Sam Walton: Made In America

by Sam Walton

Mart’s

I learned from a very early age that it was important for us kids to help provide for the home, to be contributors rather than just takers.

the best way to reduce paying estate taxes is to give your assets away before they appreciate.

One of the real reasons I’m writing this book is so my grandchildren and great-grandchildren will read it years from now and know this: If you start any of that foolishness, I’ll come back and haunt you. So don’t even think about it.

We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers’ pockets.

Mother must have been a pretty special motivator, because I took her seriously when she told me I should always try to be the best I could at whatever I took on.

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.

As I mentioned, Helen’s father was a very prominent lawyer, banker, and rancher, and she felt we should be independent.

you can learn from everybody. I didn’t just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street.

But this is really the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of the increased volume.

There was never any question that he was the boss, and when he wanted something done, believe me it got done.

Through our combined efforts the kids received your everyday heartland upbringing, based on the same old bedrock values: a belief in the importance of hard work, honesty, neighborliness, and thrift.

If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores.

He was really ten years away from the computer world coming. But he was preparing himself. And this is a very important point: without the computer, Sam Walton could not have done what he’s done. He could not have built a retailing empire the size of what he’s built, the way he built it. He’s done a lot of other things right, too, but he could not have done it without the computer. It would have been impossible.”

I feel like our time is better spent with our own people in the stores, rather than off selling the company to outsiders.

So my role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.

As soon as we got home, we started calling our store workers “associates” instead of employees.

As I said back when we lost that first lease in Newport, most setbacks can be turned into opportunities. And as things turned out, this setback presented us with one of the great opportunities in our company’s history.

I think everyone needs as much exposure to as many areas of the company as they can get, and I think the best executives are those who have touched all the bases and have the best overall concept of the corporation.

My feeling is that just because we work so hard, we don’t have to go around with long faces all the time, taking ourselves seriously, pretending we’re lost in thought over weighty problems.

We’re constantly doing crazy things to capture the attention of our folks and lead them to think up surprises of their own.

For the meeting to work, it has to be something of a show. We don’t ever want to let it become predictable. One day, we might do a few calisthenics. Another day we might sing. Or maybe do the Razorback cheer. We don’t want to plan it all out. We just want it to unfold. It is so unconventional that I don’t think anyone could really duplicate it even if they wanted to.

Just like everybody else, in order to survive, we need to keep changing the things we do.

one of the main reasons we’ve been able to roll this company out nationally was all the pressure put on me by guys like David Glass and, earlier, Jack Shewmaker and Ron Mayer, to invest so heavily in technology.

Here’s the point: the bigger Wal-Mart gets, the more essential it is that we think small. Because that’s exactly how we have become a huge corporation—by not acting like one.

If you had to boil down the Wal-Mart system to one single idea, it would probably be communication, because it is one of the real keys to our success.

Now, I want you to raise your right hand—and remember what we say at Wal-Mart, that a promise we make is a promise we keep—and I want you to repeat after me: From this day forward, I solemnly promise and declare that every time a customer comes within ten feet of me, I will smile, look him in the eye, and greet him. So help me Sam.”

A computer is not—and will never be—a substitute for getting out in your stores and learning what’s going on.

“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty.” —JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER, JR.

RULE 1: COMMIT to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don’t know if you’re born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it. 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.

RULE 2: SHARE your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.

RULE 3: MOTIVATE your partners. Money and ownership alone aren’t enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners.

RULE 4: COMMUNICATE everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care.

RULE 5: APPRECIATE everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them.

RULE 6: CELEBRATE your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm—always.

RULE 7: LISTEN to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines—the ones who actually talk to the customer—are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there.

RULE 8: EXCEED your customers’ expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want—and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them.

RULE 9: CONTROL your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.

RULE 10: SWIM upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.

the more you give, the more you get.