Great Throughts Treasury

"Remain a corporation and retain control if you like, but behave as a servant leader in a partnership."

"Success has always had its price and I learned that lesson the hard way when Forbes names me the so-called ‘richest man in America.’ The next thing we knew all these reporters and photographers arrived, I get to take pictures of me diving into a swimming pool full of money they imagined I had, or to watch me light big fat cigars with hundred-dollar bills while the hootchy-kootchy girls danced by the lake."

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

"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."

"That’s one thing we never did much of while we were building Wal-Mart, talk about ourselves or do a whole lot of bragging outside the Wal-Mart family – except when we had to convince some banker or some Wall Street financier that we intended to amount to something someday, that we were worth taking a chance on."

"Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs."

"The airplane turned into a great tool for scouting real estate. From up in the air we could check out traffic flows, see which way cities and towns were growing, and evaluate the location of the competition – if there was any. Then we would develop our real estate strategy for that market."

"The media usually portrayed me as a really cheap, eccentric recluse, sort of a hillbilly who more or less slept with his dogs in spite of having billions of dollars stashed away in a cave. Then when the stock market crashed in 1987, and Wal-Mart stock dropped along with everything else in the market, everybody wrote that I’d lost a half billion dollars. When they asked me about it I said, ‘It’s only paper,’ and they had a good time with that."

"The folks on the front lines – the ones who actually talk to the customer – are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there."

"The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want. And really, if you think about it from the point of view of the customer, you want everything: a wide assortment of good quality merchandise; the lowest possible prices; guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy; friendly, knowledgeable service; convenient hours; free parking; a pleasant shopping experience."

"The truth is when those Butler Brothers folks turned down my discounting idea, I got a little angry, and maybe that helped me decide to swim upstream on my own."

"The more they know, the more they’ll understand. The more they understand, the more they’ll care. Once they care, there’s no stopping them."

"There’s a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of."

"The two most important words I ever wrote were on that first Wal-Mart sign, "Satisfaction Guaranteed". They're still up there, and they have made all the difference."

"Though Helen [Wife for more than 50 years] bore more than her share, through our combined efforts the kids received your everyday heartland upbringing based on the same old bedrock values: a belief in the importance of hard work, honesty, neighborliness, and thrift."

"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."

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

"We couldn’t care less about what is forecast or what the market says we ought to do. If we listened very seriously to that sort of stuff, we never would have gone into small-town discounting in the first place."

"We let folks know we're interested in them and that they're vital to us. Because they are."

"You can make a positive out of the most negative if you work at it hard enough."

"We’re all working together; that’s the secret."

"We sell for less."