Stephen Murdoch, VP of Solutions and Services, EMEA at Dell. After a long career at IBM, Stephen Murdoch is enjoying a different culture at Dell, and insists on ‘always leaving something behind’.

 

How did you progress to your current role at Dell?

 

IBM turned me down three times because they didn’t hire for sales straight from university. I persisted, and spent 17 fantastic years there. By the time I was 28, I’d had five different sales roles within IBM. I was there when it was going through its most difficult times and most interesting times. For example I was in Germany when Greg Lock was given the challenge of being one of the first Global General Managers for a business, creating a worldwide strategy within IBM. I got called back to the UK to be the RS/6000 Unix Sales Manager, which was a job I really didn’t want to do. My boss said I was bristling about it, saying I thought the job was beneath me, but he told me my experience of sales management wasn’t deep enough and it would always be a gap unless I solved it now.  So I came home and did the job – and it nearly killed me. Not only was the training superb, but the leadership development was world class.

 

What was it that persuaded you to leave IBM?

 

Leaving somewhere like IBM feels like a divorce; I had a huge amount of personal friends there but 17 years is a long time. In a company that is broad and complex it’s easy to lose accountability. I never wanted to do that. I also found I was having to fix things I had fixed before. I used to always get broken things or businesses that needed a shake-up, with the message ‘Go fix’. I was tired of fixing things. I wanted to build something, and test myself. When I started talking with people at Dell I found it has an incredible culture, it’s grown rapidly and continues to grow rapidly. The people have a strong ‘can do, will do’ attitude and I welcomed the opportunity to be part of the challenge in transforming the company to a Solutions business.

 

How would you describe your management style, and how does it set you apart from others?

 

I really believe the team you leave behind is your most important legacy. There are those executives who you might classify as ‘scorched earth’. Their attitude is ‘I will deliver what I’m asked to deliver, even if it means leaving carnage. Whatever it takes – I’ll get it done.’ I’ve never subscribed to that. My job as a leader is to build on what I’ve inherited and make people feel passionate about their role and contribution to the team, and the values and goals of the organisation, but not necessarily about me. I do care, and it is nice to be liked, but it is critical that you are first respected and trusted. I think I’m quite cuddly although I don’t get that feedback from people. I think part of it is that is I’m brutally straight – but I won’t damage people. As General Patton once said “You don’t lead by hitting people over the head. That’s assault, not leadership.”

 

I’m very, very competitive, and I hate missing any target or goal, but I always think in terms of developing things. I try and leave people more capable, or in different jobs. I’ve moved roles or jobs 14 times, and I’ve never taken people with me because you’re supposed to leave more behind than when you started.

 

Is that a philosophy you have evolved because of someone you’ve worked with in the past?

 

Yes, many of the best leaders I have worked with embody this. But also in part it’s a reaction to a more negative thought. I hate the macho approach, because it’s counter-productive. At one of my previous jobs, it became the done thing to schedule a meeting on Saturdays so that it didn’t interfere with the working week. I would get instructions, “Get the German or the French team on the call on Saturday mornings.” And I would refuse. I’m not getting people on the phone on Saturdays just to be macho. Sometimes people drive you nuts. For example presentee-ism, when people send an email so you can see they’re working at 11.00pm. Or people say “I’m on holiday, but it’s OK to call”. No, it’s not OK – you’re on holiday. It’s not altruism, it’s respect and pragmatism. You’re no use to me if you come back from holiday knackered. I always, always take holidays.

 

When you’re hiring, is there some sort of wow factor you look for in a candidate?

 

The one thing I do is I make sure the people who are involved think differently to me, so I get different perspectives and insight, but always built on the same values. I have a quote on my wall from Warren Buffett, “When valuing executives, look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. But the most important is integrity because if they don’t have that, the other two qualities, intelligence and energy, are going to kill you. Without integrity you really want them dumb and lazy.”  It’s a key part of my philosophy. I’ve worked with people who work harder than me and are smarter than me, but they don’t have that fundamental integrity. I don’t mean they’re dishonest, but they don’t care what they leave. I just couldn’t do that.

 

How have you taken to the Dell culture – does it differ greatly from that of IBM?

 

IBM has huge capabilities and resources internally, and looks to do everything they can first, for example promoting from within, developing things themselves. Dell, in contrast, is a younger, faster growing company, and a very externally oriented organisation, so it’s a hugely different challenge for me. There’s almost always a complete absence of politics. I think some of it is that people are too busy. This is a 21 year old, and it has all the attributes of a 21 year old – lots of energy, but that has to be allied to discipline. It has that very dynamic, get-stuff-done attitude, which is a lot of fun. But when you’re trying to transform something, you can sometimes be over-empowered. What I’m trying to do here is put in some structure, some direction, without stifling the entrepreneurial-ship. That said, you need to get the balance right between collaboration, listening and understanding.

 

What makes Dell’s approach different to the competitors?

 

As a services and solutions business it’s important to be much more targeted on where you can be world-class. If a customer says ‘Can you do...?’, most of the IT industry has said ‘Yes’ before the customer’s finished the sentence. The whole industry’s like that. For Dell, it’s ‘We do this. We don’t do that.’

 

Hardware price performance and what you get for your money has changed out of all recognition in the past five years, and now Dell is in a position to bring some of that process improvement and standardisation to IT services. One of my jobs is to make sure we don’t allow ourselves to drift into the idea that, ‘All those people have been doing it for a long time, so maybe we should do that too.’ HP can’t be IBM, and nor can we, and at the same time they can’t be Dell. We have a unique approach with our direct model and ability to drive standardisation and process efficiency that other companies can’t easily imitate.

 

Customers are finding more sophisticated, more demanding use of the technology, whereas five years ago x86 was file/print and a little bit of Web. As people begin to do more sophisticated things, they demand more from you as a provider. They’re interested in the optimum way to architect Exchange, or a strategy for back-up and recovery, or guidance on when they should deploy Vista. They expect us to have a point of view on how the technology can be exploited. So we’ve built a service capability that enables us to have that point of view.

 

Stephen Murdoch's Profile

Prior to joining Dell, Stephen worked for 17 years at IBM where, most recently, he was Vice President, Communications Sector, responsible for the complete IBM portfolio for Telco Media and Utilities industries. During his career with IBM, he held a number of EMEA and UK senior management roles. His experience spans storage, enterprise systems, software and services.