Made in America Sam Walton
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The story of Sam Walton’s success from a dime store in a small town in Arkansas over fifty years ago to the world’s biggest and most successful retailer is chronicled in the book Made In America. Along the way Walton’s innovation and management strategy, mainly his own ideas without the benefit of a blueprint to follow, are now the stuff of business legend. If anything describes Walton’s main leadership strategy in turning Wal-Mart from a store nobody ever heard of into a multibillion dollar a year profit-maker, it is vision. Walton’s vision of providing excellent customer service, low pricing, high quality (and desirable) products, and employment or career opportunities for staff while expanding domestically and abroad has provided the organization with the potential to advance for the foreseeable future. Walton closely studied rival discounter K-Mart before he opened the original Wal-Mart store in 1962. Some five decades later, Wal-Mart remains the top discount retailer while K-Mart struggles to regroup after claiming bankruptcy. This analysis will discuss Wal-Mart’s rise to success as illustrated in Walton’s own book, Made In America. A conclusion will discuss some of the key elements of Wal-Mart’s successful strategies that helped Walton become a billionaire and made Wal-Mart a popular household name. Made In America contains 18 chapters that discuss everything from Walton’s humble origins to the unbelievable
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the phenomenal success of Wal-Mart for its stockholders. Over a two decade period Wal-Mart stockholders would enjoy nine stock splits (See Exhibit One). This is true even though Walton and his management team were not overly impressed by Wall Street nor did Wall Street welcome them with open arms. As Al Miles, his first assistant manager, maintains, “When we went on the stock market, it didn’t mean anything to some of us country boys. I didn’t even know what stock was. But I bought some, thank God…because I believed in Mr. Walton and I believe him when he said we could do all these things with the company,” (Walton 118).
In chapter eight, Rolling Out The Formula, we see that while not all of his managers always proved effective, they always came up with good ideas that would propel Wal-Mart’s success. For example, one manager advocated electric cash registers but few could understand how to operate the temperamental Singer electric registers. Shortly after, another manager implemented in-store computers that gave Wal-Mart another competitive advantage, “Not many of us gave in-store computers much thought. But Shewmaker studied all that stuff, and we would run with whatever he talked Sam into putting in the stores,” (Walto
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Approximate Word count = 2089
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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