Just in case you might not realize it, the huge Walmart corporation was actually started and grown quite large by one main individual and his name was Sam Walton. This book is his personal and business story and I Highly recommended it! Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.”

Walton, Sam (2012). Sam Walton: Made in America. Random House Publishing Group. p.18. ISBN 978-0-345-53844-4. There he saw a store that would list its employees as “associates”, and he began thinking that it’d be wonderful if Walmart could consider employees as associates instead of employees to be managed. In this book Made in America, Sam Walton shares the story of how he did it. This is the autobiography of the Walmart’s founder. He started with one small store in one small town in the middle of the United States. And he grew that into one of the largest businesses ever—Walmart.Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.” I often read biographies to learn more about how other successful people started their journey. After I finished like 40% of the book he already had founded Walmart and opened hundreds of stores (and bought an airplane). I'm missing more of the youth part and struggles here. 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]

The culture of Wall-Mart assumed constant change and development... "... We are always ready to give away all achievements and start from scratch ..." Tedlow, Richard S. (July 23, 2001). "Sam Walton: Great From the Start". Working Knowledge. Harvard Business School. Archived from the original on October 16, 2015 . Retrieved March 30, 2012. This is one of those book that you have to have on your bookshelf. Sam Walton is a great example of a man with very strong values and principles, despite all of the success and failures Sam never sacrificed his core values. If I had to summarize the book into top 3 lessons this is what it would look like:To ensure productivity, Walmart has several ways to reward the work of its associates, such as a profit-sharing plan and other financial association programs, bonuses on loss control expectations, and incentives for formal education for its directors. David Glass turned out to be awesome in the post and a major help in rescuing Walmart and pushing it to even higher heights. But he soon realized that the company split in two: one favoring Mayer and the other side favoring the other VP. Here’s how I look at it: my life has been a trade off. If I wanted to reach the goals I set for myself, I had to get at it and stay at it every day. I had to think about it all the time. And I guess what David Glass said about me is true: I had to get up every day with my mind set on improving something. Charlie Baum was right too when he said I was driven by a desire to always be on the top of the heap. But in the larger sense - the life and death sense - did I make the right choices?” p.320 Understood the value of a dollar, grew up during the depression. Continued to be frugal through all his years. Made sure all his businesses also understood the value of a dollar. From an early age he worked multiple jobs, never stopped moving. He has an urge to win, to win at everything.

Of course he gives a wonderfully folksy description of the history of his with the help of many, many associates' building the great Wal-Mart corp. Lots of neat comments from his family, top Wal-Mart employees and others regularly interspersed in his story. Discounter stores. In the early 1960’s, a new type of retail store called a discounter store began popping up. The idea was to sell products at cheaper prices, but with a higher volume of sales they still made a lot of profit. Sam Walton saw discounter stores very successful in the northeast US and he knew they would come to Arkansas soon.

I also started selling magazine subscriptions, probably as young as seven or eight years old, and I had paper routes from the seventh grade all the way through college. I raised and sold rabbits and pigeons too, nothing really unusual for country boys of that era. Nobody knows whether they’re about to embark on what might become a billion-dollar empire, not even Sam did, but either way, learning a few lessons from this man can’t hurt.