Kevin Rollins was the president and CEO of Dell Inc. Prior to becoming CEO in July 2004, he served as president and COO, vice chairman, and president of Dell Americas. The company employs approximately 50,000 team members worldwide and reported revenues of $45.4 billion for the past four quarters. Before joining Dell in April 1996, Mr. Rollins was vice president and partner of Bain & Co. management consultants. While with Bain, he developed strategies around the direct selling of computer systems and services that helped propel Dell into its current global leadership position.
Mr. Rollins earned his master's in business administration and bachelor's degrees from Brigham Young University. He serves at the request of the President of the United States on the Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiation and is a member of the Computer Systems Policy Project and the U.S. Business Council. He is active in the American Enterprise Institute and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Background
I grew up in Provo, Utah. My father was a professor at Brigham Young University. I grew up just outside of the city and went to Orem High School and graduated in 1970. I went to BYU for my undergraduate degree and my MBA.
While I was taking undergraduate courses I changed my major a couple of times. I got a university studies degree thinking I wanted to get into law but then went to get an MBA. After my MBA I went back to finish a civil engineering degree but was a semester short from finishing. When I was in MBA school I decided that business was for me.
Career Path
I had a professor in business school that suggested I look into consulting for Bain & Company. There had been a number of BYU MBAs that had gone to Bain. So I did that and found it very interesting. I ended up joining Bain out of business school. The rest of my career at Dell has followed from my experiences coming out of Bain consulting with Dell.
I started in general strategy consulting at Bain. Over a period of time, I moved from a consultant to a manager, which is their next move up. Then, I moved from a manager to partner, and from partner to director. Director is the senior title you can hold at Bain. I made all of those steps from 1984 to 1996 when I left.
In Bain there is a different success factor in each level. As a consultant it is doing excellent analytic work. As a manager it is helping to develop a solution and problem-solving activities for clients. And as you become a partner, it is selling project work.
When I was a director, Dell had some challenges and called Bain to participate. I was asked to go down to Texas and work with Michael. I was living in Boston at the time. Bain had helped Dell a lot with its strategy and so I had been working really closely with the leadership team at Dell and they came to know me almost as a colleague. Dell was fairly unique because they asked me to take responsibility for things rather than advise them on things. It was a fairly unique consulting engagement. After two and a half years we had pretty good knowledge of one another and the skill sets available there. Dell had asked me to join a year earlier but I declined. That was in 1993 and I did that until 1996 when I joined Dell. I joined Dell when the right job became available. Taking over as president of the Americas region was something I was interested in enough to leave Bain. I had no intentions of ever leaving Bain or Boston. Yet the job offer came up and I was convinced enough of the strategy. The financial rewards were attractive enough that I decided to take the risk and get into general management.
Characteristics of Great Managers
I can give you characteristics of a great manager for Dell. They are a tremendous intellectual curiosity, a high degree of energy for hard work (work intensity), a passion for winning, a desire to have a lot of fun, and a real deep, data-driven analytic bent.
The people that I saw when I got to Bain had resumes and careers that were listed with superior performance across a broad range of areas. Some had been White House fellows; some had been Peace Corp volunteers; many had lived abroad, many had worked for years in major corporations, climbed Mount McKinley, participated in professional athletics, etc. They were superior individuals. They had a lot of accomplishments and a lot of talent. You could tell they had spent a lot of time working on things in addition to their academics.
Advice for Aspiring CEOs
You need to go to a reputable business school. Then you need to perform within the business school at fairly high levels. Something akin to the top ten percent will be able to attract the recruiters. Companies like Bain, McKenzie, and BCG hire from the same pool of top business school graduates. It's not about your resume or mission experience. It’s really your academic performance and interpersonal skills when they interview you that get you hired.
You have to be willing to work hard and do the things that will get you to that position. People will not just normally recognize your brilliance. You have to work really hard. And you have to put yourself in a position to be acknowledged and recognized as a leader. You then have to frankly have a lot of luck to be at the right place at the right time. But you have to take advantage and take risks that will allow you to get into those right positions at the right times. You have to also have some fundamental capability for leadership, decision making, and business acumen.
I don’t think there is a formula that says if you do all these things you will end up at the other side as a CEO of a company. I don’t think it works that way. I’ve seen CEOs that have come from many different paths. But I do believe that having an excellent education from a top school is very important. It doesn't have to necessarily be an ivy league school but it should be a top respected school. And then you have to be willing to work in major corporate America. I think you need to prepare throughout your lifetime by getting good business experience in other major corporations. And then you have to extend yourself to have extraordinary experiences that differentiate you from the pack. So reach out for every level of extraordinary accomplishment you can during your life.
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Interviews
Interviews
