Quotes from Sam Walton

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

We don't believe in taking a lot of money out of Wal-Mart's cash registers and giving it to charity for the simple reason that any debit has to be passed along to somebody—either our shareholders or our customers.

Sam wouldn't let us hedge on a price at all. Say the list price was $1.98, but we had only paid 50 cents. Initially, I would say, 'Well, it's originally $1.98, so why don't we sell it for $1.25?' And he'd say, 'No. We paid 50 cents for it. Mark it up 30 percent, and that's it. No matter what you pay for it, if we get a great deal, pass it on to the customer.' And of course that's what we did." It

One person seeking glory doesn't accomplish very much.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.

You can't just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.

Some families sell their stocks off a little bit at a time to live high, and then - boom - somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain.

I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.

Appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Sam Walton: I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who's going to have a great idea.

High expectations are the key to everything.

What we guard against around here is people saying, 'Let's think about it.' We make a decision. Then we act on it.

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.

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.

Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers' pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition—which is where we always plan to be.

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.

He proved that people can be motivated. The mountain is there, but somebody else has already climbed it.

What's really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody's theory that we're headed down the wrong path. As

Business is a competitive endeavor, and job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living. To

For my whole career in retail, I have stuck by one guiding principle. It's a simple one, and I have repeated it over and over and over in this book until I'm sure you're sick to death of it. But I'm going to say it again anyway: the secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want.

Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.

And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making. Of