Walmart

"All the successful people I ever met were fanatics about focus. Sam Walton, who built Walmart, thought only about stores day and night. He visited store after store. Even Warren Buffett, who today is my partner, is a man super focused on his formula. He acquires different businesses but always within the same formula, and that’s what works. Today our formula is to buy companies with a good name and to come up with our management system. But we can only do this when we have people available to go to the company. We cannot do what the American private equity firms do. They buy any company, send someone there, and constitute a team. We only know how to do this with our team, people within our culture. Then, focus is also essential.22 Our CEOs’ business"

"Sol Price was a retailing visionary whom Sam Walton (founder of Walmart), Jim Sinegal (cofounder of Costco), and Bernard Marcus (cofounder of Home Depot)"

"And Fields' career path is typical. Walmart recruits nearly all of its managers internally, after they have been rigorously tested. The message is clear: if you are loyal, perform well and work like an animal, one day it could be your turn to become a manager, even without a college education. It is "the workplace of opportunities. Here you can go as far as your hard work and talent take you."[272](private://read/01jas9tvg84jycb27616w1f9k8/#note-272)"

""Give me a W ... Give me an A ... Give me an L ..." The sounds echo in the empty venue early in the morning. "Who's number one?" "THE CUSTOMER!" It's just another day at work in a discount department store. Every day the employees shout out the company's mandatory cheer.[270](private://read/01jas9tvg84jycb27616w1f9k8/notes.html#note-270) They love their job as others love their favorite football team. Walmart is the world's largest chain of discount department stores. The chain started with one store in Rogers, Arkansas in 1962 and first grew in the USA, but then internationally as well. The inspiration for the cheer was originally taken from a Korean tennis ball factory in the 70s that he visited with his wife, according to founder Sam Walton's autobiography.[271](private://read/01jas9tvg84jycb27616w1f9k8/notes.html#note-271) "It was the dirtiest place I had seen in my entire life, but Sam was very impressed. It was the first time he saw a corporate cheer," says Helen Walton in her husband's autobiography."

"Walmart invests heavily in internal competitions. When the company's pre-tax profits were over eight percent, Sam Walton danced the hula-hula on Wall Street after a bet. Most in the industry then had half as large profit margins. A manager would wrestle a bear if he lost a bet that the staff could not break a production record. Walmart does everything to break the monotony, although the spectacles have been toned down in recent years. But it is also a demanding workplace."

"reviving a run-down department store not only requires skill and dexterity but also luck in a multiplied form. Anyone who dares to take on such a company must know the upcoming trends and the buying behavior of customers. No American department store chain has been able to gain a permanent foothold in Germany. Woolworth had to close its doors, America's leading supermarket giant Walmart has failed in this country, and the English fashion chain Marks & Spencer was also unable to prevail. In contrast, there is again the global success of brands like Foster Grant, Schweppes, or Burger King. Buying these is part of the success strategy of the Berggruen-Franklin duo."