Reinventing Dell: The Innovation Imperative

“Knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the earth is not really useful if you are not planning to launch missiles to knock it out of the sky. You have to work massively overtime on the belief that innovation or massive change is going to happen.” — Tom Martin, former VP of marketing

Dell was once listed by Fortune as the most admired company in the world, and held the #1 market share in personal computing. Between 1991 and 1999, Dell’s stock price outperformed that of its next closest competitor by a factor of 20 times - only to lose 70 percent of its value by 2009. Reinventing Dell is the inside story of one of tech’s most intriguing giants.

In this essential new text, innovation expert Heather Simmons asks: How did Dell go from one of the most admired companies in the world to a firm whose stock flatlined for the better part of a decade? More importantly, how might it come back?

Reinventing Dell turns Dell’s rise, fall, and emergent return into cogent lessons that business leaders can’t do without. Simmons combines insightful interviews from former Dell employees, seminal innovation thinking from authors such as Linda Hill and Clayton Christensen, and her own framework, the Intelligent Gambler ©, to analyze Dell’s innovation potential. She predicts that Dell's innovation-driven comeback will be one for the ages, and that more than half of Dell's profits will soon come from product lines it didn't have 5 years ago.

Revealing, funny, and incredibly useful, Heather Simmons’s Reinventing Dell is a must-read for leaders in the digital age.

Heather Simmons worked at Dell in both Austin and Toronto for over 13 years, from 1992 to 2005. She led teams involved in some of Dell’s greatest crises and triumphs, and had a front row seat for Dell’s unprecedented growth in the ’90s and sideways slide in the mid-2000s. A Certified Public Accountant and a Harvard MBA, she brings both a bean counter’s eye for the numbers (the “hard stuff”) and an insider’s perspective on the cultural shifts (the “soft stuff”) which contributed to Dell’s performance. Prior to Dell, Heather worked for accountants Arthur Andersen & Co. and consultants McKinsey & Company. After Dell, Heather served as the CEO of a high-tech start-up and the chairman of a life sciences start-up. Her success rate with start-ups is running about 50%, and she wonders whether she should quit while she’s ahead.