Business Quotes and Tips from Michael Dell

Many times they’re talking about risk as a bad thing. The way I think about risk is, I want to take some risks. The most dangerous thing is not taking a risk.

The key challenge—and the biggest change from business as usual—is changing the focus from how much inventory there is to how fast it’s moving.

The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem, because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000. So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development. That can mean anything from a new feature or capability to a new way to finance purchases or a new way to link things together.

The point is, you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect it to keep working. We had to do something different, but the really hard question was, What is it? We made plenty of mistakes along the way to answering that question, but the most important thing we identified was that we needed to know more about our customers and what problems they were really trying to solve in their businesses–even if they didn’t neatly fit into an existing category of ours.

The key challenge—and the biggest change from business as usual—is changing the focus from how much inventory there is to how fast it’s moving.

The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem, because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000. So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development. That can mean anything from a new feature or capability to a new way to finance purchases or a new way to link things together.

The point is, you can’t keep doing the same thing and expect it to keep working. We had to do something different, but the really hard question was, What is it? We made plenty of mistakes along the way to answering that question, but the most important thing we identified was that we needed to know more about our customers and what problems they were really trying to solve in their businesses–even if they didn’t neatly fit into an existing category of ours.

The changes headed our way require more than incremental progress; they demand fundamental reinvention. We need to de-materialize heavy processes and drive radical efficiencies across the entire global economy. Think about what’s happened in music, publishing, travel and taxi cabs. Entirely new, digital business models are replacing resource-intensive ones. The opportunities in the digital economy for both growth and sustainability are limitless.