Dell's Rollins unfazed by new title

ROUND ROCK, TEXAS -- Kevin Rollins is taking his elevation to chief executive officer (CEO) at Dell Inc. in stride. On Friday, company founder Michael Dell will relinquish the CEO role to Rollins at Dell's annual shareholder meeting, but little is expected to change at the top of the world's leading PC vendor following the move.

Dell, who will remain heavily involved in the business as chairman of the board, has run the business with Rollins for several years in a unique arrangement the company calls "two in a box." Dell and Rollins work extremely closely together, even finishing each other's sentences like a long-married couple.

The new title is sure to bring more attention to Rollins' role at Dell, over the past few years and into the future. But he seems unfazed by the new responsibilities, poking fun at himself in an internal company video that shows him taking over duties such as unlocking the office doors in the morning, signing payroll checks and even flipping burgers in the cafeteria on his first day as CEO.

Rollins sat down with IDG News Service the afternoon before the shareholder meeting to discuss his new title, his views on the competition and his ideas about emerging technologies.

IDG News Service: What’s going to change with Dell as of tomorrow when you take over as CEO? What is going to be the main difference?

Kevin Rollins: Well, I’ll have a different business card, and he’ll (Michael Dell) have a different business card. In actuality, not all that much. From the standpoint of how we run the company, he and I do it very collaboratively, have done it for many years. It’s going to be much more of a name change really than an actual operating change.

IDGNS: So what changes for you then? It’s a new role, so there must be new things that you’re going to do that you didn’t do before.

Rollins: In fact there is not. Because Michael and I have run it as co-CEOs for a long time. It’s hard for people to understand, it’s just the way we’ve run the company. So we’ve collaborated, our offices are one big room, we talk 15 times a day, we stay very closely aligned, we discuss issues, we’re marching together. So it’s a unique management model. Most companies don’t have anything like it.

IDGNS: Was the whole co-CEO idea something you brought into Dell from your consulting background? How did you two decide it would work here?

Rollins: Well, if you go back through the history, Michael has always had someone he considered to be either a partner or a mentor working with him, but we haven’t ever formalized that. We’ve taken it now over the last couple of years to a new level of collaboration, where we talk about everything. It really has not been a demarcation between who is the boss, what do I do, what do you do. We don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that.

IDGNS: Is the “two in the box” management philosophy something that evolved organically?