Sam Walton, Made in America

• Commit to your business
• Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners
• Motivate your partners
• Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners
• Appreciate everything your associates do for the business
• Celebrate your success
• Listen to everyone in your company
• Exceed your customers’ expectations
• Control your expenses better than your competition
• Swim upstream

Walton was a lifelong learner who applied everything he learned to his advantage. He was also an experimenter unafraid to try new ideas and discard them if they didn’t work. Ultimately, he had a single driving goal for all his stores: to make every single customer as happy as possible.

• Frugality
• Continuous improvement
• Start & fix along the way
• Prioritize
• Try new things
• Think long term
• Life is unfair
• Money is not the prime motivator
• Lower your prices to sell more
• Learning to value a dollar
• You can learn from everybody

• In 1945 Sam Walton opened his first discount shop.
• And he took ideas from all over the places. Especially from his competitors.
• In a way, Walmart was another experiment for Sam. Would shoppers shop strictly because of the lower prices?
• It turned out, they would.

Walton always wondered what he could do to make the shopping better and easier for the customers.

1. Costumers would need to go to different stores that were specialized for one product.
2. They’d need to find parking each time, and all stores would close early.

He answered with bigger, one-stop stores, long opening hours, free and abundant parking and lower prices.

• But initially, he didn’t put employees first.
• In England, he saw a store that would list its employees as “associates”.
• He treated his employees well, they’d treat his customers well.
• He decided then to call his employees associates and he started a cash and stock sharing so that all employees could take part in Walmart’s success.

“We take the best ideas from someone else."

“High expectations are the key to everything.” 

“Ignore the conventional wisdom.

If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction."

 "Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable."

"Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures."

“There are only four things in life that matter.

The first is happiness and I’ll sell you the other three for a dollar."