To Survive, Become the Rival That Would Kill You
After ChatGPT, Michael Dell told his workers to imagine the startup that would destroy them, then build it themselves.
David Senra · Michael Dell, Dell Technologies | David SenraMichael Dell, who started selling computers from his college dorm room and built Dell Technologies, stood up in front of his company with a warning about the future. He told them that in five years the company would be put out of business unless it reinvented itself.
Dell warned his people: "we will have a new competitor" that would be "faster, more efficient, and more capable" and would "put us out of business." He added that "the only way that we're going to prevent that is we are going to become that company." He described that kind of reinvention as painful, but said the alternative was disappearing.
He returned to that warning after ChatGPT arrived in November 2022. Watching early AI models, Dell said he tried to plot where the technology would be in one, two, or three years, with software agents able to reason over vast amounts of information. The question for him was what that shift would mean for knowledge work and for the tools people use to do it.
The answer, as Dell sees it, requires resetting how the business thinks and reimagining what every process will look like in five years. If Dell kept working the old way, a new company with the new tools and none of the old baggage would start fresh and win.
That is why Dell puts it this way: "if you don't have a crisis, make one." As Dell puts it: "The technology is there whether you use it or not." He says the hard part is not the machines themselves. It is organizing people, motivating them, giving them the right tools, and structuring how they work together so they can move quickly.
That push reflects his belief that pressure is needed to create change, because people who have done a job the same way for 10, 20, or 30 years do not want to try something new. Dell puts it bluntly: "people don't like to change" but "you have to."
Questions people ask
What is an LLM?
LLM stands for large language model, the type of artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT. It is trained on enormous amounts of text, and predicts the next word to answer questions, write drafts, summarize documents, and code.
What does Dell mean by a legacy from the past?
He means old software, old processes, and old habits that slow a big company down. A startup has none of that, so it can use new tools from the beginning, while an established company has to replace or work around what it already built.
Do other chief executives really invent crises?
Yes, it is a familiar management tactic, sometimes called a burning platform. Leaders at companies from Microsoft to General Electric have warned of decline to loosen attachment to old routines, because research shows people accept painful change more readily when they feel urgency.