021-07-10 12:52:12
- 15 minute(s)
Michael Dell — Business & Leadership Lessons In The Spotlight
Who in this world is unaware of the Dell Empire? At the age of 27, Michael Dell became the youngest CEO to have his company ranked in the Forbes Top 500 companies. He has since gone on to create the world’s largest PC manufacturing company in the world. Let’s have a look on Michael Dell’s business & leadership lessons.
One can easily imagine Michael Dell’s personality and attitude when one reads about his journey to the success he achieved.
He had a dream of starting a computer firm and make it big in the industry and join the ranks of hotshots like HP, IBM and Compaq. But there are no free lunches and short cuts towards becoming a real success in this world. You have to work really hard to achieve the kind of success he has had.
Let’s face reality: Very few people in this world have the courage to brave the tides and make the best out of their knowledge.
There are countless curious minds in the world of entrepreneurship, always stressing their nervous system to unfold the mystery of being a successful entrepreneur. But a person’s intelligence is never proportional to the success graph, he achieves for himself especially in the business cosmos. Plenty of brilliant minds lives life as an employee for one of the other company!
Michael Dell has always had the type of mind that likes to pick things apart and find solutions to problems.
Over a lifetime building one the world’s top computing companies, Michael Dell has experienced failure and success up-close and become an inspiration to entrepreneurs around the world. Real entrepreneurs have a passion for what they’re doing, a problem that needs to be solved, and a purpose that drives them forward.
Find your Passion, your Problem and your Purpose, and you won’t need to ask anyone’s advice before pursuing your dream.
All these milestones that Michael Dell has achieved over the years will definitely make the entrepreneur inside you wonder how achieving such feats is even possible. So, what does it take for one to become so prolific and extraordinary? Here are five business & leadership lessons you can learn from the Founder of Dell computers.
Rule #1 : Fuel Your Passion
Michael Dell has been a vocal supporter of entrepreneurship in the world. He wants founders to find what moves them and then go ahead with it full-steam. He says, “Whether you’ve found your calling, or if you’re still searching, passion should be the fire that drives your life’s work.”
If you’re not passionate about what you do, it will reflect on your work and performance, and eventually, stop you from achieving your full potential.
Whenever you feel passionate towards a work, you feel a pulling force to make that work happen. That pulling force feeds the persistence that is guided by your mind and heart both. Passion plays a vital role in the path of success. Michael Dell has a strong passion towards personal computers and hardware. He was a pre-medical student but his passion for personal computers drives him in making a multi-billion dollar company.
Passion is a simple yet profoundly all-encompassing narrative to describe the essence of a true entrepreneur.
Passion, in my opinion, is the chief driver of successful entrepreneurship anywhere in the world. With passion, an entrepreneur possesses an inherent fuel and inexhaustible stamina that constantly drive his actions forward. This superior energy helps overtake and surpass various challenges and injects a certain indescribable strength to continue pursuing goals when difficulties arise.
Taking action is key for any entrepreneur.
Let your sense of impatience as an entrepreneur fuel your passion to take steps to become an entrepreneur. By going forth and doing, you will begin learning and this can lead you down a path of ideas, or at least give you a better sense of direction and where your passion lies. In fact, many entrepreneurs pursue things that interest them or projects that aim to contribute to a faction of society an entrepreneur feels responsible for or sensitive towards.
When you identify your passion and align it with whatever you’re doing, a magical synergy happens that will effortlessly carry you to rarefied heights.
Work becomes joyous and pleasurable. Hours fly by, unnoticed. Tiredness and fatigue take the backseat as you power your way to greater achievements. Passion without a plan, without action, and without hard work may be doggie do-do, but without passion you’ll run out of energy long before your actions yield the desired result.
Rule #2: Failure Begets Success
While businesses in general do not tolerate failure, Michael Dell didn’t indulge in such practices. He always gave the liberty to his employees, especially the R&D team to come up with new ideas. Although the cost of R&D is great, that’s how you come up with a novel idea completely backed up real market data and launch a product/service on this basis.
Nobody who has ever become successful has done so without failing.
Accept it as part-and-parcel of your journey, focus on the lessons you can take away, and move on. There is a tendency among entrepreneurs to sit and sulk about losses they’ve taken. It’s not the right approach and you tend to become irritable after a while. You should keep on going and follow your curiosity as you go from one project to another.
50% of the problems and stress get automatically reduced by thinking optimistically.
It is important to cope up with difficult life situations. Success and failure are the two sides of a coin named challenge. There are very few people in the world who don’t get depressed by failure but take it as a learning opportunity, Michael Dell is among them. He always sees a challenge as an opportunity with a positive vibe by keeping in mind that he can do it. He strongly believes that negative situations are temporary, limited in scope and manageable
🔈 Michael Dell has said
Take the risks your challenge deserves. Our greatest challenges require doing some things differently.
Push the boundaries and be willing to take risks where others won’t. Taking manageable risks is what Michael Dell has been willing to do, and he has also encouraged his executives to take risks so long as the risks are well reasoned. No business is too big or too small to confront roadblocks.
For entrepreneurs, the ability to embrace failure — or at least the prospect of it — is essential for success.
The reality behind every success is that there were a dozen failures that happened beforehand. In fact, failure is almost like a right of passage for every successful business. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to avoid failure; but you should embrace it when it becomes inevitable. Without a willingness to fail, you’ll always hold back. And most of the time, the biggest successes require the biggest risks.
Rule #3: Pick The Best
Michael Dell knew how important it is to make everyone onboard. One person alone cannot handle everything even if he is owner of the company. His secret was to surround himself with employees who were smarter than him and then talk to them about any issue or problem. That’s how he rectified even the biggest problems in a matter of days.
Surround yourself with the best people.
Be it with employees, investors, partners, suppliers, or any other business relationship, Michael Dell advises executives and entrepreneurs to be around the best possible people to help develop an organisation. These smart people will challenge organisations and force them to think differently. In 2003, Michael Dell said, “Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people … or find a different room.”
When talking about relationships as they connect to leadership, consider how much a leader values their people.
Great leaders are able to bring out the best from very diverse teams. Leaders must also be able to build relationships with partners and prospective clients. Today’s tech heavy business environment creates almost constant opportunities to either strengthen or hurt relationships. Even when we aren’t physically together, we are always connected to each other through our phones, office chat, and email. Good leaders understand how to use these mediums to build and sustain professional relationships that last.
In today’s economy, hiring the best people is more critical than ever.
Entrepreneurs can’t afford to lose time, money and results from a bad hiring choice. The greatest leaders view new employees as an investment and anticipate an excellent financial return over time. Being a good leader in a business really pays off. And one of the traits of a good leader is hiring the right employees. Because if you don’t, then it can lead to extra stress and pressure that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
The right candidate will invest time in your company if you invest time in them.
Hold out for the right one, and save yourself both a headache and money down the road. Hiring is a necessary problem. You must have people to do the work, but if you don’t have the right people, you’ll end up wasting money and perhaps even more valuable, time. What to do? Be steady. Don’t let the urgency of “we have this work to do but no one to do it” take over. When leaders let urgency run the hiring process, they almost always make a poor hiring decision that hurts the organization in the long run.
Rule #4: Think Unconventionally
The entire marketing and sales department need to come up with an innovative mindset. Dell, Inc. was based on this idea so that every product bears the genius stamp of Michael Dell all over it. By researching the market, you will be able to foresee what the market needs and how you can fill the void to come up with an innovative product.
Plenty of people told Michael Dell that his ‘direct‘ approach to selling computers would never work on a large scale.
“It’s fun to do things that people don’t think are possible or likely” he says. Consequently, questioning conventional wisdom became a basic element of the culture of the firm. To be successful like him, you need to spot the opportunity and then create an environment to leverage that opportunity and make it happen.
What a successful entrepreneur requires is the knack of being a problem-solver, someone who finds unique solutions to problems.
There are multiple problems that people face in their day-to-day lives, and each of these problems acts as a million-dollar business idea. When you’re running a business, it becomes very easy to become ’comfortable’ after you’ve seen a glimpse of success. You start ignoring pursuing opportunities and stop taking risks. Nothing can be more harmful to your business. In competitive times, no company can rest as you never know when your service or product will lose its demand. So, regardless of which stage you’ve reached with your company, don’t stop or shy away from challenges.
It’s at times when people are confused that the greatest opportunities are presented before them because no one is really doing anything.
According to Michael Dell, this is the time when the seeds of really successful businesses are created. History has shown that the greatest companies were formed in some of the most difficult times in the industry. For instance, when Dell was formed in the early 1980s, the US economy was in bad shape. The PC industry had just gone through a big down cycle, and the prevailing wisdom was that all electronics would be dominated by the Japanese. The subsequent emergence of the personal computer industry unleashed enormous opportunity and productivity.
Majority of the people cannot execute the right actions during the times of difficulties.
But only a few people are sharp enough to grasp the opportunities these difficult times present and they can easily succeed because they do not face much competition from others as the others stun into inaction on facing the difficult situations. You should focus on creating success the way you want it and in the life that you choose.
Rule #5: Focus On Your Dreams
When you wake up, are you pumped up about your day, or are you hitting the snooze button every 10 minutes? Tiny as it seems that may mean all the difference between failure and success. Michael Dell never once questioned his ability to achieve his goals. Such was his optimism that it became a mental state.
Each day that you’re moving toward your dreams without compromising who you are, you’re winning.
It’s important to always remember what drove you to strive for success in the first place. Keeping your end goal and dream in focus will not only give you the motivation to keep working, it will also keep you focused and driven. The key is to listen to your heart and let it carry you in the direction of your dreams.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, its Michael Dell’s endless efforts and 24/7 dedication towards work that made him to create “The Dell Empire”.
There is a well-said quote, “When there is a will, there is a way”. Michael dell proved this by his ultimate dedication. He still takes himself as a challenger and looks forwards to challenging opportunities. From the age of selling newspaper subscription on phone, making upgrading kits from his dorm room, becoming a CEO of a computer company, taking the Dell as private company to direct marketing of PCs, nothing was served to him in the plate, he overcome all these challenges by dedication and passion.
If you want to spend your life doing something that you love, the best way to start is to treat any financial concerns that you might have as secondary concerns.
If the practicality of what you want to do and how much money you can earn is a primary criterion for you, you will quickly limit your options to what is predictable, making it tough for you to do what you really love. By allowing yourself to follow your curiosity without worrying about money, you will find yourself in a position of power that will ultimately put you in the position of earning money on your terms.
As an entrepreneur, you must follow your heart. Analysis is important, but it is overrated.
You must first follow your heart, then use your mind and intelligence to determine which of your “heartfelt ideas” make sense as a business. What sense does it make to have a potentially very profitable business that you’re going to hate? No one will make it happen for you. You have to do it. It will require a great deal of discipline and dedication, but if you are following your heart and pursuing a dream, you will find sources of extra energy that you never knew existed.
Wrapping Up
Some will say that Michael Dell was just lucky to be sitting on the tip of a rocket that took off, but he has lived through the hype, returned to the top position in the company, and continues to produce remarkable results. Michael Dell’s overriding success lesson: the simpler you can make life for people, the more valuable you will be to them.
Michael Dell’s success secrets are his working ethics.
That’s why he saw amazing success in a short period and his remarkable success over the years. From modest beginnings to one of the biggest technology companies in the world, his journey wasn’t an easy one. He had a clear vision about what he wanted to achieve and the rest is history.
Michael Dell has combined innovation, passion, persistence and a focus on solution finding to become a Billionaire.
It was a curiosity coupled with hard work that ignited an entrepreneurial fire within Michael Dell a young age, a fire that will never go out. As this passion continues to grow, he uses all of his skills, abilities and mindset to overcome any challenge or controversy and remains committed to making a positive difference in lives less privileged than his own.
Michael Dell may not be the richest tech entrepreneur in the world, but he has lived a life rich in experience and learning.
His success story teaches us that no dream is too big and that any idea that we have can take us further than we could ever imagine as long as we take action on it. His journey building Dell is one of true grit and determination, and an inspiring example for business leaders and entrepreneurs everywhere.
Michael Dell’s story teaches us a very important lesson that we should follow our passions to become successful.
Genius minds don’t necessarily make entrepreneurs; entrepreneurs do make genius minds work for them. For being an entrepreneur, you just need a dream and proper framework to execute it. If you think something can be added to make this post even better, be sure to share your comments/feedback in the comments section below.
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