University of Minnesota - UMN Executive Leadership Insights
Made in America
Book

Made in America

My Story

Sam Walton and John Huey
Doubleday Broadway, 1992
First Edition: 1992
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Applicable

Recommendation

Wal-Mart is not just a gigantic retail company. It is the ultimate retailing juggernaut, setting the bar for products, packaging and pricing, and demolishing its competitors. Given its staggering influence, some would say Wal-Mart has become the very embodiment of retailing. The personality of Wal-Mart’s late founder, Sam Walton, is still a driving force, a source of homespun, countrified wisdom and old-fashioned common sense. In this engaging autobiography, Walton explains how he built his mammoth corporation from a small five-and-dime store in Bentonville, Arkansas. America’s ultimate entrepreneur was clearly a determined steamroller as a businessman, but, as his book makes clear, he was also a charmer.

Summary

As American as Apple Pie

Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder, died in 1992, still believing that the average person can accomplish anything, given encouragement and opportunity. And so he did. This plainspoken, simple-living Midwesterner developed the colossal Wal-Mart empire, the largest retailing organization in history. No competitor comes close. How did Walton create this enormous enterprise? His remarkable life story is as American as apple pie.

Samuel Moore Walton was born in 1918 in Kingfisher, Oklahoma. When he was five, his family moved to Springfield, Missouri, and it continued to move to a series of small Missouri towns during his childhood. Walton was an entrepreneur from an early age. He sold magazine subscriptions when he was seven or eight. As a boy, he became the “youngest Eagle Scout in the history of the state of Missouri.” He was president of his high school’s student body. An accomplished athlete, he led his high school basketball team to a state championship and quarterbacked his football team, also state champions. Everything Walton attempted, he did superlatively well.

In 1940, he graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in business...

About the Authors

Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. Forbes magazine identified him as the richest man in the U.S. from 1985 to 1988. John Huey is the editor in chief at Time Inc.

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