Made in America

Walton gives a thorough and complete look into what turned Walmart from a small 5-and-dime store into the largest company in the world by revenue. The main takeaways from the memoir were the value of hard work, knowing your customers and competition, and befriending your employees.

Walton extolls the virtue of hard work throughout the book, but especially hits on it when explaining the weekly Saturday Morning Meeting. He correctly surmises that since Saturday is the most important day for retail that store managers should be fully prepared to give up their Saturday mornings to the business.

Walton makes a point of getting to know his customers at a very deep level on a personal level, a tendency level (from the data), as well as on the anecdotal level. He makes a point of visiting an ungodly amount of stores to understand the nuances of the trade from the front lines. He also repeatedly mentions how often he likes to explore other retailers and especially KMart. This clearly gave Walton and Walmart the ability to react much quicker than their competitors to changing market realities.

Walton finally credits his employee incentive plan with aligning the incentives of his employees with the incentives of the shareholders. This masterstroke has clearly had an impact over the years as Walmart has become known for their exceptional customer service.

While none of these insights were particularly complicated, none were easy to implement either, which is why most companies are not nearly as successful as Walmart.