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...Carnegie's eggs were made of steel. Fast-forward to today, when average workers have become rich at Microsoft and Dell by loading up on their employers' stock (thus the Dellionaires). Bill Gates' portfolio is still overwhelmingly Microsoft. Bad planning, Bill. And how about the folks who retire from Wal-Mart and can shop at Tiffany because they bought Sam Walton's stock on the cheap? One stock. One company...
...Wal-Mart is an exception because it focuses on management instead of technology. It shares just about every piece of market data it collects—we’re talking petabytes here—with its suppliers, which has proven so vital for the consumer products industry that Proctor & Gamble, makers of everything from Charmin to Crisco to Cover Girl, have an office employing more than 200 people in Wal-Mart’s small-town Arkansas headquarters. Its logistics and distribution system is smart enough to know which ethnicities of Barbie sell better in which stores. It pioneered...
...told. Yet few saw the tremendous productivity improvements that were promised, something that many in the tech industry could have predicted. It’s an old joke among the technology companies that the only firms that know how to use technology well—with rare exceptions like Wal-Mart—are technology companies themselves...
...Walton’s fortune starts to make a little more sense, then, as you begin to understand the scope of Wal-Mart’s achievement. It manages its suppliers and its customers better than any company in America, and it knows more about its products and its prices too, allowing it to undersell all its competitors. It invests in technology but only buys the software and hardware that will improve productivity, preferring to let other companies jump on faddish technology bandwagons. Case in point: Wal-Mart waited longer than just about every retailer in the country to launch...
Microsoft aside, it’s unusual for someone talking about the business practices of one company to be able to claim economic ramifications applicable to the whole country, but McKinsey shows that to be precisely the case with Wal-Mart. From its founding in Bentonville in 1962 to today’s 1600 stores, 1000 supercenters, 1000 international stores and 500 Sam’s Clubs, Wal-Mart has gotten to the point where it is a macroeconomic force in the countries in which it operates...