Sam Walton drove change. In any situation, when everyone else was happy, Sam was working on ways to improve further. But it wasn't just change for change sake, it was change directed at serving the customer by giving the best value for the money spent. Consequently, Sam Walton went from a broke young man to the wealthiest man with one of the most successful companies in the history of manking - Walmart. Regardless of whether a person likes Walmart today, Walton's success is admirable.
One of the keys to Walton's success was his ability to thrive through change, not die through change. The Mental Fitness Challenge designed by Orrin Woodward and Chris Brady teaches a person how to develop internal consistency so that when the external world changes, he still feels peace on the inside. The Mental Fitness Challenge was developed around the principles of Orrin Woodward's best-selling book RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE. In it, Orrin outlines 13 resolutions that are crucial for inuring internal peace and fortitude.
Sam Walton had this peace and fortitude. Check out this blog post from Orrin.
Walton, as a young boy, hit the ground running, starting his business career early. His parents, Tom and Nan Walton, were mismatched, to put it mildly. Walton shared in his must read autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America, “They were always at odds, and they really only stayed together because of Bud and me. . . . I’m not exactly sure how this situation affected my personality – unless it was partly a motivation to stay so busy all the time – but I swore early on that if I ever had a family, I would never expose it to that kind of squabbling.” Walton’s first leadership lessons were instructions in what not to do, similar to General Norman Schwarzkopf’s, who said he had learned more from bad leadership than good leadership, learning first hand what demotivated the troops. Walton’s dad, who foreclosed on defaulted farm loans during the depression, developed a small thinker’s mentality, valuing security over any potential risk associated with success. He was frugal, not just with expenses, but also with personal investments, a good plan to remain poor.
Again, Walton learned a valuable lesson. He absorbed his dad’s frugality in expenses, but ignored it, when it came to investments, believing that only through investments could he start his own business, which he fully intended to do. Thinking big and not squabbling were two of his original principles developed on his way to business immortality. He applied both principles in his first significant business venture, a newspaper route, that expanded across the Missouri countryside. Walton, always kind and courteous to his customers, quickly realized that one man could not do it all. His solution, was to subcontract out the newspaper routes, setting up others kids in business, while maintaining control of the financial accounting. Through this win-win arrangement, many hard working kids who struggled with financial literacy, became successful in business; at the same time, Walton made an extraordinary side income, literally financing his own college education, making more than his professors by profiting $4,000 to $5,000 per college year (over $70,000 in todays money), until his graduation in 1940.
Walton’s intense hunger was fueled further when he accepted an offer for $75 a month at the J.C. Penney store, as a management trainee, in Des Moines, Iowa. His salary was minimal compared to his paper routes, but Walton desired to learn the retail trade from one of the top companies, understanding that learning comes before earning. Walton was an immediate success as a salesman, topping the list of sales numerous times, but the personnel manager told him, because of his haphazard approach to recording sales slips along with cash register transactions, “Walton, I’d fire you if you weren’t such a good salesman. Maybe you’re just not cut out for retail,” proving the truthfulness of the saying, “The smallest minds with the smallest ideas will criticize the biggest minds with the biggest ideas.” But, in the personnel manager’s defense, Sam admitted later, that he “never learned handwriting all that well.”
Walton was befriended by Duncan Majors, his mentor and store manager. He was Majors’ top student, working with him six days a week, then spending Sunday afternoons at his house, playing ping pong, cards, and learning all he could about the retail business. After an eighteen month stint, Walton left J.C. Penney, joining the service during World War II, but he never ceased to dream of one day owning his own retail store. Moreover, while stationed in the army at Salt Lake City, he checked out every book on retailing at the local library, reading voraciously on the latest trends and techniques, supplementing his books learning with innumerable trips to the local department stores. Walton was a huge positive thinker even then, saying, “Thinking like that (positively) often seems to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy,” having faith, that when his opportunity arose, he would win, just like he had in sports, entrepreneurship, and education, and college elections throughout his youth.
