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 growth and success of Wal-Mart as the leading discount retailer in the world. Walton expresses in chapter one, Starting On A Dime, how he came to value the low prices that would make Wal-Mart famous and a leading discounter. He discusses in the first chapter the ludicrous notions of the media and individuals once it was apparent he had become a billionaire. However, knowing the value of a dollar is the secret of Wal-Mart’s success and Walton admits he might not know how to squeeze the last...