Michael Dell ON: Dreaming Bigger Than Your Goals & How to Play Nice But Win

come back every week to listen, learn and grow. Now, today's guest is someone that I was really excited to have today on the show because I think there's so many moments in his life where he's gone through experiences that we can all learn from. I'm talking about none other than Michael Dell, the chairman and chief executive officer of Dell Technologies and innovator and technology leader, providing the essential infrastructure for organizations to build their digital future. Now.

He's the author of two books, including the next upcoming book. The one that I really want you to read is Play Nice but Win, a CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader. I love the title. I've already loved chapters of the book that I've read and I cannot wait for you to read it. Michael is an honorary member of the Foundation Board of the World Economic Forum and as an Executive Committee member of the International Business Council. I welcome to the show, Michael Dell. Michael, thank you for taking

the time to do this. I cannot wait for people to read your book, and I'm so lucky that I get to sit down with you as the author of the book before everyone gets too So thank you so much for your energy. Yeah, thank you, Jay. Great to be with you and great to be with your audience. Yeah. I, like I said, I love the title. I want to dive into the book a bit later, but I want to start off with asking you a question that I've been asking a lot of people recently, because I think

there's something beautiful about learning about this. So I'll share with you a story. I was I work with a lot of core but clients as a speaker or a coach, and I was speaking on my clients recently, and of course we're on zoom and he's got something in his background and I'm wondering what it is. And he has a paintbrush hanging on his background wall, and it's a real paintbrush, and it's a big paint brush. You can't

miss it. And I said to him, I said, look, I don't want to be creepy, but I'm just being curious. Why do you have a paintbrush on your wall? And he said he started laughing. He said, no one's ever asked me that before. And I was thinking, wow, like people must really be scared of you. But he said that. He said that the reason he has it is because his first ever job was that he used to paint fences, and then when he did that successfully, he painted walls.

And then when he did that successfully, he got to paint homes. And he keeps that paintbrush up there to remind him of where he started. Today, he's a very successful executive. I wanted to ask you, what was your first ever ever job that you did, and is there a lesson that you learned there that you've carried with you throughout your success? Yeah? You know, I first of all, I'm big believer in those early jobs. You know, my first job, I was twelve years old. I was a

dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant. I got promoted to a water boy and then assistant mater d So I was moving up pretty fast, and I got recruited away by another restaurant, and I've been working every day since then pretty much, and I have to say I've loved it. That's incredible. Do you do you mind me asking how much did you used to make at the time as a twelve year old? I guess it was like this would have been in nineteen seventy seven. So what was

the minimum wage back then? Like a dollar or two dollars or you know, something like that. It wasn't very much. Yeah, what would you save it up for? Like? What were you doing with that money at that time? What was it leading to it? Yeah? So at the time, I was into stamps and I started, you know, I was collecting stamps and then I started like buying and selling stamps.

I ran a stamp auction. I got into stocks and you know, currencies when when I was like fourteen fifteen, started investing my mom was a stockbroker, really got interested in financial markets, you know, around fourteen fifteen. It was sort of the dawn and the microprocessor age, and I happened to, you know, get exposed to the origins of what became the PC and that obviously impacted my life

in a big way. If you're a twelve year old today, you'd be doing NFTs and crypto and that would be a whoad I'm guessing seeing is probably yeah, yeah, you know, now there's so many interesting things going on with you know, technology, and you know the intersection of the biological sciences and the computational sciences, and you know, it used to be

technology was about it departments and stuff like that. Now it's pretty much affecting everything, and every business is getting upended in some way by technology and AI and data and networks. And it's super exciting to see the pace that the economy is changing with technology at the fulcroom of that. Absolutely, And I know that you dropped out of college, and a lot of successful founders have dropped out of college, and I'm not at all recommending that

or encouraging that, and either of you. I'm intrigued to think about, though, if you've finished your degree, how differently do you think your life would have gone. That's the first part of the question, And the second part of the question is what gave you the courage to actually drop out and pursue something which at the time, as you said, was very new and very cutting edge and innovative, but people didn't really have a lot of certainty and surety around it. Yeah, you know, it seemed like I

have an easy decision for me. I mean, let me start with the first part. You know, what would have happened if I'd graduated. I don't know. Oh, I don't know that I would have gone down this path. I might be like a you know, a doctor in Houston somewhere, you know, which is what my parents wanted me to be. But you know, when when I started, first of all, if you have nothing, you have nothing to lose, right,

So it's it's pretty easy decisions. You know, the University of Texas here in Austin, you can take a semester off and come back with no academic penalty. So that was kind of the deal I made with my parents that I would go do this for a while and if it worked out, I would keep doing it, and if it didn't, I go back to school. So you know,

it didn't seem like an enormous risk to me. My parents were were pretty upset with me, for sure, because you know, when the world they came from, giving up an opportunity for an education was like the worst thing you could possibly do, but you know, all it all worked out. I love that. I want to hear more about that interacts me with your parents, Michael, because I feel there are so many children today and young people and young adults. They go through the same experience as

you did. They either want to quit, or they want to start something new, or they're on the verge of an idea they have but they don't have the confidence their parents might not be into it. What does someone look to at that time, at that early stage in their career where they don't have the wins on their list yet, they don't have the successes, but they want to follow their dreams, follow their passion, follow their heart. What advice do you have for someone who's in that

position right now? Well, it's it's difficult and extremely emotional, and I talk about this in the book and the kind of struggle that I had with that and with my parents. You know, ultimately I just decided that I was going to do this whether or not I had their approval, you know, which which was which was a really tough thing to do, and my mother was was unbelievably upset with me, and I would say it took about a year or two, maybe three to sort of

fully get through that. I don't know that there is universal advice here other than if you are in a situation where you can take the risk and you don't have a lot to lose and you can fall back on something else. You know. Look, I think a lot of people don't achieve even a small fraction of what they're capable of because they're afraid to fail and they're

not willing to take on more risk. And there's a lot of potential that's left on the field that never gets utilized because people want the perfect plan, or they want to do what they're supposed to do, or they're just not willing to take on that risk. And we need people to take on risk, not just for new companies, but you know, for existing companies and to redo and rethink and reimagine our world. You know, we can't just like do a little bit better version of what we

had before. We have to constantly be reimagining things. You spoke a lot about risk, then, Michael, I'm wondering, what do you think is the biggest risk you ever took. You said that decision was fairly easy. What do you think What was the time when you feel like, yeah, I took a big risk, and whether it paid off or not, I'd love to hear about how it panned out.

But what was the biggest risk you ever took? If you looked at it from the outside in, you know, people would say, well, dropping on a college that was a pretty big risk. Taking the company private that was a pretty big risk. You know, doing the largest tech acquisition ever with fifty or sixty billion dollars a debt,

that was a pretty big risk. But you know, to me, they actually didn't seen that risk right because I, you know, sort of on a risk adjusted basis, I could see my way through to the opportunity and could it have all gone wrong, sure, but I didn't think it was going to It's also a situa where, you know, if I had sat there and said, Gee, should I drop out of school? Should I not drop out of school? Let's go talk to ten or one hundred people and ask them what they think. Probably most of them would

have told me you're crazy for dropping out of school. Okay, I didn't ask anybody, you know, that wasn't how I was thinking about it. Yeah, what would you say would be your biggest failure to a day that you feel like you were down and out where it was a really tough situation. Was there a moment where things really felt like they weren't working out? When would when would

that have been? Well, look, there've been plenty of times, and you know, I think what people maybe fail to understand is that embedded in success are failures, right, And at the root of success you have kind of curiosity, learning, experimenting, and failure, and without those things, you don't have any success, right, And so failures are not necessarily bad, you know, especially

if you're learning from them. And so, yeah, we had all kinds of failures along the way to uh, you know, cumulative revenues of about one point four trillion dollars, right, But yeah, I mean, you know, early on, we had some super ambitious technical projects that failed, and we learned from that. We built a lot of capability that allowed

us to create all kinds of new new products. As a result, we had inventory planning challenges early on that led us to be really world class that supply chain management because we had to right and you know, necessities the mother invention and the key is to learn from the failures and correct them quickly and hopefully not make

the same mistakes over and over again. And if you can learn from other people's mistakes, you know, learn from from your new mistakes that you're making and correct them quickly, you're going to be very successful. You've got to be willing to experiment and fail. The other thing is, you know, when you're when you're going into new areas, there's no playbook, right, there's you can't like read a book or talk to an expert like tell you how to do this. You

just have to start. I love that, Thank you, Michael no. I love hearing that. It's always it's always wonderful to hear of someone who seems to be having fun and growing continuously and enjoying life on the journey as well. And I want to come to your book now. You know, play nice, but when a CEO's journey from founder to leader. I wanted to talk about the tie tool for a bit. When you hear the words play nice, but when were these words that you said a lot? Were these words

that you heard a lot? How did these words take shape in your life? Yeah? So, my two brothers and I, you know, when we were little kids, and we would go out in the street and play ball with our friends. That's what our parents told us. You know, almost every time they say it, played high school win. And so it kind of became this philosophy of you know, let's not forget about the winning part, right, but we're gonna we're gonna play nice, we're gonna play fair, We're gonna

do it, you know, kind of ethically responsibly. But yeah, well's we're aded to win, right. And so I kind of been something that's just stuck with me ever since I was a little kid, and it goes back to my childhood, and I talk about that in the book as well. Did you ever meet anyone along the way that tried to challenge that and tell you it wasn't possible. I tell you, you you had to play ruthless, you had to play bad and win like Was there anyone who

challenged that? And not specifically, I don't need you to tell me exactly who I'm just saying, was there anyone who really debated and challenged that hypothesis and said, my cod this is not gonna work. You're gonna have to play unfair? And was there anyone in your life that you met that completely disagreed with that statement. Well, look, I you know, I've been running our company for thirty

seven years. I mean, I believe markets are are long term efficient, right, And you know, I think everything sort of comes back to you in a good way, you know, or a bad way if you're playing the other side. And I've just kind of avoided the opposite path and it's worked for me. And you know, it just feels right to me. And at the end of the day, you know, you have to feel right about what you're doing.

And you know, when I'm ninety or one hundred or hopefully older, I want to be proud of everything I did and the way I did it. And that's just really important to me. So and look, I've I've run into plenty of people that didn't play nice, and I just tried to, you know, certainly not have a in our company, you know, avoid doing business with them to the extent I could. And that's what's worked for me. Yeah.

Was there ever a time, though, that you felt pressured that you might have to change your approach to win or was it always easy to stay to that? I just I feel like I love it. By the way, I completely agree with you, Like I think my favorite way to win is to play nice, and the best way to play nice is to make sure you win.

So I love that approach to life. I'm just wondering whether there were any times where you actually maybe just had a thought and you thought, well, maybe if I didn't play so nice, maybe i'd win more, Maybe i'd maybe I would be more successful if I did this or did this thing. Did you ever have that debate? Did you ever have that thought internally or were you always convinced that this was not for a second. I mean, it wouldn't feel right to win if I had cheated

it or done in an unscrupulous way, you know. And I talk about in the book some of the early former of experiences where we had people that did things that weren't exactly correct right in one way or another, and it really surprised me. Maybe I was naive, or I think people love the clarity of knowing what we stand for right and knowing that we don't change the rules depending on who it is or how important it

is or anything like that. It's like, hey, we're very clear about the ethical standards that we uphold as a company, and it's just a lot easier that way. I love hearing that, trust me, I'm so happy to hear that because I think value based business is so needed in the world right now, and when we look at things like conscious capitalism and the idea of creating wealth, creating impact through values and through purpose and through mission. It's beautiful to hear that you never even got you know,

you never even had a moment of doubt. I love hearing that because I think it shows what's possible. I wonder there's a lot of our listeners who may be trying to decide between entrepreneurial employee and you know, today, because the entrepreneurial life mindset has become so mainstream culture and accessible, a lot more people are thinking in that direction. I wonder, what can you do to teach us about the difference between the entrepreneur mindset and the employee mindset?

And what difference is people can see so that they can see where they're best placed. When things get pretty heated, you I think you see more opportuners, you know, and not necessarily the pure entrepreneurs. And you know, that's okay. Everybody could choose their own path, you know, in my experience. It's not for the faint of heart right to go

start a business. I mean, it is all in And you know when I started, fortunately I was nineteen years old and I could work eighteen hours a day and sleep with the office and had no responsibilities, you know, uh in terms of family or any anything like that. And I had the kind of physical statement to work like a maniac for several years, which that's sort of what it took at the beginning. Fortunately that didn't have

to perpetuate. But yeah, I mean it's not all glamorous and success and and there are plenty of businesses that don't work out. And yeah, I mean it's easy to look at the successful businesses and say, wow, it was just straight up, you know, and to the right forever. It's like, not exactly, it's not exactly the way it goes really in any business. But yeah, I mean it's it's a very personal decision in terms of what someone's risk appetite is, and you know, are they willing to

take all that on? And you know, when you put your head down at night, you're thinking about all those people that you're responsible for. I loved having chapter three. You said, you know you don't start a company if you're not an optimist. You know that there has to be that optimism. And part of your optimism was the openness to compete with IBM and to you know, to challenge a long established company even when you were young. Where did that confidence come from? Where did that ambition,

that desire come from? That gave you so much confidence and strength and that sort of a mindset. I guess if I was being objective looking at it now, I'd say there was some naivete there for sure as well, But all that mixture was pretty powerful. And you know what I saw when I looked at the IBMPC back

in nineteen eighty one when it first came out. It just had the fortieth anniversary a month or two ago of the IBM PC was it was this thing they sold for like three thousand dollars, but it had five hundred dollars worth of parts in it, and none of the parts were made by IBM. So to my teenage mind, it kind of seemed like a criminal enterprise. You know, It's like, why does it cost so much and why does it take so long? And why can't it be faster?

And you know, had a ton of ideas, and it's hard for people to really understand right now, but back in the early nineteen eighties, IBM was not just the most successful, you know, computer company. They were like unbelievably dominant in this field, unlike any other company except maybe like Standard oil. You know, back in the day, they just dwarfed any other company in the IT slash data processing field. Obviously very different thirty forty years later, but

at the time they were the giant. And they were also like the most valuable company in America, right, so it was a big business. But hey, they seem vulnerable to me. I up that example of what you said, like looking at it and seeing a criminal enterprise because of the you know, because of the shocking difference between the parts and the pieces. And you're right, I mean, I grew up in a world where IBM was still

very powerful. But I know what you mean. You're talking about the scale of it at the time, and you talk about in chapter seven the fight for Dell to go private, and it's been like a long disruptive process for everyone that's involved. And you mentioned in the book that in del you had this saying of failure is not an option. I want to know what kept you going in that fight to make it private, Like, what

was the thing that kept you consistently fighting? Because sometimes we're fighting for fighting sake, But in this situation, that wasn't it. You were fighting for something more important and more deep. Where did that come from? Yeah? You know, I really felt that going private would allow us to accelerate our transformation, and it would allow us to kind of ignite the entrepreneurial risk taking, a spirit that was

the origin of the company. And you know, I think Winston Churchill said something to the effect that, you know, if you're going through hell, you know, keep going, all right. So we were in the middle of it. It's not easy to like stop and say we're just kid never mind forget it. You know, I guess we could have done that, But once you get started, it was a

fight worth winning. I thought we could win, you know, I thought it was truly believed that it was a very important thing for the company to do at that time to inflect the transformation. And we can look back seven years later and say, yeah, good, good thing we

did that. Everyone else can make the connections in hindsight, but you were able to make the connections in the process, and I think that's always what's hot of but another area of your life apart from your professional success of course, but you one of the few people who have this red personal success too, with your wife, your four children, And I wanted to understand you probably get asked the work life balance question a million times. I personally don't

believe in balance. I think it's a myth. I'm not convinced that it's real, and I think that it's actually causes more pressure than creates fuel in our lives when we're constantly trying to balance. I wanted to understand what was your journey in creating a successful professional life, an extremely successful professional life, but also managing to have a real, genuine personal life as well. Yeah, so, first of all, I think when you're starting a business, you know, this

idea of balance, you know, just forget about it. It's like, you know, it's like you're you're not going to have it. So, you know, if you're thinking, oh, I'm going to be an entrepreneur, I'm gonna start a company and I'm a great work life balance and it's not gonna happen. Right If it is, it's a foreign thing to me. I

don't understand how how you could do that. But you know, once you have a business kind of up and running and you're into year, ten, year, fifteen, year, twenty, right, you've got systems and processes and people, and well, what you find is there's a diminishing return to the number

of hours worked. And also you know your happiness is impacted and you don't have to do everything yourself, and you sort of always kind of are reassessing what is the point of impact where I can make a meaningful impact on the company and you know, cause something great to happen, And I'm not going to do that in my ninetieth hour or one hundredth hour of work in a week, right, you know there's a sweet spot there.

And so yeah, I also consciously wanted to have a family and children and a family life and that kind of grounding that I had as a child, and that was something I really desired. So I sought it out and planned planned my life in that way because I also knew that, you know, if I kept working for another ten plus years and didn't have that, I would

be unhappy. Yeah, And but I'm sure that there were those tough decisions to make like, I'm sure there were moments where maybe your wife and your children wanted your time, but you had to be at an important meeting, or you had to be on a plane, or how did you deal with those challenges because they're very natural. It doesn't you know, it doesn't make you a bad person, but it's like you, I'm sure there were moments where you felt guilty or you couldn't be somewhere with your

family that you really wanted to be with. How did you deal with that and get through that successfully when so many other people struggle with those moments. First of all, you know, you have to have some boundaries and set some boundaries, and I'll say I was pretty good about having boundaries. Didn't really do a lot of work on the weekend, so that was pretty sacred time. When when in the Jenny did that happen or was that from

the beginning you never worked weekends. I'd say, you know, when we started having, you know, little kids, I also, you know, kind of set up our house where we had a place where people could come over for dinner, and so I would often have a lot of dinner still do at the house, and that way to just save time sometimes my kids would you know, it's kind of a funny story. My son he figured out when he was about five or six that, you know, if he came to one of the dinners towards the end,

he could get a dessert. Right. But but then after a while he's like, hey, that's Bill Gates. You know. It's like, look, let's look, maybe I'll warned something, you know, so he would like come and sit out and participate in the dinners. It helped a lot to do that at home. And yeah, you gotta have some boundaries. You

can't make it perfect all the time, you know. And they're going to be times when we haven't been doing this lately obviously, but you know, when I would go to Europe or Asia on business trips, you're just going all out, like for for a long time, from early morning to late at night. And that's okay. You know, you can sprint for a while and do that. But also, yeah, I made time to relax and play and exercise and think and not be overly scheduled too. I think I

think the dinners is a genius one. I love that that opening up your home and having those work dinners or people over for dinners, so that you're actually at home, you're with your family. It's it's still a part of family time. I think that's that's genius, and it makes so much sense as to why that's beneficial for the family, for work, for so many other things. So I love you sharing that tip. You can make story time with the kids and still have a still have a dinner

with your business colleagues. You know. Yeah, it's brilliant. That's a brilliant one. You mentioned in the book that you always kept mementos in your office, like some personal some about the highs and low points of the company. Can you tell us about some of these mementos because I'm a I mean, you collected stamps, obviously, so collecting as part of your your DNA. I love collecting mementos as well.

I want some inspiration. What were some of the things that you held onto Yeah, you know, I kept things that were meaningful. In the book, I have a picture of the motherboard that Jay Bell, our first engineer, hand wired up. You know, that's obviously a pretty treasured memento for me about the origins of our company and tons

of stories there. I love how one of the values of your company was to be known as a great company and a great place to work at, you know, the first few years of my entrepreneurial journey and trying to build a team. We have a team of you know, just shy of fifty people across the world that are working on my certification school, my course is, my podcast, videos, my books, just the whole area of my work. And I love that you said you wanted your company one of the values was to be known as a great

company and a great place to work at. I wanted to know what were three key ingredients in ensuring you were doing that as a leader. First of all, you want to have an inspiring mission, and you want to have people excited, not just engaged, but you want them to believe that what they do is really important and makes a difference in the world. And you're basically engendering passion, which is way more powerful than just about anything else

you can present as a motivational tool. I'd say the second thing is you want people to feel like they can succeed and grow and fulfill their full potential inside the organization, and there's nothing holding them back. There's no limits for them, and you're caring about their success I think a part of that is probably the third point is that you've created an environment that is inclusive and anybody can succeed. You're not looking for people that are

all the same. You want, you know, to hear a diverse set of voices, and you know you're you're stronger because of the you know, diverse set of voices and ideas coming together. And we're all focused on ultimately something that's bigger than ourselves. And you know, again, we've got a really important reason to get up out of bettery morning. You know what we do matters in the world. Yeah. Absolutely,

I love that. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's going to be really really useful to me as we continue to grow. So, Michael, I want to thank you for just being so generous with your time and giving us sense great insights. And I'm so excited for my audience to read play nice but win, and I want to end as we always do, on on purpose, without final fire. If these are a fast five questions, you have to answer them in one word to one sentence maximum. That's it. So,

Michael Dasy a fast five. The first question is what is the best piece of advice you've ever received? If you find a problem, fix it as fast as you find it. I love that. Okay. Second question, what is the worst advice you've ever received? Nobody ever says, boy, I'm glad you waited to make that tough decision, all right, So it's important to lean into difficult conversations a difficult decisions, and you know, anybody tells you otherwise is just creating

more problems. Got it? Yeah? Absolutely? Question number three, what's the first thing you do in the morning when you wake up and the last thing you do at night before you go to bed. I spend some time every morning thinking about what do I want to accomplish during the day, what's really important for me to get done today and be proud of it at the end of the day. And then as I'm going to sleep, I'm really trying to wind down and relax and you know,

calm myself and sleep is super important. I try to go to sleep early, get up early, want to get a great night's sleep, want to get a high score in my order ring and my sleep eight pod, and just try to relax, calm myself, think grateful thoughts, and not be too wound up about all the stuff I have to do tomorrow. Awesome. Question number four, what is

your current purpose today? Our purpose as a company is still enabling human potential with technology, and you know, I think that's a super powerful mission that will continue for a long long time. That's enduring and we're continue to be excited by it. Fantastic And fifth and final question, Michael, if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be. Be grateful for what you have and take responsibility for your own life,

self determination. Don't blame it on other people. It's all on you. You've got to go make it happen, and it's nobody else's fault. I love it, Michael Dell everyone, and the new book is out. It's called Play Nice but Win, a CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader. Michael, I want to thank you again for your energy. I hope that everyone's been listening on watching that you're going to share your greatest insights on Instagram, on Twitter, makes you tag me and Michael and let us know what

resonated with you. And again, go and grab a cropy of the book. Michael, thank you for this time. I look forward to meeting you in person one day soon. All the best with everything you're working on, and I'm so happy that we got to spend this time together. Thank you so much, Jay, great to be with you. If you want even more videos just like this one makes you you subscribe and click on the boxes over here. I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book Think Like a Monk from Think

Like a Book dot com. Check below in the description to make sure you order today.