11. 山姆?沃爾頓

公司名稱：沃爾瑪

銷售額:4,469億美元

市值：365億美元

員工人數：200萬

建議：給人們想要的。

????1984年，66歲的山姆?沃爾頓穿上草裙，在華爾街跳起了草裙舞。這滑稽的一幕是他輸掉一場賭局后的代價。他與首席執行官戴維?格拉斯打賭，賭沃爾瑪（Wal-Mart Stores）的利潤率，結果輸了。

????“大多數人當時可能都認為，不過是個可笑的董事長，耍些老套的公關噱頭而已，”后來沃爾頓在自傳中寫道【《富甲美國（零售大王沃爾頓自傳）》（Sam Walton: Made in America），由時代公司（Time Inc.）總編約翰?休伊共同撰寫】。“他們并不知道，這種事情每天都在沃爾瑪上演?！?/p>

????是的，這類事情，包括努力工作以及（不管你信不信）創新。1992年去世（卒年74歲）的沃爾頓自開設第一家沃爾瑪商店三十年后，沃爾瑪成為了美國歷史上最成功的零售商，究其原因是他給零售業帶來了效率和紀律，而且在這方面總是遙遙領先于競爭對手。

????沃爾瑪成功的基石歸根結底是以盡可能低的價格出售商品。沃爾頓取消中間環節，直接與制造商討價還價，盡量降低進貨成本，因此才做到了這一點。“低價進貨，大量鋪貨，廉價銷售”的想法成為了一個可持續的業務模式，很大程度上是因為在戴維?格拉斯（沃爾頓后來的接班人）的要求下，沃爾頓大舉投資軟件，依靠沃爾瑪收銀臺的條形碼掃描實現了對消費行為的實時追蹤。

????他將這些實時數據與供應商分享，建立了合作關系，使得沃爾瑪能在一定程度上敦促制造商提高生產效率。隨著沃爾瑪的影響力擴大，它幾乎可以決定很多供應商產品的價格、產量、交付、包裝和質量等因素。結果：沃爾頓顛覆了供應商-零售商的關系。

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.