To make my reading more related to the topic of my research, I switched the non-fiction book to "The Wal-Mart Way" (Don Soderquist, published by Thomas Nelson Inc. 2004). The author of the book was a senior vice chairman of the corporation in Wal-Mart, with more than 25 years’ career. In this way, he had been seeing the blossom of the enormous retail empire. In this book, he looked back of the history of the company, and explained Wal-Mart's core value related to its incredible success in profit and expansion. Today I finished reading the first 2 chapters which illustrated the history of Wal-Mart.
In the first chapter, the former senior vice chairman of Wal-Mart told a brief history of Wal-Mart. As everybody knows, Wal-Mart was founded by Sam Walton in 1962. But at that time, as Don pointed out, Wal-Mart was just a single store in Rogers, Arkansas. After several years of strive, Wal-Mart became a regional chain company of 15 stores, the largest customer of their supplier, Ben Franklin's, Don wrote. Then, in 1969, Sam believed that he won't get what he desired from Ben Franklin's company, so he decided to build up his own business network without any intermediate suppliers. Don described Sam's endeavor with admiration: "It was a big risk, it took a lot of courage and openness to change… Little by little, the dream would grow one successful Wal-Mart at a time."(p4). Soon Wal-Mart stepped into its booming era. As Don illustrated, from 1971 to 2004, the total revenue of Wal-Mart increased from $30.8 million to $256.3 billion.
The name of the second chapter is "Vision". Don claimed with proud that Wal-Mart was a pioneer in the innovation to new business models. Sam was always prepared to see things beforehand. Wal-Mart introduced brand new conceptions such as membership club, "Supercenter (A supermarket with a number of service shops outside)" and "Neighborhood Market (A small store in the community which does good to customers who need fast service)" to the retail business area. All these way, as Don pointed out, made Wal-Mart become the wealthiest company of the world as well as a great innovator to find methods to cater for the customers' need.
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3 comments:
Wal-Mart is the flagship in retail market. But in China, there are many other local companies did better than Wal-Mart,such as Aijia, United LiHua ,and even ex-HomeWorld. Today's Wal-Mart in China is quite like Metro,which is not a good sign.
Why did so many MNCS such as Metro,Google lose their way in China? This is a question that every MNC should think about.
Your introduction of your book during the class was quite impressive. You gave us a lot of details about Wal-mart and your comment was unique~From your summary I could see you read the book very carefully and evaluated the material sufficiently, but I think you shoud eliminate some details. On the whole, you are adequately prepared and I learnt a lot from both your summary and introductory. Thanks a lot!
hi,I'm LULU. I am really interested in you topic. wal-malt is a famous company.In the class,you expressed your summary quit clearly. Also, you give several example to explain the theory.In addtion,I thinkg you adequately prepared,since you do support your opinion.finally, I think you distinguish between fact and opinion.for example, you said" the anthor stated ....".well done!
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