Michael Dell

If you look at innovation, it doesn\'t just occur in the lab.

If you\'re happy, that\'s probably the most important thing. Everyone probably has their own definition of success, for me it\'s happiness. Do I enjoy what I\'m doing? Do I enjoy the people I\'m with? Do I enjoy my life?

If we have 99% [market] share of Ford Company, the question to us is \'How do we improve the customer satisfaction in order to get that additional 1% share?

Try never to be the smartest person in the room. And if you are, I suggest you invite smarter people... or find a different room. In professional circles it\'s called networking. In organizations it\'s called team building. And in life it\'s called family, friends, and community. We are all gifts to each other, and my own growth as a leader has shown me again and again that the most rewarding experiences come from my relationships.

You just have to change. To be successful, what you have to do is have an acceptance of risk and you have to be pretty explicit about that, because if you don't accept risk, you don't get any innovation. And that means part of risk is you have to accept failure because not everything works.

Don't be afraid to fail. Get out there and experiment and learn and fail and get a rate based on the experiences you have. Go for it and when you go for it you'll learn what you're capable of, what the potential is, where the opportunities are, but you can't be afraid to fail because that's when you learn.

The best customers for us are the ones that present us with a new problem because chances are, if one customer has that problem, 100 more have it, or 1,000, or 10,000. So you start thinking about solution development rather than product development.

Dell\'s a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There\'s enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.

There are many different kinds of PCs. You have fixed, virtual, tablets, notebooks, ultrabooks, desktops, workstations. What you find in commercial PCs, business PCs, is that there\'s a really long tail of usage on client devices.

One of the interesting things about the Dell-EMC combination is that we don\'t have a lot of overlap.

If you think about computing, there isn\'t just one way to compute, just like there\'s not just one way to move around. You can have shoes, you can have a car, you can have a bicycle, submarine, rocket, plane, train, glider, whatever. Because you have one doesn\'t mean you get rid of another one... But PCs continue to be important.

I was in seventh grade math class, and we had this thing called Number Sense. So, I wasn\'t on the track team. Wasn\'t on the football team. Wasn\'t on the basketball team. I was in the Number Sense Club.

5G cell networks create a whole new wave of distributed and edge computing.

Microsoft\'s an important partner for Dell, an important company in the industry.

At Dell, we believe the customer is in control, and our job is to take all the technology that\'s out there and apply it in a useful way to meet the customer\'s needs.

I think it is going to be very difficult to be a company in silos. I think the game has changed. We won\'t define our success by looking at the competitors but at how satisfied are our customers, how engaged are our internal stakeholders, and how good is our product pipeline.

Dell will participate in tablets and all sorts of client devices. Our main business is helping our customers secure, protect their data and access it from any device they want to.

If I come to Aspen for one or two nights, I stay at the St. Regis.

The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as - \'You don\'t have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.\' So they see it as a positive.

People assume that the executive branch has more power than it actually has. Only the legislative branch can create the laws; the executive branch cannot create the laws. So, if the executive branch tries to create a branch one side or the other... you go back to the founders of the nation. They set up a system that ensures that it doesn\'t happen.

IT for a long time has been about how do you make old processes more efficient. But with all of the progress in digital technology, there is a kind of digital transformation that is occurring. And you see it with the explosion in the number of devices; you see it in the explosion in the number of applications.

I\'ve been fascinated with technology since I was a boy banging around on my father\'s adding machine. Back then I\'d type in an equation, the device made some cool noises, and out came my answer. I was hooked.

Every breakthrough business idea begins with solving a common problem. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. I discovered a big one when I took apart an IBM PC. I made two interesting discoveries: The components were all manufactured by other companies, and the system that retailed for $3,000 cost about $600 in parts.

VMWare, as you know, remains a public company, and Secure Works is also a public company. And it\'s possible in the future that within the group, we could have other public companies.

I do think a founder has special permission to make sweeping changes across an organization.

Productivity is grounded in the PC. Where does the computing power come from? How would you run \'USA Today\' without PCs? Run a hospital without PCs? People don\'t want products, they want solutions.

You have to imagine a world in which there\'s this abundance of data, with all of these connected devices generating tons and tons of data. And you\'re able to reason over the data with new computer science and make your product and service better. What does your business look like then? That\'s the question every CEO should be asking.

Buying a company that is number one in its business is hard to do. When something is for sale, it\'s often not a leader.

The whole idea behind virtual integration is that it lets you meet customers\' needs faster and more efficiently than any other model. With vertical integration, you can be an efficient producer - as long as the world isn\'t changing very much.

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.