The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World's #1 Company [Paperback]

Robert Slater (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2004

Two of the toughest challenges for any company are leadership transitions and rapid growth. How do you replace an enormously popular and beloved CEO? 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. It’s now the first company to rank number one on both the Fortune 500 and the Fortune Most Admired lists. Sam Walton’s successors have taken the company into far-flung new markets and new directions, without losing the down-to-earth retailing culture that made Wal- Mart thrive in its early years.

With unprecedented access to Wal-Mart’s press-shy senior executives, Robert Slater offers new insights about how the company manages its people and its operations, how it is expanding around the world (even in China), and how it is dealing with its many critics and competitors.

Editorial Reviews

Review

[Slater] offers an inspiring narrative on a major business transition. (Harvard Business Review)

About the Author

Robert Slater, a 21-year veteran of Time magazine, has written more than twenty books, including the bestseller Jack Welch and the GE Way.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Trade (May 25, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591840430
• ISBN-13: 978-1591840435
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,278,386 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars minimally useful: some basics, but no investigative reporting whatsoever, December 30, 2005

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World's #1 Company (Paperback)

Wal-Mart has become a controversial company because it has grown immensely powerful - by revenue the biggest company in the world and the largest private employer. From its origins as a southern mid-western company going for neglected rural markets, its story is one of remarkable success.

This book offers a succinct history and some explanation of how Wal-Mart succeeded: it went to markets that its big competitors ignored, made everyday low prices an essential part of its brand image, cultivated a conscientious service mentality in workers, and pursued efficiency through both scale and operations. That is its business model in a nutshell. Slater presents this matter of factly, as a natural evolution that carried the seeds of genius in the personality of earthy founder Sam Walton. The bulk of the story is how Walton's successors expanded the company far beyond what the founder achieved, making it truly global and putting a bureaucratic system into place. This was a bit useful for me as I start to investigate the company for a writing project.

Unfortunately, this book felt to me like Slater was happy to propogate the myth that Wal-Mart wishes observers to believe about the company. He recounts how employees are taught to cheerlead, and acts like they want to, like they feel it sincerely rather than do it because they have to! I can say that I found it hard to believe: big companies are rarely happy and enthusiastic places. Is that conclusion surprising to anyone? It would be for Slater, who himself is a cheerleader.

Even worse, he only perfunctorily asks himself any of the hard questions - such as the company's treatment of labor, its transforming impact on local communities, its use of sweatshops, etc. etc. - and then quickly implies that they are largely superfluous or silly exaggerations. This is nothing short of a simple white wash, and reads like PR that is trying to pose as thoughtful. This is really mediocre and shallow, almost like a company brochure. Slater failed to get inside the company, though he did do some interviews with prepped top officials, or so it appeared to me.

Oddly, as a relatively conservative business writer, I would give Wal-Mart the benefit of the doubt, pending my own investigation as a reporter. But Slater seems to be openly endorsing the company as if it lived up to its own PR. It is appalling to me, and I am no leftie or automatic critic of big companies, but I am a skeptic as a reporter.

Indeed, where he did address issues, they were never detailed enough, but instead were the most simplistic and narrow-minded generalizations. For example, he writes: "A new attitude was beginning to surface...Rather than show disdain for the negativism, the feeling was growing that there was virtue in having the media and community activists monitoring Wal-Mart." That pap is emblematic of the tone of this book and perfectly reflects how superficial it is. It also flatly contradicts what I have heard through the corporate grapevine with only the most simple of inquiries among my contacts.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book. Reading it is like getting a huge vanilla milkshake for dinner rather than a steak. I will have to look elsewhere for more balanced treatments of the many thorny issues that this huge company has helped to create.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars First review ever, June 11, 2008

By 

Jane Higuera "Manchester2010" (Spokane, Washington) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World's #1 Company (Paperback)

Okay so here goes.
Hey i just finished reading this book and it was amazing!
"The Wal-Mart Triumph" by Robert Slater was an amazing book. It's so soaked with facts on how and why Wal-Mart is the way it is if it had anymore facts the book would drown in a puddle of facts. The first chapter is basically about how Wal-Mart started and how Sam Walton started his business empire. Then it goes on to tell about how Walmart got it's roots implanted into the south and then took over certain chain stores in the south and so on and so forth unti they get to today and it talks about the lawsuits and so on and so forth.
Great book good read.

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Story Inside a Great Company!, August 19, 2005

By 

Bob - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wal-Mart Triumph: Inside the World's #1 Company (Paperback)

Very interesting book! I also liked the book, which is similar to this, "The Wal-Mart Way" which describes the man who had a clear purpose and vision and his greatness of achieving success in forming the World's #1 company.