The CEO and Founder of Dell Technologies discussed change management in the AI era
I’ve been fortunate to attend Dell Technologies World for the past decade. And every year, the highlight is a candid, open Q&A session with CEO Michael Dell, COO Jeff Clarke, and the company’s leadership team.
At the event this year, I asked Dell what leadership principle has held constant across the significant technological transformations — personal computers, the internet, the cloud and now, artificial intelligence — he has led the company through.
Here’s what he told me:
“I think you have to sort of leap ahead to what’s the likely impact of this, and how do we need to change. And if you don’t have a passion around that, or there isn’t a crisis in your organization, make one.”
Leaders have to ask themselves and their organizations, “What’s the reason why we’re doing this?”
Reflecting on previous change cycles and transformations, Dell said the difference in the AI era is speed. He said, based on pattern recognition, that the rise of the internet is the closest analog to the rise of AI. “I can remember when there were just a handful of websites you could visit…then it became everywhere.”
“Speed matters,” he said. “It’s also a big organizational change management activity, and so spending the time to explain to everyone, and having a real understanding why are we doing this, what does it actually mean, what does it mean for each person and each role, and how do we evolve as an organization because of this. And we did that.”
Dell said every few years the company examines the “leadership imperative,” which is leader-led discussions that follow a Socratic method format to foster company-wide alignment. “We want to get everyone passionately engaged in the change.”
Here Clarke jumped in, saying that Dell, his colleague of nearly 38 years, was being “a little modest. How we run the company, led by Michael, is we assume our competitors are taking advantage of the latest and greatest technology.”
He said that involves examining and modeling what companies born in the cloud era or born in the AI era look like without any legacy constraints. “That’s our target,” Clarke said. “That’s what we have to become…[And] we have to use the speed of Dell.”
