Dell, founder & chief executive of Dell Computer Corp., doesn't brag about it. Ask him about his wealth and he becomes awkwardly shy. ``I try not to think about (the money) too much,'' he said, in a recent interview. ``I'm trying to focus on future challenges.''

These days, he has a unique set of them. Foremost is how to keep his company riding a growth curve that would give others severe vertigo. ``Today we have 7 per cent of the global PC market. We'd like to have more. If we were to grow (our share) to 20 per cent, that would be a good thing,'' Dell said.It's not immune to market fluctuations, however. Industry apprehensions about sales of the PC in general and slightly-below-expectation figures inDell Computer's most recent quarter have brought the stock down from the May high, industry analysts say.

Still, Dell Computer remains in a class of its own. It ``has had an exceptional run when other (PC makers) have had failure,'' said Steve Dube, an analyst with Wasserstein Perrella Securities Inc. in New York. By Dube's calculation, every major PC maker except for Dell and Gateway 2000 Inc. is losing money. By contrast, in its most recent quarter, Dell posted profits of $305 million on sales of $3.9 billion, a increase of 50 per cent over the previous year's results.

The secret is an idea that Dell calls the ``direct model'' -- building to order and selling directly to customers -- and it's a concept he's never stopped honing since he was a teenager.

A few months after his 23rd birthday, Dell took his company public. By the end of its first fiscal year, the company had racked up sales of $257.8 million.

Even as it grew more successful, the company continued to sell its computers directly tocustomers. Large corporate customers would hear about Dell from sales people who knocked on their doors. Consumers could see pictures of Dell computers in the company's catalogues and order PCs over the telephone.``The success of Dell to me illustrates the power of simple but radical ideas,'' said Taylor of Fast Company magazine. ``Michael Dell sits in his board room and decides he's going to take on the most powerful computer company in the world (IBM) -- not based on more money or more people, but having a radical new idea about how to be in that business,'' Taylor said.

Selling directly to customers turned out to have many advantages. For starters, Dell Computer didn't build up huge piles of unsold systems if customers turned out not to want them. It instead ``built to order,'' assembling a machine only when it had an order for it.

At the same time, Dell also developed ``just-in-time'' delivery to its factories of such components as chips and monitors, and so did not have to spend money buying thingsit might not use for months. That meant that when component prices fell, Dell became the first computer maker to take advantage of the lower prices.

Because it dealt directly with its customers, Dell could also develop a clear picture of what its customers wanted. In the process, Dell also developed a reputation as the sophisticated buyer's computer company -- its machines weren't the cheapest on the market, but they received high marks for being the latest and best at reasonable prices.

At the same time, Dell began to look for managers who had more experience and could help him learn how to run what had become a business with sales of $2.8 billion in 1993.

These days, Dell, Topler and Kevin Rollins, who joined the company in December, run the PC maker together from its headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, an Austin suburb. While Topler and Rawlins devote most of their time to running daily operations, Dell is the company's top salesman and strategist.

Together, they are working on version 2.0 of thedirect sales model. ``We have eight days of inventory, when typically a company has between eight to 12 weeks of inventory,'' Topler said.

And Dell has turned to the World Wide Web to sell its products directly to consumers and to small businesses. The company now sells more than $5 million a day on the Web, seven days a week. Executives have said they hope to do as much as half the company's business via the Web by the end of 2000.Staying close to the customer remains very much the core mantra at Dell. The company doesn't advertise bargain-basement computers; yet if corporate customers want them, the company will build them. ``Dell will sell what his customers desire,'' Topler said.

Wage floor benefits by-pass poor

Minimum wages do create some jobs-for economists. In America economists have had a field day studying whether setting a floor under pay destroys jobs or reduces poverty. Their British counterparts will soon benefit too, when Britain introduces a minimum wage next April. But will theworking poor for whom minimum wages are meant to help, be cheering too?

The first comprehensive international study of the impact of minimum wages, published recently by the OECD, suggests not, writes The Washington Post. The reason is that the policy of wage regulation is ill-suited to dealing with the problem of poverty. In most countries, the OECD reports, relatively few low-paid workers live in low-income households, and relatively few low-income households have low-paid workers. The benefits of minimum wages, such as they are, largely by-pass the poor.

This is not, in general, because they lose their jobs. Critics of minimum wages frequently argue that a government-mandated pay level reduces total employment, because firms will scale back hiring rather than adding employees who must be paid more than they are worth. The study finds little evidence of this as far as adults are concerned: So many factors affect firms' employment decisions that the OECD's economists cannot separate the impact, if any,of a minimum wage.

There are great differences in minimum wages from country to country. In the Netherlands, the minimum has declined sharply over time when compared with the median wage. Britain's planned minimum wage will also be quite low at around 45 per cent of median earnings, according to estimates by the Low Pay Commission. In theory, a relatively high minimum wage should have a greater impact on aggregate employment than a relatively low one. Unfortunately, the OECD is unable to say whether there is a level at which the minimum wage turns into a drag on total employment.

The impact is clear, however, for the young. Workers younger than 25, who generally have few skills and little experience, tend to have much higher unemployment rates than older workers. Unemployment among America's under-25s averaged 11 per cent last year, three times the rate among workers over 25 years. In France, the unemployment rate for workers under 25 was a shocking 28 per cent.

Minimum wages are one explanation. TheOECD study-which considers data for 1975 to 1996 from nine countries, including America, Japan, France, Spain and the Netherlands-finds that a 10 per cent rise in the minimum wage reduces teenage employment by between 2 per cent and 4 per cent in both high and low minimum-wage countries. Whatever the level of the minimum wage, the OECD says, it reduces their job opportunities.