Dell: You have to have a business model that comprehends the rate of change in technology and customer preferences for products and services. You’ve got to have an organization that can deliver around customer expectations; those are fairly easy compared to the final part, which is really executing on the first two. A lot of companies have had products and strategies which sound like they make sense, but the people weren’t been able to pull it off. You really have to put together a model that can be executed.

Dell: Well, the nature of managing an organization at different size or scale have changed.My responsibility is more along the lines of determining what businesses we’re going to be in, and where we，re going to make our investments, prioritizing investment decisions, and establishing the criteria for success in the different businesses that we’re in, and, obviously, prioritizing the opportunities. We’ve always had more opportunities than what we’ve known what to do with, and the key point is which ones we should go after first. As the company was evolving, I was much more into ‘ok，now let’s go do it.，As an organization changes, you go from detailed implementation to deciding which things are going to get done and ensuring that they, in fact，are the right things.

Reporter: Dell has a tradition of being very responsive to customers and coming out with products quickly. Do you look for a particular kind of employee to hire who manages to fit in well to that culture you’ve created?

Dell: We do look for certain kinds of employees, particularly in the areas where it’s a sales or service orientation. We have a lot of processes within the company that really involve everybody in understanding the customers’ desires. For example, at any Dell operation in any country you might see something we call a customer advocate meeting, which occurs generally every Friday at 7: 30 in the morning. We have a series of people from all around the company, oftentimes 200, 300 people, who talk about the key statistics that describe whether we’re meeting customers’ requirements. If we find that we’re not meeting their requirements, we discuss what’s gone wrong with the process, and what we need to do differently to change that. We have manufacturing folks there, human resources, finance, engineers, of course, sales and marketing. And we invite customers to come to it. I think it sensitizes everyone in the organization to the needs of the customer. It’s a very key part of the way we do our business in terms of exposing everybody to customer concerns. One thing that’s different about our company compared with a number of our competitors is we actually do our own distribution. So, we’re in contact with the customer every day .We take 50,000 phone calls every day and we’re sort of immersed in customer feedback all the time, which gives us a great opportunity to use that to improve our products, and our services, and our processes. We think that’s a really key structural advantage.