Key Lessons from Sam Walton's Made in America Part 2

This is my final review of Sam Walton's biography 'Made in America'. It is my sincere hope you have learned something from this great American who dified odds to establish what is today the world's largest retail store chain emplying over 3 million people worldwide.

  

Learn From Books and Publiations

During a stint in the army, Sam was posted in Salt Lake City. He checked out every book on retailing in their library, and studied a nearby department store. He would read every retail publication he could find, and would later refer to himself as an "avid student of management theory

Learn from Your Workers

Walton learned from everyone in his stores, regardless of status."Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who’s going to have a great idea."  He especially loved to talk to the truck drivers. According to Lee Scott, "For a long, long time, Sam would show up regularly in the drivers’ break room at 4 A.M. with a bunch of doughnuts and just sit there for a couple of hours talking to them." According to Sam, “It’s amazing to me how many ideas they always have for fine-tuning the system." He'd grill them, asking, ‘What are you seeing at the stores?’ ‘Have you been to that store lately?’ ‘How do the people act there?’ ‘Is it getting better?’ "…I’d still say that visiting the stores and listening to our folks was one of the most valuable uses of my time as an executive. But really, our best ideas usually do come from the folks in the stores. Period." 

Innovate, Swim Upstream; Constantly Experiment With New Ideas

Many people are good at learning, but have a hard time applying what they learn. After Walton learned something new, he’d experiment with the best ideas in his own store.  According to Walton, "I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart. "A pattern emerges in Walton’s biography. First, grab ideas from anybody you can. Second, shake things up in your stores by innovating. Learn something else. Innovate. It became a lifelong obsession. According to Walton, "…after a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart’s phenomenal success has been that very tendency." 

Learn from Your Mistakes

Not all of his ideas worked. The minnow buckets didn’t sell. People in Wisconsin didn’t go for his Moon Pies. But when he saw he was wrong, he admitted his mistake and went on to try something else. And he wanted his associates to be the same way. He’d get them together on Saturday mornings to share their success and admit their failures. That culture of candor produced a great environment to capture ideas. It helped that he had "very little capacity for embarrassment." 

Travel Far and Wide for Great Ideas

He’d travel the world to get an idea. In his early career, he read an article about how two stores in Minnesota had gone to self-service, which nobody else was doing. Customers picked out their own stuff and checked out at the cash registers at the front of the store. So he rode the bus all night to visit the stores, liked what they were doing, and changed his store to self service. He was always out looking for new merchandise. Once he came back from New York with some unique sandals which some called flip-flops, or thongs. The clerk said, "No way will those things sell. They’ll just blister your toes." They sold like crazy. Before Walton, very few stores concentrated on buying low, selling cheap, and making their profit by selling such huge quantities. When Walton heard of a few discounters, he ran around the country from the East to California, studying the concept. Everywhere he went; he visited stores and scribbled ideas in his yellow legal pad.  According to his brother Bud, "There’s not an individual in these whole United States who has been in more retail stores…than Sam Walton. Make that all over the world. He’s been in stores in Australia and South America, Europe and Asia and South Africa. His mind is just so inquisitive when it comes to this business. And there may not be anything he enjoys more than going into a competitor’s store trying to learn something from it."  

For more inforamtion about Wal-mart visit walmartstores.com

Happy reading!!!