Michael Dell founded the dell company back in 1984 while still a student at Austin at the University of Texas. He started with a principal of $1000 and was working from his hostel. The company rose to become to become a multinational corporation that builds up, repairs, and trades computers and their accessories. It grew by increasing its customers and a large team of employers and had a stable growth, year after year.
Michael Dell resigned as the C.E.O in 2004 but retained the chairman position in the company. The president, Kevin Rollins took over as the new C.E.O. A year later, the growth of sales decreased amicably while the sales and earnings continued to increase. The decreasing sales were due to the maturing of the PC market which amounted to a large percentage of the company’s sales. Savings also became hard to make in the company’s chain supply their competitors made their operations more proficient. A decline in the purchase of PCs was noted as many people started visiting the retail electronic stores to try out the devices. The company also had a poor reputation of poor customer services and the company’s critics also said that that defective apparatus were used for their PCs. By the end of that year, dell had lost its name as the biggest PC manufacturer to a different company. It is this that made Michael dell take back his position as the C.E.O, and has since then implemented initiatives to revive the company.
Dell started by first changing the whole management and hiring an entirely new one, most of them being fresh to their position. They also include experts that he hired from other companies. He also reduced the number of managers that reported to him directly as he wanted to change the management culture of the company. He wanted an executive that would be excited on new business prospects and take business risks. He was rather not sure, so he consulted 20 years old Brian Gladden who was a fortress of modern management. Dell wanted him to take up the position of the chief financial officer to oversee the company’s operations. Gladden embarked on trying to change the lack of structure at this trendy company whose tools did not support the business of $60 billion. After consulting with Dell, they decided that the company to be reorganized around customers. It was a risky move as most tech companies do it around the products they dispose for instance, computers, but this would make the top managers respond more to the clients. The company was then restructured into four groups, government and education buyers, corporations, consumers and midsize businesses. Thou still in those dark days, Dell started gaining confidence in his company as it had a solid foundation as both the executive and division leaders started being responsible to meet financial targets and find ways of meeting them.
The dell company has also come up with ways of focusing on customers. It has done this by first increasing their software, services, and fresh hardware categories which include table-like machines and smart phones. Dell is also going to the extent of adding features of social networking, video, and music services to their devices. Michael wanted so much to revive the consumer business. He started searching for a replacement of the head of that division after the former left. He was interested in someone who would advise the company about retail chains all over the world, as well as be able to cut costs. Garriques, the head of Motorola mobile handsets business stood out. When they met in the earlier years, Dell had been intrigued with the way Garriques had directed the expansion of the famous Razr phone. His expertise in dealing with the high executives at wireless carriers and vendors would not be valuable as dell wanted to create a network of distribution from scratch. Dell considered him and made a call to persuade him to work together with him. His work would be to create a consumer business which was profitable with designs that would compete favorably with its rival, HP or Apple.
Garriques introduced Mantra and stopped the idea of emulating apple by opening a lot of Dell owned stores. The first thing was to stop and think clearly of what they were going to do instead of having the Dells fast mindset. He then went out looking for a heavy-hitter which was being used by other companies such as Apple and HP, so as to compete favorably with them. It is then that he approached Boyd, who was an expert in sunglasses and shoes but had never worked with computers. He was going to create a sense of style with their products. These changes sent a message to the employees that the computer business that was long considered being dead was going to be a priority. Boyd also carried out experiments to show that it would become an exciting place to work. He also came up with a plan for consumers to pay some extra cash in order to get some designs on laptops but the manufacturing team did not agree, so he consulted Dell directly who approved the move. By the end of that year, the company broke its tradition top sell only direct to customers.
CONCLUSION
Though the company has not yet regained its initial success glory; it has begun to show some improvements especially on its financial outcomes. It has become more reflective these of late, and although critics say it has taken them to long to stabilize it, Dell is confident that the company is going to be faster, strong and even hyper than it has ever been.
