Michael Dell Interview (page: 7 / 7) Founder & Chairman, Dell Inc.	Print Interview

You stepped down as CEO a few years ago and then stepped up again. Can you tell us about that?

Michael Dell: Yeah. I was the CEO of the company for 20 years and decided to give somebody else a shot at being CEO. Then, after about two-and-a-half years, the board asked me to come back into the CEO role.

What happened during the two-and-a-half years that they were not thrilled with?

Michael Dell: I think a number of things changed in the industry, and it was time for a clear, decisive set of decisions to set the company on a different path.

Were you getting more competition?

Michael Dell: There were a lot of things going on. There was this enormous growth in emerging countries going on. The consumer business, for the whole industry, was growing super fast. There was huge growth in the enterprise area with servers and storage. Small-to-medium businesses were growing very rapidly around the world. There was a big shift toward mobility, so we needed to have a decisive approach to regain competitiveness and put the company back on a growth path.

During your years away from the CEO's desk you became heavily involved in philanthropy. Do you have any mixed feelings about being CEO again?

Michael Dell: I did that job for 20 years, and I've done it now for another year-and-a-half or so, and I'm having a good time. I'm very happy doing that. I'm still involved in philanthropy. My wife and I set up a foundation about ten years ago, and we've got a great team that's involved in that. My wife is pretty involved in it as well, you know. Some very exciting opportunities.

Could you tell us about your wonderful gift to your alma mater?

Michael Dell: I think Austin has a special place in our hearts because it's where we live and it's our hometown. Our foundation does things all over the world, but we have done quite a few things in Austin. We're very involved in Children's Hospital there, and gave a pretty large grant to the University of Texas to build a pediatric research institute -- which is sort of a precursor for a medical school, which is a much needed resource in Austin that a number of us are hopeful will come -- and also to build a new computer science building at the University of Texas at Austin, and another facility focused on pediatric health and addressing childhood obesity and really trying to get kids more active and deal with the preventative aspects of medicine, as opposed to the other side.

One of our interviews this week was with Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the Director of the National Institutes of Health. He says that's the direction medicine has to go.

Michael Dell: It's a shift left. In our industry we're always looking for the root cause. If you fix problems at the very end, it is exponentially expensive. It's true with healthcare or any other kind of system. The system we have in this country applies enormous expense at the very end, and has very little responsibility and measurement and accountability at the beginning.

What other philanthropic projects are you involved in outside of Austin?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Michael Dell: We've got an office in India. We're getting pretty active in Africa. We're really focused on disadvantaged urban youth. There are lots of opportunities all over this country, and all over the world, whether it's in education or healthcare. We've taken a kind of measurement-and-data-driven approach. I think there are a number of new philanthropists that have come into focusing on using data and analytics in a much more intensive way. We've adopted a number of the business practices, the way we would think about projects at Dell, with return on investment. Our objective is not just to provide a bunch of grants, but really to understand problems and make sure that we get results, and that those are sustainable improvements, so we're not just providing a support system, but rather we're fundamentally changing the outcomes. So that after four or five or six years, our goal is that we don't have to do that anymore, we can go do something else, 'cause we've fixed that problem. Those are the kind of challenges that we take on.

If you were to tell a young person what makes your work so exciting or rewarding, what would you say to them?

Michael Dell: I would say it's working with incredibly smart people in an industry where it's right at the center of change, and you get to see so many changes are going on in all the industries around the world, and see how countries and societies are evolving, embracing this technology. I'm still getting my education, and get it every day when I travel around and meet with customers, meet with our teams. The industry, I think, is still very much in the early days in terms of how technology affects all parts of society.

There's wonderful irony in your career. You didn't become a doctor, like your father and brother, but you just built a pediatric health research center. Well congratulations on your wonderful success, and thank you for the great interview.

Michael Dell: Sure. Thank you very much.

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