NYT Profile of Dell’s CEO Kevin Rollins

The New York Times looks at Kevin Rollins, the CEO of Dell.

Mr. Rollins was living in Boston, a partner at Bain & Company, the management consulting firm, when he was asked to fly to Austin in 1993 to meet with executives at Dell. He readily acknowledges that he was hardly thrilled about the assignment. “Texas is a lo-o-o-ng way from Boston, in many ways,” he said. He had worked primarily with aerospace companies before his partners asked him to help what was then a modest-size computer company on pace to lose $100 million that year.
Just before Mr. Rollins arrived, Dell announced that it would sell its computers at Wal-Mart stores, as well as continuing to sell directly to consumers over the Internet. Breaking into big-box retail outlets, Dell said, could bring in an additional $125 million in annual revenue – and rapidly build its brand name.
Mr. Rollins promptly suggested that Dell scuttle the deal, telling a meeting of top Dell executives that the arrangement, over time, would prove to be a money loser. He apparently made a persuasive case. Within days Mr. Dell said he asked Mr. Rollins to end the company’s agreements with retail chains. After that, Mr. Dell added, “very rapidly Kevin became a critical part of the senior management team” – although he was still technically a consultant.
Largely, his work involved bringing a basic management discipline to a company that had been growing so fast that even Mr. Dell was inclined to acknowledge that things were something of a mess. Over the next several years, Mr. Rollins would spend weekends with his family in Massachusetts and his weekdays with Dell in Texas – essentially functioning as if he were a top executive working within Dell. “It was all extremely odd,” Mr. Rollins said.

Rollins doesn’t seem particularly worried about Dell’s long-term outlook.

Among Mr. Rollins’s gifts as chief executive, those around him say, is what Mr. Bell, head of Dell’s European operations, calls his “tight messaging.” So crisply does Mr. Rollins convey the Dell line, said Roger L. Kay, the founder of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a research firm that monitors the personal computer industry, that it is “a little bit scary how everyone from the highest to the lowest employee is on message.”
Today Mr. Rollin’s message is that everything is fine at Dell, despite a depressed stock price—now at $34.65, down 17 percent for the year. Dell may be the leading computer maker in the world, but it is No. 2 in Europe and No. 2 in Asia, leaving plenty of room for growth there.
There is also plenty of opportunity for growth in other product areas, like printers, which Dell has been selling for less than three years, and plasma televisions, which it has been selling for less than two years. The company is making progress in selling the more expensive equipment used in corporate data centers, and it is starting to do a brisk business in consulting. So what if its stock has fallen more than 12 percent since disappointing Wall Street last month?
“As our big strategic initiatives capture share and profits, the profits we deliver will go up and our stock price will naturally rise,” Mr. Rollins said. “We have a lot of room for growth for a long time before we have to ask what’s the next vision thing. It’s really a matter of execution.”

Posted by on September 12th, 2005 at 6:13 am


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