Made in America: A Story of Traditional Success
When we think of the great American success story, we think of today’s contemporaries — the Steve Jobs’, Mark Zuckerberg’s, and the Jeff Bezos’ of the tech community. While these tech luminaries certainly deserve the accolades that have been bestowed upon them for taking advantage of the technological revolution, we seem to have forgotten those whom they looked upon as the business and thought leaders of their age; those from whom they drew inspiration to create new, groundbreaking businesses. Certainly one person that I am sure they have all heard and read about is Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart. Without further adieu, let me introduce the book that I read to discover more about Sam Walton:
Sam Walton: Made in America is not the traditional biography of a successful start-up founder that you would have read about. It is, in fact, an auto-biography that Sam Walton has written about his own life, with respect to Wal-Mart, framed in such a way as to bring clarity and cohesion to the decisions he made to grow Wal-Mart into one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Given the nature of the book’s structure and the fact that it written through the lens of Sam-Walton himself, you will find positive and negative aspects about it. Let’s start with the positive.
If you are looking for fundamental examples of how to create a competitive advantage for your company, you can read about how Wal-Mart differentiated itself from its competitors in very fundamental ways; ex. their focus on small, underserved communities in rural/semi-rural USA that were being ignored by the likes of large discount retailers. You can also find that they follow certain patterns of business practices that enabled them to outperform their competition — most notably:
- Their ability to cost-cut and be more lean about their operations.
- Full, Vertical Integration in their business and reducing reliance on external distributors. Then, leveraging this advantage, to force suppliers to offer them better prices.
- Leveraging technology in a very technology-averse industry to streamline their operations and to gather information quickly.
I would even go as far as to suggest that there are many practices from the Lean Startup that Sam Walton (far before the publishing of that book) utilized. For instance, the ideas around designing experiments & feedback loops and attempting to do things manually before pursuing automation.
Now for the negative. Good things aside, you will find that the book, having been written from the founder’s perspective, has certainly been shaped to paint Wal-Mart and Sam Walton in the best light possible. This means largely focusing on the positive, while occasionally bringing light on the negative. In addition, we are presented with the representation that Wal-Mart was the plucky upstart that disrupted an industry. This certainly would have been the case starting out, yet perhaps not as much as it grew into a $100 million business and then into a several billion dollar business. We do not get into the more methodical ways that they may have ruthlessly battled their competitors and ways in which they might have throttled other upstarts that started to challenge them.
All in all, I would recommend this book if you are interested in reading a great story about a fascinating founder and a fascinating company. You will be presented with concrete examples about how Sam Walton grew Wal-Mart from zero to a hundred and there are things that you can take away from reading this that you could apply to your business, organization, or team — such as how to reward those whom deserve recognition and how to spur competition to elicit the best results. This is certainly not one to miss out if you’re fascinated about the tales of those who have shaped our way of life.
