America, land of “free-enterprise” has millions of companies in its market. The metropolitan statistical area of Houston, Texas in fact has over 600,000 businesses, most employing from 2 to 10 employees. As companies grow in the number of people they employ, fewer and fewer companies surround them. Most companies never grow beyond the smallest group size for many reasons. Some companies grow to become the target of the competition or the “model” on which the smarter more savvy managers base their practices to achieve “best of class” status in their industry or market. Wal*Mart has certainly earned its position at the pinnacle of American business and global retail dominance.

Founded by a retailer named Sam Walton with his brother in 1962, Wal*Mart has become that company to watch and emulate in the twenty first century. Walton, a “Ben Franklin” franchisee between 1945 and 1962 collaborated with his brother Bud Walton to found the first Wal*Mart in 1962 in rural Arkansas. Their strategy was simple. They opened discount-merchandising stores in rural America where big business and big retailers typically ignored “fly over” territory. The strategy of mass buying power and passing on the savings to customers took flight as the company grew steadily into the seventies and eighties.

As Walton situated stores in small towns with populations between 5,000 and 25,000 he implemented his plan “To put good-sized stores into little one-horse towns which everybody else was ignoring.” He thought that if they offered, “Prices as good or better than stores in cities that were four hours away by car…people would shop at home.” David Glass, CEO, explained, “We are always pushing from the inside out. We never jump and then back fill.”

Walton successfully instilled a small town friendly caring atmosphere in America’s number one company by indoctrinating “associates” in the idea that Wal*Mart “Has its own way of doing things.” He habitually shopped the competitors like K-Mart and Target. He would count the number of vehicles in their parking lots and “measure their shelf space.”

Sam Walton believed the number one key to the company’s success lay in the way the company treated their “associates.” He felt that if he wanted his associates to care for the customers then the associates must know that the company was taking care of them. Do to his foresight in people management the company many associates became wealthy as the stock price continued to climb the value turned everyday individuals in to wealthy people. Walton discouraged such shows of wealth claiming that such behavior did not promote the company’s reason for existence, to take care of the customer.

Walton described his management style as “Management by walking around.” Walton said about managing people that, “You’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and you’ve got to check up on them.” This philosophy required sharing information and the numbers. The target was to empower associates, maintain technological superiority, and build loyalty within associates, customers and suppliers.

Free flow of information to associates gave associates a true and actual sense of ownership of the organization and allowed them to exercise authority to continually improve their processes especially their main institutional profit driver, supply chain management and process improvement. One of their key tools to managing an element of their chain, inventory, is called “traiting.”