Rating: 
Summary: Very inspirational
Review: As a young entrepreneur it helped me to believe that one can achieve their goals by having a plan and a burning desire to succeed.
Rating: 
Summary: Dell Isms
Review: Between 1984-87, Michael Dell managed has taken his company from a $1,000 hobby to a $160 million business. In 1999, it was worth $18 billion and had experience a 36000 percent growth. Dell computer company is a "Good to Great" company. Michael Dell exhibits the type of leadership that a "Good to Great" company should have. Dell's Big Picture: Build a business on what people want instead of what you think they want: 1. listen to the customer 2. respond to the customer 3. deliver what they want. Success is a matter of learning and identifying core strengths. Every new growth opportunity has a level of risk Try to identify potential problems early and fix them. Pace investment to match progress. If there was a way to get something done more quickly and easily, I wanted to try it. Eliminate the middle man. Opportunity is part emmersion and part instinct. Dell's Competitive strategies: 1. faster speed to market 2. superior customer service 3. commitment to produce high quality and high performance product 4. rapid entry to the internet. The PC was going to be the business choice for the future. Surround yourself with smart advisors. If you hire good people they will bring other good people to the organization Dell's Two golden rules: Distain inventory and Always listen to the customer. Always sell direct. Build your infrastructure as you grow. Slow and steady growth with a focus on liquidity. Communication is the most important tool in recovering from mistakes. Interject functional excellence and maintain accountability. Segment by customer. Segmentation offered the solution to rapid growth. Maximize strengths to improve profit. The quality of information is proportional to the amount inventory. Focus on getting quality information and decreasing inventory. Information Technology must reduce obstacles to the origin and flow of information. Acheive velocity by selecting the minimum number of parts that will cover the largest portion of the market sector. Dell's view on company culture: moblize around a common goal, invest in long term goals, don't leave the talent search to human resources, cultivate commitment to personal growth, and get involved. Dell's list of donts: 1. Don't be satisfied 2. Don't waste precious resource 3. Don't play hard to get 4. Marry high tech and high touch 5. Don't forget the customer have different fears, questions, and sensitivities. Dell's beliefs about the customer: 1. See the big picture 2. Run with suggestions from the customer 3. Always think bottom line (find ways to help the customer cut costs) 4. Make yourself valuable to the customer. 5. Be a student. Dell's guidelines for communication: 1. Don't underestimate the value of information 2. Communicate directly with the customer 3. work toward increasing demand verses supply 4. think real time 5. R&D must deliver value-added stuff for the customer 6. Get online and learn from the customer. Focus on the customer and not competition.
Rating:
Summary: Dell Rules!
Review: For a kid who enjoyed taking apart computers, Michael Dell has come a long way. In DIRECT FROM DELL he enthusiastically describes the development of his phenomenally successful business, Dell Computer Company. The book is a fascinating read for people who enjoy learning about "hypergrowth companies" and the personal computer industry. It's also interesting simply as an account of a businessman who possesses the exceptional ability of dealing with the rapidfire changes in technology and being able to build an organization whose employees thrive on change. Dell provides examples and advice for start-up business owners on ways to handle change and the importance of constant communication with employees, customers, and suppliers. He offers some innovative ideas for encouraging employees to think outside the box and for suppliers to work as partners with the company for everyone's benefit. Congratulations, Michael Dell, on your company's amazing success and your willingness to listen to the customer's needs over everything else.
Rating:
Summary: Goes on the short list of must-have business books
Review: Great book by one of the true pioneers of business in the last 15 years. It provides a fast-reading insight into the success of Dell.
Rating: 
Summary: Good and Okay
Review: He's obviously a hard-working, intelligent man with a great deal of drive who has accomplished a great deal in life. This book is good light reading. Its writing style is at a junior high level - similar to what most newspapers carry. The sophomoric prose bored me a bit by the third chapter, and it's obvious it was meant more for mass marketing appeal with the additional agenda as a marketing tool for DELL itself. There are some good lessons learned. However, again, there's too much commercialism running through it. That aspect becomes distracting for any serious business research such as a graduate degree, which is the reason I picked it up. Again, I don't discount it (I wish I could be as successful) because he makes an important point - don't doubt your intuition when you're thinking out of the box. I'm only saying that Michael Dell is not a Peter Drucker in how he presents his story. That's not necessarily bad depending on your motivation for reading it.
Rating:
Summary: Great read for Business & Economics Studnets
Review: I can understand the criticism of this book that perhaps Mike Dell should have gone more in depth about the dynamics of his company and industry. However, this being his first book that I know of I can understand why he choose to keep it short and simple, and to his credit. A great peak into the mind of a business man and leader who in my opinion deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence with Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca et al. One part in particular that caught my attention was Chapter 7 where on page 95&96 he talks about his "Know The Net" initiative in order to familiarize his employees with the Internet. I personally liked when he stated that: "Some might argue that if you give employees access to the World Wide Web, they will spend all their time surfing the Net. But that's like saying, We don't want to teach our people how to read because they might spend all their time reading." Fabulous insight into Michael Dell's view of the Internet's future as a conduit for Economic Efficiency in business, school, and life. Great piece of literature especially for beginning Business& Economics students. Peace :-)
Rating:
Summary: A decent management handbook
Review: In business, a lot of words and phrases are overused to the point that they lose all their original meaning. "Paradigm" has to be one of the worst. The one that comes to mind when discussing Dell is "revolutionary". Dell is one of the few examples where a word this strong really applies. Taking $1,000 of startup capital to build custom PCs in a dorm room all the way to becoming the worlds leading computer manufacturer and the highest return on investment company in history (ROI = 14,000%) is impressive, but there have been many such basement-business-to-boardroom success stories. The revolutionary part was building the first manufacturing operation that relied on mass customization of an extremely complex product, and succeeding at it. Before Dell, such a technique was considered impossible.
I was struck by the Randian style of Dell's life. Oblivious to the critics laughing at his seemingly naïve attempt to challenge the large, dominant, and established players in a complex and technical industry, Dell proceeds to create an entirely new business and eventually dominates those same critics. Dell is a modern day, real life Henry Rearden, a prime mover whose success benefits the world over. He makes the impossible seem natural, and his modest demeanor masks an unimaginable and limitless drive for success.
Readers expecting an autobiography of Michael Dell may be disappointed; he glosses over his own life in barely half a chapter and quickly gets down to business, so to speak. I was mildly disappointed by this, as Dell seems like a very interesting guy. This was the right choice though, and considering Dell's own personality of economy this seems fitting.
It seems Dell has always been an uncannily direct person, starting in 3rd grade when he purchased a high school diploma from a mail order company in an attempt to save himself another 9 years of unnecessary education. This was a child destined to succeed. He was born with dollar signs in his eyes and was all about the Benjamins before most of us even knew what a Benjamin was. This pattern continued as he earned $2,000 by selling stamps on consignment though an advertisement in a stamp collectors journal. At age 16 Dell earned over $18,000 in one summer by selling newspaper subscriptions by targeting newlyweds from lists he compiled by canvassing county courthouses (the really funny part about that story was that when he told his high school teacher about this, she became angry because it was more money than she made). Finally, the real turning point: Dell's interest in computers leads him to begin upgrading computers for friends of the family. This becomes such a profitable hobby that Dell buys himself a BMW which he drives himself off to college in upon graduation from high school. You all know where things go from there.
From this entrepreneurial beginning, the book succinctly describes Dells early struggles and eventual rise to power. The book is written really as a managerial primer on what it really means to create a "customer oriented" company (again with the buzzwords - but in this case Dell really means it). Dell knows his likely target audience (as always) and the book is divided up into short chapters, each carefully labeled for quick reference. Each chapter is written like an executive summary, with bold headings marking each major subsection. Now that's high "skim value".
Obviously, this is one of those "books every manager should read". Otherwise the books appeal to the general pubic is probably pretty low. Still, anyone who likes a good story of success would enjoy most of the book, and could skip the business-heavy sections. Anyone with an entrepreneurial inkling really should consider checking it out though.
Dell succeeds in distilling the major reasons for Dell's success into a fairly compact book. And he goes on to describe how his philosophy is applicable to any and every company. While most management books are meaningless buzzword dictionaries, Dell crafts a real world guide to creating a successful company. Being customer oriented is more than a buzzword for Dell, it is a philosophy. Dell claims to spend upwards of 40% of his time dealing directly with customers, finding out what they want, need, and are unhappy with - name another CEO who is this committed to his customers. Dell respects his customers, which is exactly where many firms fail. Similarly being direct is no gimmick. To organize your entire firm around and just one level away from the customer is a guiding philosophy for the design of Dells corporate structure.
Rating:
Summary: Direct bleprint for Success
Review: Michael Dell has penned the story of a small computer companyfrom Texas that has gone on to be one of the biggest powerhouses inthe direct consumer marketing industry. He shares his secrets of success, that sometimes appear to be almost common sense, except for the fact that none of the other companies do some of these things. While not a biography of Dell, the man nor the company, it is a good roadmap for the IT entrepreneur to succeed.
I, one day, hope to start my own company in in the computing industry, and he has given me the handbook for success. I read the book in under 36 hours, I could not put it down. I saw many applications to implement some of the ideas that he talks about at the University HelpDesk that I manage. I think that managers at all levels and in all industries can benefit from read "Direct from Dell".
How much can the CEO of a company that does $40 million dollars a day on the Internet know about business?....a whole heck of a lot!
Rating:
Summary: good but missing a little something
Review: Michael Dell is a tech wunderkind. He is a successful businessman. He may be considered a visionary. A business author??? I just thought this book was a little too fragmented for my taste. The book could have gone the way of a full biography or full business lesson. There's valuable insights but the majority is padding. The book could have been condensed to a slim volume. Overall, I thought it was good but nothing spectacular. This shouldn't matter to those who view Dell as an iconoclast. It will belong in your collection.
Rating:
Summary: Banal and Uninsightful
Review: Michael Dell sure isn't an exciting writer. His writing style rivals the Dell's technical manual on excitement. It isn't as if he lacks exciting stories to tell. Dell is one of the greatest success stories in business. But I found his stories to be downright boring. For example, he writes about how he managed the Coke Vending machine at one of his old factories...Who cares??? I wanted to get insights on how Dell beat hundreds of competitors in a business where product and price differentiation are minimal. On this, I was very disappointed. Dell repeatedly sites three things for his company's success 1)execution and 2)having the right people 3)selling direct. But there are other competitors who had the same qualities and now they are either minor players or out of business. This book didn't really gave me the insights I was hoping for.
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