“All of us profit from being corrected – if we’re corrected in a positive way.”
“And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making. ”
“Capital isn’t scarce; vision is.”
“Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.”
“Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.”
“Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.”
“Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.”
“Do it. Try it. Fix it.”
“Don’t get so stuck in your ways that you can’t change.”
“Every time Walmart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers’ pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition – which is where we always plan to be.”
“Exceed your customer’s expectations. If you do, they’ll come back over and over. Give them what they want – and a little more.”
“Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who’s going to have a great idea.”
“High expectations are the key to everything.”
“I always favored the mavericks who challenged my rules. I may have fought them all the way, but I respected them, and, in the end, I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said.”
“I believe in always having goals and always setting them high.”
“I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they’ve been.”
“I’ve always had a strong bias towards action.”
“If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.”
“If you don’t listen to your customers, someone else will.”
“If you love your work, you’ll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you – like a fever.”
“If you take someone who lacks the experience and the know-how but has the real desire and the willingness to work his tail off to get the job done, he’ll make up for what he lacks. And that proved true nine times out of ten.”
“If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you’re taking care of the people in the stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of Walmart’s success.”
“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.”
“Individuals don’t win, teams do.”
“Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.”
“It is a story about entrepreneurship, and risk, and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there.”
“Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.”
“Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.”
“Lose your smile and lose your customers.”
“Most everything I’ve done, I’ve copied from somebody else.”
“Most of us don’t invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.”
“My role has been to pick good people and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.”
“Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise.”
“Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it’s amazing what they can accomplish.”
“Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.”
“Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.”
“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.”
“The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.”
“The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Walmart sign: “Satisfaction Guaranteed”. They’re still up there, and they have made all the difference.”
“The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.”
“There is only one boss: the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.”
“To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.”
“We’re all working together; that’s the secret.”
“What we guard against around here is people saying “Let’s think about it.” We make a decision. Then we act on it.”
“You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you’re too inefficient.”
“You can’t just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.”