Inside one of America's most remarkable success stories, from the bestselling author of Jack Welch and the G.E. Way.
Two of the toughest challenges for any company are leadership transitions and rapid growth. How do you replace an enormously popular and beloved CEO-especially one who started from scratch to create a national icon? And how do you maintain a rapid growth rate without losing the culture and focus of a small company?
Over the past ten years, since the death of the legendary Sam Walton, Wal-Mart has passed both challenges with flying colors. In 1992, it had revenues of $43.9 billion; now it's number one on the Fortune 500 list of America's largest companies, with revenues of $218 billion. Sam Walton's successors have taken the company into far-flung new markets and new directions yet without losing the down-to-earth retailing culture that made Wal-Mart thrive in its early years, when its business model was truly revolutionary.
Robert Slater, a highly respected business journalist and author, was granted unprecedented access to the company while writing The Wal-Mart Decade. He takes readers deep into the inner circle, where the big decisions are made about strategy and operations. And he weaves a fascinating, accessible story about the many challenges of the past decade and how Wal-Mart built on its founder's legacy to overcome them.
Since Sam Walton's death in 1992, Wal-Mart has grown into one of the world's largest and most controversial companies. Slater's latest (after The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco Through the Technology Collapse) delivers an insider's look at the retailer's meteoric rise. Wal-Mart's secret to success is well-known: by selling products for less, the firm makes less profit per product, but is able to sell more products and keep inventories low. This strategy brought the company incredible success before Walton's death, but Wal-Mart had yet to hit its real growth spurt. It was doing $43.8 billion in sales in 1992. Just three years later, under CEO David Glass, sales hit $100 billion. Glass "took Wal-Mart out of Middle America and made it into a global brand," explains Slater. He shows how Glass and his colleagues stayed true to Walton's idiosyncratic management style while investing in the technologies and logistics operations that a multibillion-dollar company needs. Slater saves some of the most compelling chapters for the book's end, when he describes how the firm is besieged by legions of bankrupt small-business owners, muckraking journalists and, of course, lawyers. Slater reports Wal-Mart is the most sued entity in the U.S. "I don't know how things happened," says Glass, "but you suddenly become a target rather than everybody's favorite." Thanks to his access to top executives, Slater shows how Wal-Mart survived (by beefing up its PR department) and thrived (grabbing the top spot on the 2002 Fortune 500 list). Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Robert Slater was a reporter for Time for eighteen years and is the author of a number of bestselling business biographies including Jack Welch and the GE Way.
Robert Slater was born in New York City on October 1, 1943, and grew up in South Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from Columbia High School in 1962 and graduated with honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966, where he majored in political science. He received a masters of science degree in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1967. He worked for UPI and Time Magazine for many years, in both the United States and the Middle East. Slater has written 16 books about major business personalities before his new book on Donald Trump: ' The Titans of Takeover (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987). ' Portraits in Silicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). ' This ... .Is CBS: A Chronicle of 60 Years (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1988). ' The New GE: How Jack Welch Revived an American Institution (Homewood, IL: Business One Irwin, 1993). ' Get Better or Get Beaten! 31 Leadership Secrets from GE's Jack Welch (Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1994). This book made the business best-seller list in Japan. ' SOROS: The Life, Times, and Trading Secrets of the World's Greatest Investor (Chicago, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1996). This book profiles superinvestor George Soros, and it appeared on the Business Week best-seller list. ' Invest First, Investigate Later: And 23 Other Trading Secrets of George Soros, the Legendary Investor (Chicago, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1996). ' John Bogle and the Vanguard Experiment: One Man's Quest to Transform the Mutual Fund Industry (Chicago, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing, 1996). This book profiles the most important business figure in the mutual fund field. ' Ovitz: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Most Controversial Power Broker (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1997). This book made the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times business best-seller lists. ' Jack Welch and the GE Way: Management Insights and Leadership Secrets of the Legendary CEO (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1998). This is an updated look at the business secrets of General Electric's chairman and chief executive officer. It made the Business Week and The Wall Street Journal best-seller lists. ' Saving Big Blue: Leadership Lessons & Turnaround Tactics of IBM's Lou Gerstner (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 1999). ' The GE Way Fieldbook: Jack Welch's Battle Plan for Corporate Revolution (New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 1999). ' The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco Systems Through the Technology Collapse (New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2003). ' Magic Cancer Bullet: How a Tiny Orange Capsule May Rewrite Medical History (New York, NY: HarperBusiness, 2003), co-authored with Novartis CEO, Dan Vasella. ' The Wal-Mart Decade: How a New Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy into the World's #1 Company (New York, NY: Portfolio, 2003). A paperback version was published in June 2004. ' Microsoft Rebooted: How Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer Re-Invented Their Company (New York, NY: Portfolio, 2004 ' No Such Thing as Over-Exposure: Inside the Life and Celebrity of Donald Trump (New Jersey, Pearson, Prentice Hall, February 2005)
19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 starsA disappointment, August 3, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: The Wal-Mart Decade: How a New Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy Into the World's #1 C (Hardcover)
This book is a public relations dream for Wal-Mart but a big disappointment for anyone who likes good, objective, analytical business reporting. It is obvious that the author became too enamored with his access to the current Wal-Mart management. There is no balance in the book; it only presents the Wal-Mart view. It doesn't really explain how Wal-Mart has grown since Sam Walton died. It only recites "facts" - there's a lot of the "what" but there isn't a real probe of the "how" or the "why." The topic of how Wal-Mart will continue to grow (or not) is fascinating - let's hope another author will tackle it.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 starsThis should have been published by Wal-Mart's PR department, July 2, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: The Wal-Mart Decade: How a New Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy Into the World's #1 C (Hardcover)
A very shallow analysis of Wal-Mart's growth over the past ten years, providing little insight on how the managment charted the course of the Company following Sam Walton's death.
The main thrust of the book is Wal-Mart's culture, which is certainly strong. The author uses interviews with Wal-Mart senior executives as the primary vehicle to narrate "highlights" of the past ten years, rather than providing an analysis of how key decisions made by these executives have led the Company to the top of the Fortune 500. I can't believe that there is no mention of how Wal-Mart and Procter and Gamble worked to integrate their supply chain during the period, which was a key ingredient to their success in the past ten years!
For the history of Wal-Mart and Sam Walton, stick with "Made in America", Walton's memoir with John Huey. For better insight to the engine behind Wal-Mart's growth, search out articles from Harvard Business Review (e.g., on the Wal-Mart/P&G supply chain from 1994) and other management journals. These sources will certainly be less "rah rah Wal-Mart" and will provide more details on the what was actually done and spare you the executive reflections on "what Mr. Sam would think" of today's Wal-Mart.
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This review is from: The Wal-Mart Decade: How a New Generation of Leaders Turned Sam Walton's Legacy Into the World's #1 C (Hardcover)
I was disappointed with this book. It has a reasonable overview of the history and growth of Wal-mart in the pre and post Sam Walton years. Unfortunately it takes a very high-level view (most of the figures it quotes can be gotten from the company's own annual reports or from other magazine articles), focusses more on culture (and even that is given short-shrift -- there is not a single dissenting view) than on business strategy or operational details. Perhaps this has been because the company is secretive, and perhaps by nature David Glass and Lee Scott (the Wal-mart CEO's that I assume were interviewed for the book) are low-key men -- but you get none of the retail, logistics, or IT-savvy insights that Wal-mart is "allegedly" exploiting to become the hypergrowth engine it is. Perhaps retail is all that the company purports it to be (sell product at value prices -- every day :), but I wish the author had peeked behind the covers and found a better story to tell.
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