The work begins by talking about his youth in Missouri and his childhood and adolescence achievements. Walton was a good student and a talented athlete. At this point in his life, he learned, through sport, the importance of teamwork.

Sam Walton spent part of his time visiting stores and listening to his associates' ideas. He says that the bigger a company gets, the more essential it is to think small. The individual focus allows the positive and negative aspects of each store to be identified. More books about corporate culture Samuel Moore Walton was born to Thomas Gibson Walton and Nancy Lee, in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. He lived there with his parents on their farm until 1923. However, farming did not provide enough money to raise a family, and Thomas Walton went into farm mortgaging. He worked for his brother's Walton Mortgage Company, which was an agent for Metropolitan Life Insurance, [3] [4] where he foreclosed on farms during the Great Depression. [5] My whole life I never played a losing football game. […] I think that record had an important effect on me. It taught me to expect to win, to go into tough challenges always planning to come out victorious. Bias towards ActionRunning a "Ben Franklin" franchise, Sam learned that marketing is a basic principle in the retail world: by lowering the price of a product, you can profit more because of the higher sales volume. Sam Walton Biography". 7infi.com. Archived from the original on August 10, 2017 . Retrieved August 10, 2017. The culture of Wall-Mart assumed constant change and development... "... We are always ready to give away all achievements and start from scratch ..." But honestly what I didn't like was that he only scratched the surface of the topics in almost every chapter. I expected him to go a little bit more into detail when it comes to failures and hard times but instead he basically praised the whole process as if everything worked with maximum efficiency and almost without major problems. a b "Sam Walton". Butler Center for Arkansas Studies. Archived from the original on April 18, 2012 . Retrieved March 30, 2012.

Walton, Sam (2012). Sam Walton: Made in America. Random House Publishing Group. p.18. ISBN 978-0-345-53844-4.His remains are interred at the Bentonville Cemetery. He left his ownership in Walmart to his wife and their children: Rob Walton succeeded his father as the Chairman of Walmart, and John Walton was a director until his death in a 2005 plane crash. The others are not directly involved in the company (except through their voting power as shareholders), however his son Jim Walton is chairman of Arvest Bank. The Walton family held five spots in the top ten richest people in the United States until 2005. Two daughters of Sam's brother Bud Walton— Ann Kroenke and Nancy Laurie—hold smaller shares in the company. [34] Legacy [ edit ] Walton and President George H. W. Bush in March 1992; Sam Walton died 18 days after this photo was taken. The summary gives a rough idea of Sam Walton’s business practices, but you can learn so much more from the book. His 10 rules at the very end of the book are worth twice the price of the copy alone. Plus, since it’s an autobiography, it puts all lessons in the context of his own life’s story, which lets you get a lot better grasp on everything. Cleaning up/out my office, I came across my notes from when I was listening to the CDs. Here are the parts that I thought were cool or at least valuable: Finances: He also worked to make his own money throughout school, starting with a newspaper route and later having multiple jobs. Contrary to the prevailing practice of American discount store chains, Walton located stores in smaller towns, not larger cities. To be near consumers, the only option at the time was to open outlets in small towns. Walton's model offered two advantages. First, existing competition was limited and secondly, if a store was large enough to control business in a town and its surrounding areas, other merchants would be discouraged from entering the market. [14]

Be passionate about learning, Sam Walton learned so much from people around him, his co-workers and from all his competition and it was one of the key elements of his success. Diamond, Arthur M. (2019). Openness to Creative Destruction- Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. USA & UK: Oxford University Press. p.25. Author John Huey says that the years have passed and the business has narrowed. Companies that did not meet their customers' needs and that had not built strong organizations began to close their doors. Walton’s business values and principles are succinctly described in Chapter 17, where he shares his 10 rules to build a successful business. These rules form the core of Walton’s business philosophy, and they are reflected in many of the book’s earlier chapters. The rules are:He was never married to procedure, only to values and concepts. He accepted changes to his operations as necessary, but the driver to those changes was his overall vision and values, which never faltered.