The Wal-Mart decade

Publishers Weekly

Since Sam Walton's death in 1992, Wal-Mart has grown into one of the world's largest and most controversial companies. Slater's latest (after The Eye of the Storm: How John Chambers Steered Cisco Through the Technology Collapse) delivers an insider's look at the retailer's meteoric rise. Wal-Mart's secret to success is well-known: by selling products for less, the firm makes less profit per product, but is able to sell more products and keep inventories low. This strategy brought the company incredible success before Walton's death, but Wal-Mart had yet to hit its real growth spurt. It was doing $43.8 billion in sales in 1992. Just three years later, under CEO David Glass, sales hit $100 billion. Glass "took Wal-Mart out of Middle America and made it into a global brand," explains Slater. He shows how Glass and his colleagues stayed true to Walton's idiosyncratic management style while investing in the technologies and logistics operations that a multibillion-dollar company needs. Slater saves some of the most compelling chapters for the book's end, when he describes how the firm is besieged by legions of bankrupt small-business owners, muckraking journalists and, of course, lawyers. Slater reports Wal-Mart is the most sued entity in the U.S. "I don't know how things happened," says Glass, "but you suddenly become a target rather than everybody's favorite." Thanks to his access to top executives, Slater shows how Wal-Mart survived (by beefing up its PR department) and thrived (grabbing the top spot on the 2002 Fortune 500 list). (June 2) Forecast: Given Slater's previous successes (he also wrote Jack Welch and the GE Way) and the widespread interest in Wal-Mart's business model, this should sell well to suit-wearing readers. Those who enjoyed Walton's 1992 memoir or any of the slew of the negative Wal-Mart books published in the 1990s will be interested, too. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Slater, a former reporter for Time magazine and a prolific business author (Jack Welch and the GE Way), knows that after the founder of a successful business dies, the firm generally experiences significant problems. Here he turns his focus on Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, to find out how it has fared since founder Sam Walton died in 1992. It turns out that Mr. Sam, as he was known, started to put his succession team in place before he discovered that he had cancer. Using Walton's business principles, the team more than tripled revenues to over $216 billion (that's billion) by 2001. It did so by expanding into areas that the founder was not interested in, for example, groceries and international markets. Unfortunately, Slater skates over criticisms, like mandatory unpaid overtime or Wally World's effect on small businesses. In addition, the shallow presentation doesn't fit the subject; superficial research and repetitive writing undercut a subject that should have had significant appeal to management professors. In short, this book is too academic for public libraries while too poorly executed for academic libraries. It probably would have worked better as an article in a business journal. Not recommended.-Patrick J. Brunet, Western Wisconsin Technical Coll., LaCrosse Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.