Michael Dell - Leadership Advice from a Tech Legend | TIME

Michael Dell started a tech company in his college dorm room. Thirty-plus years later, he’s a billionaire who continues to lead a technology business that helps clients solve complex problems, accelerate innovation, and improve health and quality of life. Here are highlights from Dell's interview with TIME.

On Values and Beliefs

One of the things I learned early on was that not everyone had the same values and beliefs. We had to be very explicit about what was OK and what wasn’t OK. As you expand a company, especially around the world—this is maybe not the most elegant way to put it, but—there are places in the world where if they didn’t catch you doing it, it’s OK. Well, that’s not OK in our company. So we had to be super explicit about that.

On Sustainability

Let me back up to the early ‘90s. We were producing enormous numbers of computers and it’s doubling every year. And at some point, you kind of figure out wow, this is a machine with a defined lifespan. At some point, it’s no longer useful. What the heck happens then? ... So we started thinking about how do we use the cleanest, greenest materials. We started thinking about recycling and life cycle. When I was going to sleep at night, putting the head on the pillow, I’m thinking, ‘Holy bleep, all these things have my name on them.’ When these machines turn up in a landfill, everyone knows where they came from. I don’t want to be known as the guy that created an environmental catastrophe, right? When all we were trying to do was make computers.

On People, Ideas, and Innovation

At the root of it, you have to erase risk and you have to raise experimentation and incubating new ideas and testing things. You have to be explicit about the desire to go after these new opportunities, with the knowledge that they’re not all going to work. Risk is not a bad thing. One of the things that happens in companies as they get bigger is they become risk averse. Nobody wants to take a risk. Well, turns out, if you want to innovate, you’re going to have risk. So we make heroes of the innovators. We celebrate the patent awardees. We have, I think, 32,000 patents now ... It’s always experiment, test, fail, try again, and then eventually, hopefully you get some success. You want to encourage that.

On Doing Fun, Interesting Work that Matters

I love what I do. It’s fun, it’s interesting, it’s exciting. What we do matters in the world, and if somebody took it away from me and said you can’t do that anymore, I’d be really sad.

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