39 of the Best Sam Walton Quotes About Success, Innovation & More

Photo of a Walmart store
 

By Tricia McKinnon

The first Walmart store opened in Arkansas in 1962. Fast forward over 60 years and Walmart is the largest retailer in the world with sales in 2022 of $611 billion. Not bad for a company with such humble beginnings. Sam Walton, who founded Walmart was an astute businessman with many words of wisdom that you can apply in your own career and life. Here are some of his best words of advice. 

On managing people

1. “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.”

2. “If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them—not that they are working for you.”

3. "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."

4. “My role has been to pick good people, and give them the maximum authority and responsibility.”

5. “Share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. In turn, they will treat you as a partner, and together you will all perform beyond your wildest expectations.”

6. “Communicate everything you possibly can to your partners. 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.”

7.  “Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. To push responsibility down in your organization, and to force good ideas to bubble up within it, you must listen to what your associates are trying to tell you.”    


On failure and challenges

 8. “I have never been one to dwell on reverses…it’s not just a corny saying that you can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough.” 

9. “I can tell you this: though: after a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Walmart’s phenomenal success has been that very tendency. “ 

10. “Had we been capitalized or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be we might not ever have tried the Harrisons or the Rogers of the Springdales and all those other little towns we went into in the early days. It turned out that the first big lesson we learned was that there was much more business out there in small-town American than anybody including me had ever dreamed of.”

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

12. “You can make positives out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough. I’ve always thought of problems as challenges.”

13. “Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.”

14. “When somebody made a bad mistake – whether it was myself or anybody else we talked about it, admitted it, tried to figure out how to correct it, and then moved on to the next day’s work.”

15. “Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures. Don’t take yourself so seriously. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up. Have fun. “

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On achieving success

16. “High expectations are the key to everything.” 

17. “What we guard against around here is people saying, ‘Let’s think about it.’ We make a decision. Then we act on it.” 

18. “I’ve always had a strong bias towards action.”

19. “The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.”

20. “If you love your work, you'll be out there every day trying to do it the best you possibly can, and pretty soon everybody around will catch the passion from you -- like a fever.”

21. “If everybody else is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

22. "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."

23. “Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don’t become too predictable.”

24. “We couldn’t care less about what the forecast is or what the market says we ought to do.”

25. “It’s true that I was 44 when we opened our first Walmart in 1962…and like most other overnight successes, it was about 20 years in the making.”

26.  “In the early days of Walmart, this period we’ve been talking about, I really believe our emphasis on item promotion helped us to make up for a lot of short comings we had – an unsophisticated buying program, a less than ideal merchandise assortment and practically no back-office support. It was another way of swimming upstream. We made up for what we didn’t have by being merchants.”

27.  “Another way we tried hard to make up for our lack of experience and sophistication was to spend as much time as we could checking out the competition. It’s something I did from the beginning and it’s something I insisted all our managers do.”

28.  “Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. You can make a lot of different mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.”

29.  “It never occurred to me that I might lose; to me, it was almost as if I had a right to win. Thinking like that often seems to turn into sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

30.  “Capital isn't scarce. Vision is.” 


On innovation

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

32.  "I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America. I am just trying to get ideas, any kind of ideas that will help our company. Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else."

33.  “Look for the good. If you get one good idea, that’s one more than you went into the store with, and we must try to incorporate it into our company. We’re really not concerned with what they’re doing wrong; we’re concerned with what they’re doing right and everyone is doing something right.”

34.  “Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalized in these remote, small communities, contributed mightily to the way we have grown as a company.”

On customer satisfaction

35.  “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.” 

36.  “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.”

37. “If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you're taking care of the people in the stores. That's the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart's success.”

38.  “If we work together, we'll lower the cost of living for everyone...we'll give the world an opportunity to see what it's like to save and have a better life.”

39. “Exceed your customers’ expectations. Give them what they want — and a little more. Make good on all your mistakes, and don't make excuses — apologize. Stand behind everything you do.”

Tricia McKinnonComment