当代最伟大的12位企业家

11. 山姆•沃尔顿

公司名称：沃尔玛

销售额:4,469亿美元

市值：365亿美元

员工人数：200万

建议：给人们想要的。

    1984年，66岁的山姆•沃尔顿穿上草裙，在华尔街跳起了草裙舞。这滑稽的一幕是他输掉一场赌局后的代价。他与首席执行官戴维•格拉斯打赌，赌沃尔玛（Wal-Mart Stores）的利润率，结果输了。

    “大多数人当时可能都认为，不过是个可笑的董事长，耍些老套的公关噱头而已，”后来沃尔顿在自传中写道【《富甲美国（零售大王沃尔顿自传）》（Sam Walton: Made in America），由时代公司（Time Inc.）总编约翰•休伊共同撰写】。“他们并不知道，这种事情每天都在沃尔玛上演。”

    是的，这类事情，包括努力工作以及（不管你信不信）创新。1992年去世（卒年74岁）的沃尔顿自开设第一家沃尔玛商店三十年后，沃尔玛成为了美国历史上最成功的零售商，究其原因是他给零售业带来了效率和纪律，而且在这方面总是遥遥领先于竞争对手。

    沃尔玛成功的基石归根结底是以尽可能低的价格出售商品。沃尔顿取消中间环节，直接与制造商讨价还价，尽量降低进货成本，因此才做到了这一点。“低价进货，大量铺货，廉价销售”的想法成为了一个可持续的业务模式，很大程度上是因为在戴维•格拉斯（沃尔顿后来的接班人）的要求下，沃尔顿大举投资软件，依靠沃尔玛收银台的条形码扫描实现了对消费行为的实时追踪。

    他将这些实时数据与供应商分享，建立了合作关系，使得沃尔玛能在一定程度上敦促制造商提高生产效率。随着沃尔玛的影响力扩大，它几乎可以决定很多供应商产品的价格、产量、交付、包装和质量等因素。结果：沃尔顿颠覆了供应商-零售商的关系。

11. Sam Walton

Company: Wal-Mart Stores

Sales: $446.9 billion

Market Value:$36.5 billion

Employees: 2.0 million

Advice: Give the people what they want.

    In 1984, a 66-year-old Sam Walton put on a grass skirt and did the hula dance on Wall Street. His wacky performance was in the service of a lost bet over Wal-Mart's profit margins with his chief lieutenant, David Glass.

    "Most folks probably thought we just had a wacky chairman who was pulling a pretty primitive publicity stunt," Walton would later write in his biography (Sam Walton: Made in America, coauthored by Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey). "What they didn't realize is that this sort of stuff goes on all the time at Wal-Mart."

    Well, that stuff, a whole lot of hard work, and, believe it or not, innovation. The reason Walton, who died at 74 in 1992, 30 years after opening his first Wal-Mart store, was the most successful retailer in American history is that he also was way ahead of his competitors in bringing efficiencies and discipline to the world of retailing.

    The cornerstone of his company's success ultimately lay in selling goods at the lowest possible price, something he was able to do by pushing aside the middlemen and directly haggling with manufacturers to bring costs down. The idea to "buy it low, stack it high, and sell it cheap" became a sustainable business model largely because Walton, at the behest of David Glass, his eventual successor, heavily invested in software that could track consumer behavior in real time from the bar codes read at Wal-Mart's checkout counters.

    He shared the real-time data with suppliers to create partnerships that allowed Wal-Mart to exert significant pressure on manufacturers to improve their productivity and become ever more efficient. As Wal-Mart's influence grew, so did its power to nearly dictate the price, volume, delivery, packaging, and quality of many of its suppliers' products. The upshot: Walton flipped the supplier-retailer relationship upside down.