Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish.
How did Wal-Mart do it? I’ve usually been flip about answering them. Friend, we just got after it and stayed after it, I’d say.
As we moved along in the seventies, we had very definitely become an effective retail entity, and we had set the stage for the even more phenomenal growth that was going to follow. It’s amazing that o...
Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves it s amazing what they can accomplish.
We used to get in some terrific fights. You have to be just as tough as they are. You can’t let them get by with anything because they are going to take care of themselves, and your job is to take car...
Plus, as I’ve said, if you don’t want to work weekends, you shouldn’t be in retail. But
I don’t subscribe much to any of these fancy investing theories, and most people seem surprised to learn that I’ve never done much investing in anything except Wal-Mart. I believe the folks who’ve don...
A little later on, Phil ran what became one of the most famous item promotions in our history. We sent him down to open store number 52 in Hot Springs, Arkansas—the first store we ever opened in a tow...
I was executive vice president of the discounters’ trade association, working in my New York office one day in 1967. My secretary said there was a man out front who wanted to join our group. I said I...
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.
The small stores were just destined to disappear, at least in the numbers they once existed, because the whole thing is driven by the customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
I guess his vindication had to be the day in 1989 when he walked into a Kmart in Illinois and found that they had installed people greeters at their front doors.
Hello, friends, I’m Sam Walton, founder and chairman of Wal-Mart Stores. By now I hope you’ve shopped in one of our stores, or maybe bought some stock in our company.
As companies get larger, with a broader following of investors, it becomes awfully tempting to get into that jet and go up to Detroit or Chicago or New York and speak to the bankers and the people who...
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 than anyon...
We opened one, store number 8 in Morrilton, Arkansas, that was really a sight. We rented this old Coca-Cola bottling plant. It was all broken up into five rooms, and we bought some old fixtures from a...
The point I’m trying to make is that we as a family have bent over backward not to take advantage of Wal-Mart, not to press our ownership position unfairly, and everybody in the company knows it. Alic...
The first one is could a Wal-Mart-type story still occur in this day and age? My answer is of course it could happen again. Somewhere out there right now there’s someone—probably hundreds of thousands...
I’ve known Sam since his first store in Newport, Arkansas, and I believe that money is, in some respects, almost immaterial to him. What motivates the man is the desire to absolutely be on top of the...
I still can’t believe it was news that I get my hair cut at the barbershop. Where else would I get it cut? Why do I drive a pickup truck? What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce? N...