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Sheryl Crow

Award-Winning Singer and Songwriter

Sheryl Crow: I had done jingles in St. Louis, and I came out to L.A., didn't know anyone, and I took my cassette tape -- at the time, we were using cassettes -- took it to every studio in L.A. and dropped it off and asked people to hire me, and eventually I started getting hired. And about seven months after moving here, I got the Michael Jackson tour, which really changed things for me.
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Olivia de Havilland

Legendary Leading Lady

Olivia de Havilland: I think it was the first serious study of mental illness of a character -- serious study. And I, of course, saw all the experiences that Virginia Cunningham endured. I saw [electric] shock. It was very moving, because when the body under shock, it rises like this, and there is terrible danger, that it will slide off the table when it comes back, and bones can be broken. The particular hospital, it was a California hospital that I visited. Something so touching happened. They had a team of patients who were undergoing shock treatment help the patient who had been assigned that therapy for a certain day, and one would hold this shoulder, another would hold the other. All of them having been through shock, and still, still programmed for that, the hips, the knees, and the ankles, and I saw the body rise. They held on, and of course, nothing happened. No injury ensued to the patient. I saw her afterwards and then several days later, and the whole experience was altogether extraordinary.
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Michael Dell

Founder & Chairman, Dell Inc.

Michael Dell: Yeah. I wanted to see how it works, so I took it apart. A good thing about the early personal computers is that they had completely kind of standardized chips, and so you could literally get a book about each chip and read what each pin did, and how signals were processed through the chip. You could design your own circuits and you could modify them, and you could literally see exactly how the thing was working. That was sort of the classroom for me. That was where I learned the basics of how these things worked. Then I kind of became fascinated with, "Well, how could you improve it?" How could you make it do more things? How could you expand it? How could you make it go faster? How could you hook it up to other computers and let your imagination run wild?
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Michael Dell

Founder & Chairman, Dell Inc.

We went off for a few days with some of the really smart people in the company and a few outside advisors. And we said, "Well, what are we going to do with this company? This thing is really growing fast, but we're in a business that's pretty competitive and expanding rapidly. What do we do?" So we had three strategies that we clued in as our growth path for the future. The first one we said was, "We've got to go outside the U.S., because 96 percent of the people in the world live outside the United States, and it's going to be at least half the opportunities -- outside the United States. You can't just be a domestic company." Second thing we said was, "We really want to go after large companies, because they underwrite their purchase of technology through productivity and they can afford the best tools. That, we know, is going to be a lucrative opportunity and we really want to go after that in a big, big way." Kind of an odd thing for a little company like ours to go after, particularly with IBM and others in the field. The third thing we said was, "Differentiating our business is going to be really key, and the way to do that is on service." You've got to have better service than the competitor. So we invented this idea of on-site service for the PC, which had really never been done before. So with those three strategies we kind of marched forward, and that lasted five or six years.
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