Sam Walton: Made In America

by Sam Walton

If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete. That passion has pretty much kept me on the go, looking ahead to the next store visit, or the next store opening, or the next merchandising item I personally wanted to promote out in those stores—like a minnow bucket or a Thermos bottle or a mattress pad or a big bag of candy.

It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns. But I think more than anything it proves there’s absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary working people can accomplish if they’re given the opportunity and the encouragement and the incentive to do their best.

Some families sell their stock off a little at a time to live high, and then—boom—somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain.

money never has meant that much to me, not even in the sense of keeping score. If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the lads good educations—that’s rich.

What motivates the man is the desire to absolutely be on top of the heap. It is not money.

‘How do you inspire a grandchild to go to work if they know they’ll never have a poor day in their life?’

I have always pursued everything I was interested in with a true passion—some would say obsession—to win. I’ve always held the bar pretty high for myself:

It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I learned early on that one of the secrets to campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you.

The challenge at hand was simple enough to figure out: I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

You can’t praise something that’s not done well. You can’t be insincere. You have to follow up on things that aren’t done well. There is no substitute for being honest with someone and letting them know they didn’t do a good job. All of us profit from being corrected—if we’re corrected in a positive way. But there’s no better way to keep someone doing things the right way than by letting him or her know how much you appreciate their performance. If you do that one simple thing, human nature will take it from there.

He is a master at erasing that ‘larger-than-life’ feeling that people have for him. How many heads of state always start the conversation by wanting to know what you think? What’s on your mind?

“After a visit, everyone in the store has no doubt that he genuinely appreciates our contributions, no matter how insignificant. Every associate feels like he or she does make a difference. It’s almost like having your oldest friend come just to see if you’re okay. He never lets us down.”

But if the associate happens to be right, it’s important to overrule their manager, or whoever they’re having the problem with because otherwise the open-door policy isn’t any good to anybody.

At fifty-six, I was free and clear of debt. My net worth was far greater than I had ever imagined it could be when I started out in the retail business. Our kids were out of college and starting up their own lives. I really don’t see how I could have reasonably expected much more out of life.

If I’ve given the impression so far that Wal-Mart has occupied most of my competitive energy over the years, that’s not completely accurate. I’ve pursued my other passions all along, too, mostly quail hunting and tennis—and I pursued them both very competitively.

To him, the rules of tennis, the rules of business, and the rules of life are all the same, and he follows them. As competitive as he is, he was a wonderful tennis opponent—always gracious in losing and in winning. If he lost, he would say, ‘I just didn’t have it today, but you played marvelously.’ ”

Creating a huge personal fortune was never particularly a goal of mine, and the proof of that lies in the fact that even to this day most of my, and my family’s, wealth remains in the form of Wal-Mart stock.

always prided myself on breaking everybody else’s rules, and I always favored the mavericks who challenged my rules. I may have fought them all the way, but I respected them, and, in the end, I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said.

overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work.

If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you—like a fever.

SWIM upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

We can turn the whole world around just the way we’ve done it in retail. We can do it better than the Japanese because we’re more innovative, we’re more creative. We can compete with labor in Bangladesh or wherever because we have better technology, which can give us more efficient equipment. We can get beyond a lot of our old adversarial relationships and establish win-win partnerships with our suppliers and our workers, which will leave us with more energy and talent to focus on the important thing, meeting the needs of our customers. But all this requires overcoming one of the most powerful forces in human nature: the resistance to change. To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.

A lot of people think it’s crazy of me to fly coach whenever I go on a commercial flight, and maybe I do overdo it a little bit. But I feel like it’s up to me as a leader to set an example. It’s not fair for me to ride one way and ask everybody else to ride another way. The minute you do that, you start building resentment and your whole team idea begins to strain at the seams.

You may have trouble believing it, but every time we’ve tested the old saying, it has paid off for us in spades: the more you give, the more you get.