Sam Walton Quotes

Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.

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.

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.

I don’t know what would have happened to Wal-Mart if we had laid low and never stirred up the competition. My guess is that we would have remained a strictly regional operator.

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

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.

There are only four things in life that matter. The first is happiness and I’ll sell you the other three for a dollar.

Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.

I learned early on that one of the secrets of campus leadership was the simplest thing of all: speak to people coming down the sidewalk before they speak to you. I would always look ahead and speak to the person coming toward me. If I knew them I would call them by name, but even if I didn’t I would still speak to them.

Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They’re absolutely free and worth a fortune.

Leaders must always put their people before themselves. If you do that, your business will take care of itself.

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.

Individuals don’t win in business, teams do.

You can learn from everybody.

You can’t just keep doing what works one time, everything around you is changing. To succeed, stay out in front of change.

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

We’re all working together; that’s the secret.