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

by Bob Slater

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.

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Economics

256 pages, Paperback

First published May 25, 2004

Reviews

[Lance Cahill · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, if surface level, coverage of Walmart from 1992 to 2002. If you have special interest in the company, you worth reading from a historical perspective. Not any ah ha moments or deep insights. It did feel as if the author struggled for material to fill out their contractual obligations to the publisher and heavy use of filler paragraphs and repetition were used.

One interesting tidbit was heavy focus on excellence in retail execution as the core to Walmart avoiding the fate of K-Mart and Sears when they had spread into many other directions (K-Mart had acquired stakes in Borders, Sports Authority, and Office Max). Since then, Walmart has spawned into many other directions to complement existing strategies, such as e-comm acquisitions or organic initiatives.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this to learn more about the Walmart background since I work at one of WM's suppliers. It was interesting to me because it helped me understand more about Walmart from a different perspective. I was a college writing adjunct professor for ten years in a previous life. I have read ALL of the negative theories (not that I necessarily disagree with them).