Direct from Texas: McCombs MBAs at Dell^™
By Erica Grieder

In May 2004, Dell celebrated its 20th anniversary, entering its third decade in business with a 17.6 percent share of the world’s PC market. It earned $49.2 billion in revenue last year and continues to grow by about 20 percent a year. As for the company’s founder and chairman, Michael Dell is no longer the richest American under age 40—but only because he just had a birthday. In March 2005, Fortune editors named Dell America’s Most Admired Company.

Two decades in business? Industry dominance? Glowing media tributes? It’s ironic that a company famous for taking a hard line against inventory is stockpiling laurels like this.

Not to worry. Dell is far from becoming complacent. The company may be No. 28 on the Fortune 500 list, but it still has the drive of a startup.

And while it’s well known that Dell (the person) dropped out of The University of Texas at Austin to focus on his fledgling business—among UT Austin dropouts, only Walter Cronkite is more famous—Dell (the company) recognizes the value of a business education from Texas. It is the top employer of McCombs MBA alumni, with approximately 270 working at the company’s Round Rock headquarters and dozens more stationed around the world.

Why do so many McCombs MBAs work at Dell? Given the pair’s proximity to one another, McCombs students have plenty of opportunities to observe the company and interact with its executives.

But Dell’s lightning-fast corporate culture ensures that anyone looking to go for a stroll down the path of least resistance need not apply. As Mayuresh Masurekar, MBA ’01 and an operations manager in Dell’s Americas eBusiness group, puts it, “Type A personalities are the ones who do best here.”

Craig Irons, MBA ’96, is a global account manager for Dell. Based in San Francisco, he confirms that Dell’s results-driven, customer-focused culture extends to its employees around the world. “Dell has a very prevalent culture—it doesn’t really matter where you live,” he says. “Whether you’re a field employee 1,500 miles away or in Round Rock, you’re very aware of the business principles and the overall corporate strategy for success.”

Jennie Loev, MBA ’03, seconds Masurekar’s point that a successful Dell employee is an assertive one, and Irons’ contention that Dell’s overarching strategy helps employees focus. “The personality that’s going to succeed here is someone who is not shy, not tentative. Someone who is assertive, confident and comfortable with ambiguity,” she says. “You have to be able to make decisions without all the information—that’s part of the business world, but there’s no way to get around it here.”

Loev was drawn to Dell because it met her overarching goals—to stay in Austin at a good company; but its atmosphere sealed the deal. “One thing I’d heard about Dell that I liked is that you can really make a difference,” she says.

As a marketing consultant, Loev’s responsibilities at Dell include project management for OptiPlex and marketing operations for OptiPlex and Precision, two of the company’s best-selling desktop systems. One year at Dell has proven to Loev that, unlike some other big companies, Dell avoids “totem-pole stuff.” Translation: Dell employees can take on substantive responsibility from their first day on the job. Outstanding results are a passport to professional opportunities.

Loev is not alone in thinking that this meritocratic corporate culture is among the highlights of working at Dell.

“It’s a very dynamic company, very fast-moving, very results-oriented,” says Masurekar, noting that he has worked for half a dozen companies and considers Dell the best. “No matter what area we are aiming for, we always have high goals and a determinate drive to reach them.”

But for some alumni, Dell is the corporate equivalent of the girl next door, overlooked because of its familiarity. Ben Opps, for example, didn’t picture himself ending up at Dell while in school. After earning his MBA in 2003, he was working at a local startup when an offer from Dell made him consider the possibility.

“I’m kind of a free spirit in that I don’t necessarily fit the ‘corporate’ mold,” says Opps, who interned for the National Parks Service in Alaska and counts trips to China and Mexico as highlights of his experience at McCombs.

Despite his reservations, Opps decided to give Dell a try. He is currently the partner marketing manager in the small to medium business group and says that the environment at Dell was a pleasant surprise. “I’ve actually found Dell a great place to be a free spirit,” Opps says. “I have incredible autonomy. I own vendor relationships, and I run them as they need to be run.”

This entrepreneurial spirit is, of course, something the McCombs School of Business and Dell have in common.

On Dell's part, this spirit is a legacy from its not-too-distant past. Not only did Michael Dell found a company, he created a business model that was new for the computer industry. In the 1980s, when no one knew anything about computers except that they should get one, Dell was the first company to sell customized PCs directly to customers.

While Dell might not inspire the cultish devotion that Apple enjoys, its business model eschews the product-centered stance popular among its competitors. “We’re a customer-centric business model,” says Paul Shaffer, MBA ’95. “There is an account executive who owns the relationship with every customer.”

The automatic-for-the-people ethos endures. “Every day I come in, I feel I have an ability to make a difference and drive the business,” Opps says. “But also to democratize technology and bring it to the masses.”

With the worldwide PC market calming down, the company will try to replicate that strategy—bringing new customers into markets that have long been just for technocrats—to drive its continued growth. For example, Leslie Shaffer, MBA ’95, manages the Dell|EMC operations team, which handles the sales operations for all of Dell Americas. This is a constituency that Dell did not serve as recently as 10 years ago but that currently represents a large—and largely untapped—market. The group was established in 2001, the year Dell announced a strategic alliance with Massachusetts-based EMC, a manufacturer of information storage systems.

Dell employees can take on substantive responsibility from their first day on the job.

Dell’s emphasis on prying open new markets is partly a function of necessity. Given the company’s legendary commitment to lean management and operating hyperefficiency, its margin for further cost-cutting is thinner than its Latitude notebook.

But then, growth has always been one of Dell’s specialties—despite the occasional backfire. Explosive growth through the 1980s, for example, yielded billions of dollars in revenue, but also a bloated inventory, stacks of accounts receivable, a bottomless appetite for cash and a comparatively anemic stock price. After posting its first quarterly loss in 1993, Dell decided to rethink things. For years the company’s values had dictated growth, growth and more growth. “The new order of business at Dell,” wrote Michael Dell in “Direct from Dell,” his 1999 memoir, “would be liquidity, profitability, and growth—in that order.”

The company entered a new era of relative fiscal sobriety after that painful period, but the pursuit of its first two goals did not require them to sacrifice the third. Revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2005 was up 17 percent from this period the previous year.

Such growth in a company is always attractive to business professionals. Irons interned at Dell after his first year at McCombs, which gave him an opportunity to witness this firsthand. “Clearly, Dell was growing by leaps and bounds,” says Irons, who describes his career at Dell as a natural evolution. “Getting on board with Dell was a win-win proposition.”

When Paul Shaffer was looking to move from 3M to “a larger-growth company” in 1999, Dell was a logical place to look. His experience makes clear that the company’s culture of growth extends to its employees as well as its revenues. Shaffer entered the company through the consumer brand organization, becoming a manager for the notebook brand team, before taking a year-long assignment as an executive assistant to the general manager in large corporate accounts. He then moved into a role as the senior manager of the corporate business group online and Americas’ business-to-business teams. Shaffer was recently named the senior marketing manager of services, alliances and original equipment manufacturing (OEM) for the corporate business group.

As Shaffer puts it, “Dell’s really good about letting you do different things.”

This fast-paced corporate culture might seem foreboding for people who have to balance family considerations with professional imperatives. After nearly six years at Dell, Shaffer has some perspective on the situation. He recalls that when he started, Dell drove its employees relatively hard, dangling stock options like carrots. According to the company’s long-time employees, those days are over.

“Dell’s maturing,” says Irons. “Dell is learning the importance of cross-pollination and people development, in order to be a company people love to work for.”

To demonstrate that understanding, in 2003 the company launched an initiative called the Soul of Dell, a formal commitment to work-life balance. According to Leslie and Paul Shaffer, who are married with two young sons, it is possible to be a high-powered executive at Dell and raise a family.

After graduating from the McCombs School, Leslie Shaffer worked as a management consultant. Eventually, though, she decided she wanted to travel less. Friends at Dell encouraged her to look at the company, and she came on board doing marketing in the enterprise segment. While she no longer travels five days a week, she hasn’t slowed down at all.

“The speed of Dell is challenging, yet it’s very rewarding,” Leslie says. “I don’t have to sit around and wait three days for someone to get back to me.”

She says she is able to balance her personal and professional commitments to her satisfaction. “A lot of that has to do with technology,” she adds, noting that Dell employees rely heavily on e-mail. “I’m able to connect through a wireless broadband connection at home and work remotely. I’ve proven myself to my management team, so they give me that flexibility.”

For McCombs MBA alumni, the quality of life at Dell is also enhanced by the built-in Texas network, which conveys social and professional value.

“I feel like in any part of the company, I know someone from McCombs,” Leslie Shaffer says. “It’s great because we immediately have a bond and a network across the company.” Even from the distant West Coast, Irons feels connected. “The McCombs community can help you navigate through the organization,” he says. “It’s a very good network that I leverage daily.”

Opps, for his part, tries to get together with classmates every couple of weeks and agrees that this keeps him in the professional loop. “I feel like having the McCombs connection within Dell will certainly help me get my next job,” Opps says.

For Opps, as for many McCombs alumni, networking is largely informal. Given the number of alumni at company headquarters, most McCombs MBAs who consider working at Dell already have several contacts there.

Still, Dell’s immensity can be overwhelming. Approximately 18,000 of Dell’s 55,200 employees work in Round Rock. (In the Austin area, only the University itself has more employees.)

To make the big company seem a little smaller, McCombs MBAs at Dell was launched in 2003 by a small group of alumni.

“When I first thought of creating an intra-company network at Dell, I looked for a leader with a passion for alumni networking,” says Masurekar, who is also the president of the McCombs MBA Alumni Network’s Austin chapter. He pitched the idea to Melissa Evers-Hood, MBA ’03, who took on the challenge and proved instrumental in getting McCombs alumni together to form a central team and subcommittees. After Evers-Hood left Dell for Intel last year, Jennie Loev and Joe Strathman, MBA ’00, stepped up to co-chair McCombs MBAs at Dell.

“It’s very easy to have informal networks here—and I would never want that to stop—but I think that the McCombs MBAs at Dell group can enhance those networks,” says Loev.

The group focuses its activities with two committees. Dell Winning Culture is chaired by finance consultant Farhan Musharrif, MBA ’03, business process improvement manager Greg Ritzen, MBA ’01, and Masurekar. In order to foster the community, Dell Winning Culture helps orient new hires and is in the process of formalizing a mentor network. So far, says Masurekar, more than 70 McCombs MBA alumni at Dell have expressed interest in the mentoring program.

The other committee, McCombs Interface, focuses on sponsoring events, participating in career fairs, and speaking to student groups at the McCombs School. It is chaired by software brand manager Mike Horn, MBA ’04, finance consultant Liz Mattick, MBA ’03, and online marketing manager Sonja Talbot, MBA ’04. Their goal is to help Dell keep a high profile on the McCombs campus.

Of course, given Dell’s relationship with the McCombs School and its burgeoning reputation as a breeding ground for top management talent, it would be hard for any McCombs MBA alum to forget about the company next door.