1、ten golden rules of WaltonSam Walton A whole lot has changed about the retailing business in the forty-seven years weve been in itincluding some of my theories. Weve changed our minds about some significant things along the way and adopted some new principles particularly about the concept of partne
2、rship in a corporation. But most of the values and the rules and the techniques weve relied on have stayed the same the whole way. Some of them are such simple commonsense old favorites that they hardly seem worth mentioning. This isnt the first time that Ive been asked to come up with a list of rul
3、es for success, but it is the first time Ive actually sat down and done it. Im glad 1 did because its been a revealing exercise for me. I do seem to have a couple of dozen things that Ive singled out at one time or another as the “key“ to the whole thing. One I dont even have on my list is “work har
4、d.“ If you dont know that already, or youre not willing to do it, you probably wont be going far enough to need my list anyway. And another I didnt include on the list is the idea of building a team. If you want to build an enterprise of any size at all, it almost goes without saying that you absolu
5、tely must create a team of people who work together and give real meaning to that overused word “teamwork.“ To me, thats more the goal of the whole thing, rather than some way to get there. I believe in always having goals, and always setting them high. I can certainly tell you that the folks at Wal
6、-Mart have always had goals in front of them. In fact, we have sometimes built real scoreboards on the stage at Saturday morning meetings. One more thing. If youre really looking for my advice here, trying to get something serious out of this exercise I put myself through, remember: these rules are
7、not in any way intended to be the Ten Commandments of Business. They are some rules that worked for me. But I always prided myself on breaking everybody elses rules, and 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,
8、 I listened to them a lot more closely than I did the pack who always agreed with everything I said. So pay special attention to Rule 10, and if you interpret it in the right spirit as it applies to you it could mean simply: Break All the Rules. For what theyre worth, here they are. Sams Rules for B
9、uilding a Business: RULE 1: COMMIT to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I dont know if youre born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it
10、. If you love your work, youll 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. RULE 2: SHARE your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner,
11、and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations. Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in a partnership. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company. Offer discounted stock, and grant them stock for their retirement. Its t
12、he single best thing we ever did. RULE 3: MOTIVATE your partners. Money and ownership alone arent enough. Constantly, day by day, think of new and more interesting ways to motivate and challenge your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payo
13、ffs. If things get stale, cross-pollinate; have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Dont become too predictable. RULE 4: COMMUNICATE everything you possibly can to your partners. The more they know, the more the
14、yll understand. The more they understand, the more theyll care. Once they care, theres no stopping them. If you dont trust your associates to know whats going on, theyll know you dont really consider them partners. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than
15、offsets the risk of informing your competitors. RULE 5: APPRECIATE everything your associates do for the business. A paycheck and a stock option will buy one kind of loyalty. But all of us like to be told how much somebody appreciates what we do for them. We like to hear it often, and especially whe
16、n we have done something were really proud of. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. Theyre absolutely free and worth a fortune. RULE 6: CELEBRATE your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Dont take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and
17、 everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. Show enthusiasm always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Dont do a hula on Wall Street like I did. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think,
18、 and it really fools the competition. “Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?“ RULE 7: LISTEN to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines the ones who actually talk to the customer are the only ones who really know whats going
19、 on out there. Youd better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you. RULE 8: EXCEED your customers expectat
20、ions. If you do, theyll come back over and over. Give them what they want and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Fix all your mistakes, and dont make excuses apologize. Stand behind everything you do. The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign: “Satisfa
21、ction Guaranteed.“ Theyre still up there, and they have made all the difference. RULE 9: CONTROL your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For twenty-five years running long before Wal-Mart was known as the nations largest retailer we ra
22、nked number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if youre too inefficient. RULE 10: SWIM upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the
23、 conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, theres a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you youre headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than any
24、thing was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long. Those are some pretty ordinary rules, some would say even simplistic. The hard part, the real challenge, is to constantly figure out ways to execute them. You cant just keep doing what works one time, because everything around you is always changing. To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change.
