Sam Walton: Made in America

“Ten Rules That Worked for Me”

“RULE 1: COMMIT to your business. ...If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everyone around you will catch the passion from you—like a fever.” (p. 314)

“RULE 2: SHARE your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners.” (pp. 314-5)

“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.” (p. 315)

“RULE 4: COMMUNICATE everything you possibly can to your partners. ...Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitors.” (p. 315) 

“RULE 5: APPRECIATE everything your associates do for the business. ...Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free—and worth a fortune.” (p. 315-6)

“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.” (p. 316)

“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.” (p. 316)

“RULE 8: EXCEED your customers’ expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over.” (pp. 316-7)

“RULE 9: CONTROL your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. ...You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.” (p. 317)

“RULE 10: SWIM upstream. ...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. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you’re headed the wrong way.” (p. 317)

Quotables

“This is hard to believe, but it’s true: in my whole life I never played in a losing football game. ...But I think that record had an important effect on me. You taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious.” (p. 18)

“And like most other overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making.” (p. 45)

“Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong that anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.” (p. 50)

Helen Walton: “Later on, Sam never went by a Kmart that he didn’t stop and look at it.” (p. 91)

“If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taken care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart’ success.” (p. 103)

“As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.” (p. 138)

“For my whole career in retail, I am stuck behind one guiding principle. It’s a simple one, and I have repeated over and over and over in this book until I’m sure you’re sick to death of it. But I’m going to say it again anyway: a successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.” (pp. 220-1)

“A computer is not—and will never be—a substitute for getting out in your stores and learning what’s going on. In other words, a computer can tell you down to the dime what you’ve sold. But it can never tell you how much you could have sold.” (p. 285)

“Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free—and worth a fortune.” (p. 315-6)

“I’ll tell you this: those companies out there who aren’t thinking about the customer and focusing on the customers’ interests are just going to get lost in the shuffle—if they haven’t already. Those who get greedy are going to be left in the dust.” (p. 322)