Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

by Safi Bahcall

“Man, I was all set to become a big-city department store owner,” he wrote about opening his first store. He was looking at St. Louis. “That’s when Helen spoke up and laid down the law.” His wife announced, “I’ll go with you any place you want so long as you don’t ask me to live in a big city. Ten thousand people is enough for me.” He ended up in Bentonville, Arkansas, population: 3,000, in part because “I wanted to get closer to good quail hunting, and with Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri all coming together right there it gave me easy access to four quail seasons in four states.” The result was the leaf in the tornado. “It turned out that the first big lesson we learned,” wrote Walton, years later, “was that there was much, much more business out there in small-town America than anybody, including me, had ever dreamed of.”