Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.
I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.
The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.
The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.
Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.
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.
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.
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.
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.
I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn't I would still speak to them.
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.
Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.
I learned this early on in the variety business: You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.
Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
I don't know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.
Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
All of us profit from being corrected - if we're corrected in a positive way.
Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more.
Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.
