Values don’t change, they evolve; Wisdom from Walmart’s Sam Walton

Over the years of book reading, I finally developed a taste for the kind of genre that I like. At first, I thought business books or self-help would be my cup of tea, turns out most of them are full of fluff where the main message can be condensed into a 10 mins YouTube summary video. Then I tried lots of other types of books from fiction, history to scientific books, but the one that I consistently enjoy is reading autobiography. I love learning from a person’s life story, how they navigate successes and manage failures.

Sam Walton’s story on how he built Walmart took me by surprise. I had pretty low expectations, I thought some of the concepts might already be irrelevant since it was released in 1992, before the internet age, and a lot of the stories are referring to the 50–80s. I am amazed by the amount of wisdom that I can get from this book, not just that, some of the ideas are still relevant to be adopted right away. This is officially at the top of the list of my favorite books, along with Disney’s Bob Iger autobiography. The learnings that I’ll share are mostly biased towards my current role as a Product leader in Tokopedia, but hopefully, you can internalize them to your situation, or at least spark your interest in reading the book.

My key takeaway from this book is that values don’t change, they evolve. Despite being born nearly a decade ago, and lived through very different eras like The Great Depression, World War 2, and the Economic Boom, Sam Walton pretty much guides his way with the same business principles that are now popularized by Silicon Valley Start-ups. Things like challenging the status quo, or fail fast and cheap, changes are in the context and the definition. For example, the term “fast” at his time might mean 2–5 years, by our current standard, there were a lot of startups that already reached hundreds of millions of valuation and also died within the same period. Though there are lots that I learned, I want to share three learnings that resonated most with me.

1. Be good at Adopt & Adapt

The one thing that Sam Walton iterated over and over again in his book was the importance of learning from your competitors. He was obsessed with visiting other retail stores to see what are they doing right, and how can he adopt the idea and adapt it to Walmart way. Rather than running away from competition, he embraced them and use them as his most efficient learning tool. Another important detail is that he always had his tape recorder and yellow legal pad whenever he was out visiting stores. He was not just casually looking at the inside of the store, he took notes of the things he saw, and ask important questions to the store clerk while recording them. This simple gesture is what makes his Adopt & Adapt technique very efficiently. I surely am guilty of over-trusting my memories, underestimating the importance of documenting.

Being good at adopt and adapt is especially valuable in Product Development. All this time I am proud that I only use Tokopedia to shop online, as if I’m showing my loyalty to the company, but I was wrong. Learning from Sam, I should’ve been actively shopping at other shops, whether it’s online or offline, being the early adopters of every innovation. Observing competitors turn out to be the easiest and cheapest way to validate an idea. However, the hardest thing in this exercise is how to be customer-obsessed, and not competitor-obsessed. I found some product managers go into this rabbit hole of copying each and every move of their competitors. They simply think that whatever their competitor’s innovation is also good for their customers. This is dangerous and eventually could kill its product due to the lack of differentiation. Reading the book, I could tell Sam was good at prioritizing ideas, he knows his customers well enough to adopt and adapt only the things that Walmart’s customers care about.

2. Eat What You Cook

Product selection is the bread and butter for commerce, and at Walmart, it’s controlled by their merchandising team. Walmart centralizes this team at their headquarters to be able to plan supplies better and buy more in bulk to have more price bargains. The problem with centralization is that the merchandisers have less experience in the stores, which makes them often misjudge selections that the customers would like. To tackle this issue they created this program called Eat What You Cook. Once every quarter, Walmart’s merchandiser have to act as a manager of one of the Walmart store. This way, the merchandisers were not just looking at their chosen SKUs as sales numbers in a spreadsheet, but also seeing first hand how the customers interact with them in the store. After they have “eaten what they cook”, most of them have changed their perspective on what products are suitable for their customers at the stores.

This is relevant to current tech companies, especially with the internet dissolving the physical boundaries for customer reach. A small change in the app could impact millions of customers. It’s the product team’s job to care for the customers but product managers are often are too busy sitting on their desks, trying to find ideas that they think are good for the customers without actually talking to them, I know I am. Just like those merchandisers at Walmart, I might be blinded by my judgment. So swapping roles such as Walmart’s Eat What You Cook program is a good idea to bridge the knowledge gap. For example, the operations team is the one taking the hit on the ground for every product change. I think swapping roles with ops can give valuable perspective to product managers to do their job better. By the way, this problem is not specific to the product team, the same goes with marketing vs partnerships, or tech vs design.

3. Store Within a Store

This one is about trust. In Walmart, they have this saying of a Store Within a Store, which means they trust their store managers to operate their business independently despite potential missteps. Entrusting them with every bit of information to thrive such as the details of their store’s profit and costs, and also creating a healthy competitive environment even inside the company such as being transparent on their ranking compared to other Walmart stores. This gave their store managers incentive to win.

Autonomy is a term that tech companies nowadays use pretty loosely. Product managers are frequently called the CEO of their products, but in reality, that’s not always the case. Lack of information transparency and undebatable top-down ideas are often in the way to achieve an autonomous team. As a product leader, I am still struggling to find the balance between autonomy and control. Sometimes I feel like taking control of everything is the most efficient way to get the job done, however little did I know that this could create a negative long-term impact on the team. I learn that the smart people love autonomy, the challenge is how to make their autonomous role is synergize with a thousand more autonomous roles in the company. Walmart did it by splitting responsibility clearly within the roles, which gives their employees autonomy in that area. In the world of rapid changes, this is something I will constantly work on as a manager to create a well-functioning team.

These are the three values that resonated with me while I read the book, of course, there are a lot more learnings, but I suggest you read it yourself if you find this article interesting. I will end with the 10 lessons that Sam Walton write in the book while he builds Walmart.

• Commit to your business
• Share your profits
• Motivate your partners
• Communicate everything
• Appreciate your associates
• Celebrate your success
• Listen to everyone
• Exceed customer’s expectations
• Control your expenses
• Swim upstream, find your niche

“I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity an obligation; every possession a duty.” — John D. Rockefeller, JR.