Top 98 Sam Walton Quotes
#1. Control your expenses better than your competition. This is where you can always find the competitive advantage.
Sam Walton
#2. Information is power, and the gain you get from empowering your associates more than offsets the risk of informing your competitor.
Sam Walton
#3. Maybe I was born to be a merchant, maybe it was fate. I don't know about that. But I know this for sure: I loved retail from the very beginning.
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#4. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.
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#5. 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.
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#6. Money and ownership alone aren't enough. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score.
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#7. Communicate everything you can to your associates. The more they know, the more they care. Once they care, there is no stopping them.
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#8. We're all working together; that's the secret.
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#9. There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I'll sell you the other three for a dollar.
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#10. 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.
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#11. Job security lasts only as long as the customer is satisfied. Nobody owes anybody else a living.
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#12. Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.
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#13. If you want a successful business, your people must feel that you are working for them - not that they are working for you.
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#14. It is unhealthy to marinate in your own press clippings.
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#15. I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.
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#16. I probably have traveled and walked into more variety stores than anybody in America.
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#17. There is only one boss. The customer ...
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#18. There's absolutely no limit to what plain, ordinary, working people can accomplish if they're given the opportunity and encouragement to do their best.
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#19. If I had to single out one element in my life that has made a difference for me, it would be a passion to compete.
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#20. All of us profit from being corrected - if we're corrected in a positive way.
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#21. I not only knew I wanted to go into retailing, I also knew I wanted to go into business for myself.
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#22. Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys.
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#23. Curiosity doesn't kill the cat; it kills the competition.
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#24. 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.
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#25. Great ideas come from everywhere if you just listen and look for them. You never know who's going to have a great idea.
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#26. If one of our customers comes into the store without a smile, I'll give them one of mine.
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#27. I was asked what I thought about the recession. I thought about it and decided not to take part.
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#28. The way management treats their associates is exactly how the associates will then treat the customers.
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#29. 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.
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#30. What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?
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#31. Capital isn't hard to find; intuition, yes.
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#32. Individuals don't win in business, teams do.
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#33. You can make a positive out of most any negative if you work at it hard enough.
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#34. I had confidence that as long as we did our work well and were good to our customers, there would be no limit to us.
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#35. Exceed your customer's expectations. If you do, they'll come back over and over. Give them what they want - and a little more.
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#36. It's just paper - all I own is a pickup truck and a little Wal-Mart stock.
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#38. One thing my and mother and dad shared completely was their approach to money - they just didn't spend it.
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#39. To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.
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#40. You can't just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.
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#41. The key to success is to get out into the store and listen to what the associates have to say.
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#42. A computer can tell you down to the dime what you've sold, but it can never tell you how much you could have sold.
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#43. I believe in always having goals, and always setting them high.
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#44. The job of senior management is to cultivate an environment where store managers can learn from the market and from each other.
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#45. I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment.
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#46. High expectations is the key to everything.
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#47. Watson, Sr., was running IBM, he decided they would never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company. That may have been one of the greatest single reasons why IBM was successful.
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#48. The way management treats associates is exactly how the associates will treat the customers.
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#49. The small stores were just destined to disappear, at least in the numbers they once existed, because the whole thing is driven by the customers, who are free to choose where to shop.
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#50. I think my constant fiddling and meddling with the status quo may have been one of my biggest contributions to the later success of Wal-Mart.
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#51. Don't get so stuck in your ways that you can't change.
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#52. He proved that people can be motivated. The mountain is there, but somebody else has already climbed it.
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#53. Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.
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#54. I'd hate to see any descendants of mine fall into the category of what I'd call 'idle rich' - a group I've never had much use for.
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#55. I've always been driven to buck the system.
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#57. What we guard against around here is people saying, 'Let's think about it.' We make a decision. Then we act on it.
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#58. Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.
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#59. Loosen up, and everybody around you will loosen up.
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#60. Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.
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#61. You can make a lot of 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.
Sam Walton
#62. I learned this early on in the variety business: You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.
Sam Walton
#63. Celebrate your success and find humor in your failures. Don't take yourself so seriously. Loosen up and everyone around you will loosen up. Have fun and always show enthusiasm. When all else fails, put on a costume and sing a silly song.
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#64. All that hullabaloo about somebody's net worth is just stupid, and it's made my life a lot more complex and difficult.
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#65. Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customers' pockets. Every time we save them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition - which is where we always plan to be.
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#66. I learned a lesson which has stuck with me all through the years: you can learn from everybody. I didn't just learn from reading every retail publication I could get my hands on, I probably learned the most from studying what John Dunham was doing across the street
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#67. Some families sell their stocks off a little bit at a time to live high, and then - boom - somebody takes them over, and it all goes down the drain.
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#68. Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.
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#69. We let folks know we're interested in them and that they're vital to us. cause they are.
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#70. Commit to your business. Believe in it more than anybody else.
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#71. I guess in all my years, what I heard more than anything else was: a mere town cannot support a discount store for very long.
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#72. I loved retail from the beginning, and I still love it today.
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#73. 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.
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#74. 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.
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#75. If everybody is doing it one way, there's a good chance you can find your niche by going exactly in the opposite direction.
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#76. One person seeking glory doesn't accomplish very much.
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#77. I'd still say that visiting the stores and listening to our folks was one of the most valuable uses of my time as an executive. But really, our best ideas usually do come from the folks in the stores. Period.
Sam Walton
#78. If you don't listen to your customers, someone else will.
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#79. High expectations are the key to everything.
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#80. There's a lot more business out there in small town America than I ever dreamed of.
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#81. The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.
Sam Walton
#82. Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.
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#83. I think I overcame every single one of my personal shortcomings by the sheer passion I brought to my work. I don't know if you're born with this kind of passion, or if you can learn it. But I do know you need it.
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#84. I got into retailing because I wanted a real job.
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#85. Most everything I've done I've copied from somebody else.
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#86. I've never been one to dwell on reverses.
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#87. Lose your smile and lose your customers.
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#88. Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.
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#89. Keep everybody guessing as to what your next trick is going to be. Don't become too predictable.
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#90. In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn't pay my employees well.
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#91. I've owned about 18 airplanes over the years, and I've never bought one of them new.
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#92. Focus on something the customer wants, and then deliver it.
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#93. The point I'm trying to make is that we as a family have bent over backward not to take advantage of Wal-Mart, not to press our ownership position unfairly, and everybody in the company knows it. Alice
Sam Walton
#94. Expenses should never exceed one percent of our purchases.
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#95. Give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people.
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#96. After a lifetime of swimming upstream, I am convinced that one of the real secrets to Wal-mart's phenomenal success has been that very tendency.
Sam Walton
#97. I had to get up everyday with my mind set on improving something.
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#98. And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making. Of
Sam Walton
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