Made in America - The Walmart Story

Sam Walton grew Walmart from just one store in 1962 into 8,500 stores worldwide today employing about 2 million people. This is quite an amazing feat to accomplish within one lifetime, and I hoped to learn a little about how Sam achieved this.

My initial guess was sheer tenacity, attention to details, relentless focus on efficiency and customer service. Sam was probably really good at putting good people where they can contribute the most. The book bore some of these out, but there are also other important lessons within:

1. Focus on training employees. Sam set up the Walton institute to train his employees, particular those without degrees. This mirrors what Jack did at GE.
2. The bigger that Walmart got, the more important it is that we think small. Sam's lesson here is that one needs to stay focused on the little things that one used to diligently abide by when one was starting out even as one progressed and became more successful. In Walmart's case, he cited examples like treating customers well, greeting them, and discussing the performance of individual stores at management meetings (wow the attention to detail!) And Sam warns against stifling ground up innovation as the bureaucracy grew.
3. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Communication becomes more and more critical as the company grows, so that everyone is on the same page and good practices are spread quickly throughout the network. Platforms include computers, phone calls and many meetings! He said: Communicate everything to your partners. The more they understand, the more they will care. The moment they care enough, there's no stopping them.
   
4. Push responsibility and authority down, while forcing ideas to bubble up. Sam used this mantra a number of times. He wants to empower people on the ground, especially those with the passion and ambition, to help the company grow. At the same time, he helps ideas "bubble up" through encouraging people to raise ideas at meetings, and personally visiting each and every of his stores to pick up good ideas.
   
5. Reduce layers. Bureaucracies tend to fix problems by introducing new "layers", or extra personnel. Sam's philosophy is to stay lean and to limit the number of layers.
6. Hands on. Sam was a completely hands-on executive. He literally visited all his competitors' stores, taking notes and learning everything he could from them. He continued doing this even when Walmart was already expanding like wildfire in the US. Such dedication!
   
7. Commit to your goal. Sam said that he believed that he overcame all his hurdles simply by the force of passion.
   
8. Treat your associates as partners. In other words, give all your top executives a stake in the future of the company.
9. Celebrate your successes. Everyone likes to be on a winning team, and hence it is important to create that culture within the team.
   
10. Listen to EVERYONE in your company. And figure out ways to get them to talk to you. He really meant listen - he wants to know what is going on from his associates.
    
11. Exceed your customers' expectations. This one's standard, but absolutely important.
12. Control your expenses better than all your competition.

And lastly, he said that it is ok to ignore all of these "rules" from time to time and "swim upstream". Be prepared for people to tell you that things would not work.

All in all, a very good book that provided a good insight into how Sam thought and operated. His tenacity and commitment to growing his company was the main trait that jumped out at me. He really gave his company his all. I believe that he must have had tremendous energy to be able to run thousands of stores and yet drive each one to operate at the peak efficiency to remain at the forefront of competition. However, it is also enlightening that he said in his last chapter that he definitely had moments when he wondered if he was putting in too much for the company and it was time to lay back. (He did say that he would probably make the same choices if he could live his life again.) Seems like great accomplishments clearly require great sacrifices.