Leader Analysis - Micheal Dell

Dell's business strategy combines its direct customer model with a highly efficient manufacturing and supply chain management organization and an emphasis on standards-based technologies. This strategy enables Dell to provide customers with superior value; high-quality, relevant technology; customized systems; superior service and support; and products and services that are easy to buy and use.

Chapter two (Krames, 2003) depicts the values, journey and leadership style of Michael Dell. Michael Dell is the founder and CEO of Dell, Inc. According to the author, Michael had an entrepreneurial gene in him since the childhood. He started his first business Dell Stamps when he was 12. Michael started his revolutionary journey of Dell Computer Corporation when he was 19 year old. He was the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company at the age of 27.

The chapters two and five discuss two successful figures in business that I can learn from with their different leadership styles. Michael Dell and Andy Grove led their companies to billionaire status with great business strategies and some risks during their tenure. Michael Dell focus on the customer and Andy Grove focus on the employees always being on their toes so that they will always work hard. Their companies both struggle at times, but they put strategies in place to continue their successful. I will provide a brief description of Michael Dell and Andy Grove contributions, their resistance they encountered, and how they are different along with the factor of their success.

Dell has emerged as one of the biggest sellers in the PC market. From humble beginnings in 1983, when Michael Dell worked out of his campus dorm room, to 1996 when we reached $7.8 billion in sales, the source of our amazing success has been our unwavering focus on the customer, termed the “Dell Direct Model.”

Michael Dell sticking with his “bottom up” strategy and “structuring the organization around the customer,” has made him one of the most successful and well respected CEO’s of the technology world. (Krames, 2003, p. 59 and p. 70) Andy Grove as a young child barely escaping scarlet fever and the Nazis during WWII pushed Grove to success through his mantra, “Only the paranoid survive.” (Krames, 2003, p. 135)

Dell Computer Corporation was founded in 1984 by Michael Dell. From the early 1990s until the mid-2000s, Dell was ranked as a PC market leader relying on their distinctive marketing pattern “Direct Model” which undertook direct communication with customers and provided customized products. Recently, the PC industry is facing inconceivable worldwide competition, and Dell is gradually losing their competitive advantages by using its direct model in critical business segments. The company is facing shrinkage of growth, increasing competition, declining quality of customer service, and limitation of expansion. These issues have an enormous impact on Dell’s position as a technological giant in the PC industry.

Every customer and every need is unique. When we build a product or solution to order, the needs of the customer are met exactly and in real time. With the Dell Direct Model, we supply customers efficiently and on time with easy to purchase, customized hardware, software and service solutions that meet their needs.

1. What are Dell’s FSAs? What are the macro-level requirements for the direct sales model to be successful? What are the major advantages of the direct model, compared with the traditional channel strategy in the computer business?

The founders thought the dell’s successful for three reasons: direct sales model, VMI and JIT model, the sharing of information.

Successful businesses begin with strong leadership and entrepreneurship skills. From the smallest store on the corner, to the largest corporation on Wall Street, the success of the business rests on the leadership of the company. Michael Dell and Andy Grove are the two exceptional leaders who created successful companies which I have selected to compare and contrast within this paper. Both leaders have a significant amount of major contributions while creating their distinct empire which will be revealed. Notable in this paper is to ascertain the primary resistances they both combated while formulating the businesses. Categorically, I will also display the resemblances and disparities between their stratagems which led to their successes. Lastly, my personal opinion concerning the realization of what actually framed their achievements will be shared.

Dell Inc. today transfers after a standout amongst the most element plans of action, permitting it to be the biggest online retailer of PCs and related gear. By offering its clients whole customization with the item on offer, Dell guarantees that clients are included in the picking of details, in this way making another stride in PC buy known as personalisation. The component has now been received by numerous other PC makers, yet at the same time remains Dell 's essential way to deal with retailing.

▪ Communication. Maintenance of close ties with their most profitable corporate customers. By keeping open lines of communications, installing custom software, and keeping up with its customer’s business inventories for them, Dell is increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction. Dell has also built and maintained a Premier website for corporate customers. The website can be accessed by any customer subsidy worldwide, and not just a company’s purchasing agent. Through the website customers are able to purchase computers according to the automated policy (Kotler & Lane, 168).

Steve Jobs (1955-2011), the celebrated founder of Apple Inc., was the Da Vinci, Edison, and Tesla of our time. Jobs entrepreneurial spirit pushed our technology to such levels as to integrate it into our daily lives; jobs were an innovator. Some called him a perfectionist, micro-managing freak, a tyrant, a genius. All blended into a singular, compact individual whose handiwork included the personal computer, the mouse, the drop-down menu, iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone, and the iPad. His entrepreneurial success was nothing short of phenomenal, but it is also a learning lesson for the rest of us too. Throughout his adult life, Steve Jobs only had one philosophy: Follow your heart. The heart may be foolish at times, but it knows where to connect the dots, and it will eventually. As we look at Steve Jobs life, there are these dots that created the direction for what Jobs believe was his calling. Thus what we have, is an inspiring lesson in how to live your life—your way.

Dell Computer Corporation’s Michael Dell’s decisive and apparently uncontested vision for the sustained growth of the corporation hinges on advancing the Dell Direct Model. A distinct advantage displayed by Dell versus his closest competitors in this arena-Gateway, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment seems to be the synergy created by the integration of marketing communication efforts and their ability to accurately adjust sales staff and production levels to meet the corresponding demand.

Dell Inc. is a multinational organization that manufactures PCs and ropes related products and services. It was established in 1984