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- Founders Feature: Sam Walton
This week is a Founders Feature where we “look back” at history for lessons we can apply from leaders who came before us.
Here are 6 principles and the supporting highlights I took away from the autobiography of Sam Walton: Made In America.
1. Believe you have a right to win.
“It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.”
2. Take advantage of not being taken seriously.
“They didn’t take me that seriously. They assumed we couldn’t be in it for the long haul. I think that misunderstanding worked to our advantage for a long time, and enabled Wal-Mart to fly under everybody’s radar until we were too far along to catch.”
3. Go the other way.
“Go the other way. 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.”
4. Efficient operators have more room for error.
“I have always had the soul of an operator, somebody who wants to make things work well, then better, then the best they possibly can.”
“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 you’re too inefficient.”
5. Do it right the first time.
“A lot of this goes back to what Deming told the Japanese a long time ago: do it right the first time. The natural tendency when you’ve got a problem in a company is to come up with a solution to fix it. Too often, that solution is nothing more than adding another layer. What you should be doing is going to the source of the problem to fix it, and sometimes that requires shooting the culprit.”
6. Don’t be afraid to be wrong.
“Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.”
“I didn’t dwell on my disappointment. The challenge at hand was simple enough to figure out: I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.”
Why biographies?
"There are thousands of years of history in which lots and lots of very smart people worked very hard and ran all types of experiments on how to create new businesses, invent new technology, new ways to manage, etc. They ran these experiments throughout their entire lives. At some point, somebody put these lessons down in a book.
For very little money and a few hours of time, you can learn from someone’s accumulated experience. There is so much more to learn from the past than we often realize. You could productively spend your time reading experiences of great people who have come before and you learn every time."
What’s the best source for high quality insights from biographies?
… hands down David Senra’s Founders podcast.
Seriously, check it out. Start there, then buy the book if you want to go deeper.
David has read over 300 biographies at this point, so in addition to sharing his biggest insights from the book, he also connects the dots with similar learnings from other founders.
Listen to David’s latest episode on Sam Walton here:
Thanks for reading!
Until next week, keep growing »
Scott​
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