In the first part of this series, we covered the first five rules that Walton left us that can help us run a successful company. Here are the remaining five rules:
Rule 6: 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. Show enthusiasm βΓ always. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song. Then make everybody else sing with you. Don't do a hula on Wall Street. It's been done. Think up your own stunt. All of this is more important, and more fun, than you think, and it really fools the competition. "Why should we take those cornballs at Wal-Mart seriously?"
Rule 7: Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines βΓ the ones who actually talk to the customer βΓ are the only ones who really know what's going on out there. You'd better find out what they know. This really is what total quality is all about. 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.
Rule 8: Exceed your customers' expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want, and a little more. Let them know you appreciate them. Make good on all your mistakes, and don't make excuses. Apologize. Stand behind everything you do. 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.
Rule 9: Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage. For 25 years running βΓ long before Wal-Mart was known as the nation's largest retailer βΓ we ranked number one in our industry for the lowest ratio of expenses to sales. 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.
Rule 10: Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. 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. But be prepared for a lot of folks to wave you down and tell you you're headed the wrong way. I guess in all my years, what I heard more often than anything was: a town of less than 50,000 population cannot support a discount store for very long.
"Those are some pretty ordinary rules, some would even say simplistic. The hard part, the real challenge, is to constantly figure out ways to execute them. You can't just keep doing what works one time, because everything around you is always changing. To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change."
Now the most important thing. Do you think that Wal-Mart still abides by the rules laid out by his founder? In what ways is the company still on the road, and in what ways has the company shifted away? Just as Mr. Walton mentioned, everything is changing around us, and, paraphrasing Charles Darwin, it is the most adaptable (Company) to change that will win the race.
