|
|
Direct from Dell, Strategies That Revolutionized An Industry (Paperback)
by Michael Dell, Catherine Fredman
| Category:
Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Corporate history, Process excellence |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
MSL price:
¥ 148.00
[ Shop incentives ]
|
| Stock:
In Stock |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Why is this book so powerful? It talks about the power of having a dream and following it with all your heart. |
| If you want us to help you with the right titles you're looking for, or to make reading recommendations based on your needs, please contact our consultants. |
Detail |
Author |
Description |
Excerpt |
Reviews |
|
|
|
Author: Michael Dell, Catherine Fredman
Publisher: Collins; Reprint edition
Pub. in: January, 2006
ISBN: 0060845724
Pages: 272
Measurements: 7.9 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00008
Other information:
|
|
Rate this product:
|
|
- Awards & Credential -
The National Bestseller (in North America) and one of the Top 50 Success Classics as rated by Tom Butler-Bowden. |
|
- MSL Picks -
This book adds a valuable case history about coupling lean manufacturing (custom-built, high quality products, rapidly built using just-in-time inventory - see Lean Thinking) with great communications (to and from customers, employees, suppliers, technology developers, and product planners).
I have read every published article I can find about Dell Computer and every published speech by a Dell executive, and I learned a lot about what Dell did (and when), why, and what the results have been.
I came away with a much higher opinion of Dell Computer as a communications model for other companies. They reduce errors because they listen and act quickly. This is one of the biggest weaknesses of most organizations.
Recently, I had the chance to spend a day at Dell on a site visit and came away even more impressed with how well they communicate. Everyone I met had a thorough understanding of the company's vision, strategy, and business model. I have never experienced that before in any company of any size.
You may be tempted to ignore Dell Computer now that their growth and that of personal computers is slowing in 2000. That should affect your stock investing, not your best practices learning.
To the Dell model, you can further improve by considering best practices that Dell does not do enough of yet such as scanning the business environment to locate best practices that it does not yet use.
You can also consider the ideal best practice, which is to replace your product with a service that is better and less costly to the customer. In Dell's case, this would mean turning the network into the computer without the need for a computer in the first place. Since Dell recently announced it will be doing more with servers and services, that may well be in the company's future.
Dell Computer has also been very effective at overcoming the other sources of stalled performance at most organizations: Tradition, Misconceptions, Disbelief about new things and ideas, Bureaucracy, Avoiding the unattractive (such as angry customers), and Procrastination.
You can use an 8 step process involving measurements, anticipating the future best practice, exceeding that future best practice using best practices in new combinations, identifying the ideal best practice and approaching it, employing the best employees and incentives to create the results you want, and repeating this process. Then you will run rings around Dell Computer, unless Dell Computer begins to use this process before you do.
Buy, read, think about, decide how to apply the lessons of the book, and act. You will be glad you did.
Michael Dell spends 40% of his time with customers. A lot of the rest goes into designing improved ways to listen to customers. Should you be doing the same? (From quoting Donald Mitchell, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, professionals, nonprofit leaders, consultants, and MBAs.
|
|
- Better with -
Better with
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
:
|
|
Customers who bought this product also bought:
 |
Pour Your Heart Into It, How STARBUCKS Built a Company One Cup at a Time (Paperback)
by Howard Schultz(Founder and Chairman of Starbucks), Dori Jones Yang
Inspiring, motivational and heart-warming, this story serves as another testimony that imagination drives great business success. |
 |
Made in America, My Story (Paperback)
by Sam Walton, John Huey
A real classic on entrepreneurship and business building. |
 |
Nuts! Southwest Airlines' Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success (Paperback)
by Kevin Freiberg, Jackie Freiberg
NUTS! is a must read if you're interested in making your employees and customers raving fans of your business as much as those of Southwest Airlines. |
 |
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (Paperback)
by James Wallace, Jim Erickson
Even though this book is a little outdated, it's still a great read with compelling insight into Gates's young and adult life and his building of the Microsoft Empire. |
 |
Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way (Paperback)
by Richard Branson
Entertaining and inspirational, this book is the ultimate mentor for those with self-employment dreams. |
|
|
Michael Dell is the chairman of the board of directors of Dell Inc., the world's largest computer-systems company. In 1992, he became the youngest CEO ever to earn a ranking on the Fortune 500. Mr. Dell serves on the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum, the executive committee of the International Business Council, and is a member of the U.S. Business Council. He also serves on the U.S. President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the governing board of the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, India
|
|
From the Publisher:
In 1983, Michael Dell, a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, drove away from his parents’ Houston home in a BMW he’d bought selling subscriptions to his hometown newspaper. In the backseat were 3 personal computers. Today, he’s chairman and CEO of Dell Computer Corp, a $30 billion company and the largest manufacturer and marketer of computers in the world.
Founded on a deceptively simple premise – to deliver high-performance computer systems directly to the end-users - Dell Computer is the envy of its competition. It has consistently grown at two to three times the industry rate, its stock went up more than 90,000% in the last decade, and Dell is now selling more than $50 million worth of systems per day over the dell.com.
In Direct from Dell, you will learn:
- why it’s better for any business starting out to have too little capital rather than too much.
- why your people pose a greater threat to the health of your business than your competition.
- how you can exploit your competition’s weaknesses by exposing its greatest strength.
- how integrating your business virtually can make the difference between being quick and being dead.
- and much more.
This book is a good dive into Dell's fantastic success. It highlights a no-nonsense approach to business, an attention to detail and continuous improvement, as well as an obsession for focus. It also offers some glimpse into Michael Dell's personal journey with Dell and does so by avoiding any bravado. By virtue of Dell's achievements in more than 20 years of its existence, the book is a must-read for business people.
|
The Birth of Being Direct
I first experienced the power - and the rewards - of being direct when I was twelve years old. The father of my best friend in Houston was a pretty avid stamp collector, so naturally my friend and I wanted to get into stamp collecting, too. To fund my interest in stamps, I got a job as a water boy in a Chinese restaurant two blocks from my house. I started reading stamp journals just for fun, and soon began noticing that prices were rising. Before long, my interest in stamps began to shift from the joy of collecting to the idea that there was something here that my mother, a stockbroker, would have termed "a commercial opportunity."
In our household, you couldn't help being aware of commercial opportunities. The discussions at our dinner table in the 1970s were about what the chairman of the Federal Reserve was doing and how it affected the economy and the inflation rate; the oil crisis; which companies to invest in, and which stocks to sell and buy. The economy in Houston was booming at the time, and the market for collectibles was quite active. It was obvious to me from what I'd read and heard that the value of stamps was increasing, and being a fairly resourceful kid, I saw this as an opportunity.
My friend and I had already bought stamps at an auction, and since I knew even then that people rarely did something for nothing, I assumed that the auctioneers were making a decent fee. Rather than pay them to buy the stamps, I thought it would be fun to create my own auction. Then I could learn even more about stamps and collect a commission in the process.
I was about to embark upon one of my very first business ventures.
First, I got a bunch of people in the neighborhood to consign their stamps to me. Then I advertised "Dell's Stamps" in Linn's Stamp Journal, the trade journal of the day. And then I typed, with one finger, a twelve-page catalog (I didn't yet know how to type, nor did I have a computer) and mailed it out.
Much to my surprise, I made $2,000. And I learned an early, powerful lesson about the rewards of eliminating the middleman. I also learned that if you've got a good idea, it pays to do something about it.
Seeing the Pattern
A few years later, I saw the chance to seize an even greater opportunity. When I was sixteen, I got a summer job selling newspaper subscriptions to The Houston Post. At the time, the newspaper gave its salespeople a list of new phone numbers issued by the telephone company and told us to cold call them. It struck me as a pretty random way of approaching new business.
I soon noticed a pattern, however, based on the feedback I was getting from potential customers during these conversations. There were two kinds of people who almost always bought subscriptions to the Post: people who had just married and people who had just moved into new houses or apartments. With this in mind, I wondered, "How could you find all the people who are getting mortgages or getting married?"
After asking around, I discovered that when a couple wanted to get married, they had to go to the county courthouse and get a marriage license. They also had to provide the address to which the license would be sent. In the state of Texas, that information is public. So I hired a couple of my high school buddies and we canvassed the courthouses in the sixteen counties surrounding the Houston area, collecting the names and addresses of the newly (or soon-to-be-newly) married.
Then I found out that certain companies compiled lists of people who had applied for mortgages. These lists were ranked by the size of the mortgage. You could easily identify the people with the largest mortgages and go after those high-potential customers first.* I targeted these people, creating a personalized letter and offering them a subscription to the newspaper.
By this time, summer was over and it was time to go back to high school. As important as school was, I found that it could be very disruptive to a steady income. I had worked hard to create a lucrative system and didn't want to just throw it away, so I handled the bulk of the work during the week after school, and I did the follow-up work on Saturday mornings. The subscriptions came in by the thousands.
One day, my history and economics teacher assigned us a project for which we had to file our tax returns. Based on what I had made selling newspaper subscriptions, my income was about $18,000 that year. At first, my teacher corrected me, assuming I had missed the decimal place. When she realized I hadn't, she became even more dismayed.
To her surprise, I had made more money that year than she had.
|
|
| View all 19 comments |
An American reader, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
From this entrepreneurial beginning, the book succinctly describes Dells early struggles and eventual rise to power. The book is written really as a managerial primer on what it really means to create a "customer oriented" company (again with the buzzwords - but in this case Dell really means it). Dell knows his likely target audience (as always) and the book is divided up into short chapters, each carefully labeled for quick reference. Each chapter is written like an executive summary, with bold headings marking each major subsection. Now that's high "skim value".
Obviously, this is one of those "books every manager should read". Otherwise the books appeal to the general pubic is probably pretty low. Still, anyone who likes a good story of success would enjoy most of the book, and could skip the business-heavy sections. Anyone with an entrepreneurial inkling really should consider checking it out though.
Dell succeeds in distilling the major reasons for Dell's success into a fairly compact book. And he goes on to describe how his philosophy is applicable to any and every company. While most management books are meaningless buzzword dictionaries, Dell crafts a real world guide to creating a successful company. Being customer oriented is more than a buzzword for Dell, it is a philosophy. Dell claims to spend upwards of 40% of his time dealing directly with customers, finding out what they want, need, and are unhappy with - name another CEO who is this committed to his customers. Dell respects his customers, which is exactly where many firms fail. Similarly being direct is no gimmick. To organize your entire firm around and just one level away from the customer is a guiding philosophy for the design of Dells corporate structure.
|
BusinessWeek, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
When it comes to exploiting the promise of the Internet, Michael Dell is taking the rest of corporate America to school. |
New York Times, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
Dell Computer…is perhaps the purest example of the efficiencies made possible by information technology. |
Bill Gates, USA
<2006-12-21 00:00>
If you want to capitalize on cyberspace, you should read this book. |
View all 19 comments |
|
|
|
|
