Select a successful entrepreneur and outline his/her management styles and leadership characteristics. Consider how these may have contributedto success, and how they may have contributed to failure. Entrepreneur: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Inc.
Assignment
Principles of Management
BCD1H07
Task: Select a successful entrepreneur and outline his/her management
styles and leadership characteristics. Consider how these may have contributed
to success, and how they may have contributed to failure.
Entrepreneur: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Inc.
Table of Content:
Table of Content: 1
Sam Walton: leading to success? 2
Bibliography 8
Sam Walton: leading to success?
"Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish." (www.motiration.com).
Reading this quote one could certainly think that it originates from a famous expert of leadership or a motivational coach, but it is not. It originates from Sam Walton, famous founder of Wal-Mart Inc., the world's largest retail company, and is a good example to show one of the factors that created the incredible success of Sam Walton's business. To examine these factors, and to analyse how Walton's personality, his management styles and leadership skills influenced them, is the aim of the following text, which will be introduced by a short outline of Sam Walton's biography.
Samuel Moore Walton was born on 29th March 1918 in Kingfish, Oklahoma, United States of America (USA). His drive towards achieving goals and his natural ability to lead people was already apparent in the early years of his life, for example in school or later at university, where Sam Walton led several student committees. Graduated from the University of Missouri, and having been a trainee with J.C. Penney's, a famous retail company in the USA, Walton opened up his first store as a franchisee of Ben Franklin Stores in 1945. But being a franchisee and therefore having low entrepreneurial freedom, Walton was not satisfied for long and went to open up his own store, the first "real" Wal-Mart, in Rogers, Arkansas, USA in 1962. His business concept, combining low prices and great service, created immediate, but enduring success. Starting with only four employees and a single shop, Wal-Mart today employs over 1.1 million people in more than 4,200 shops worldwide, generating a turnover of more than 170 billion US Dollars. In March 1992, Walton received the highest civil award of the USA, the "Medal of Freedom". It was his last public appearance, as he died on 5th April 1992, aged 74, from bone cancer.
Nevertheless, Sam Walton's managerial approaches and the Wal-Mart corporate culture created by him are still key points in the company's ongoing success in the last decade.
As management is widely known as the structural framework of how goals are achieved, including planning, organising, directing and controlling (Schwartz, 1984 p.4), those key points are adopted to analyse Sam Walton's management styles.
Walton always believed in the importance of staying involved and controlling the daily business, and therefore initiated several traditions, as it was for example the introduction of the so-called "Saturday-morning-meetings", a meeting where all executives come together once a week to discuss all problems arising in their departments. This allowed Walton, even in a fast-growing company, to control the every-day-business on a regular basis, to identify the core problems and to make plans of how to solve them. It has to be clear that he did not intend to solve all problems on his own, but rather to delegate the solution to his associates, as all employees are referred to at Wal-Mart, in order to show his confidence and to encourage them. Walton therefore also put emphasis on the fact that he never wanted his word to be sacred, as he was conscious of having some weaknesses, and therefore relied on others where he thought they would do better than him (Walton, 1992 p.147).
Principles of Management
BCD1H07
Task: Select a successful entrepreneur and outline his/her management
styles and leadership characteristics. Consider how these may have contributed
to success, and how they may have contributed to failure.
Entrepreneur: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart Inc.
Table of Content:
Table of Content: 1
Sam Walton: leading to success? 2
Bibliography 8
Sam Walton: leading to success?
"Outstanding leaders go out of their way to boost the self-esteem of their personnel. If people believe in themselves, it's amazing what they can accomplish." (www.motiration.com).
Reading this quote one could certainly think that it originates from a famous expert of leadership or a motivational coach, but it is not. It originates from Sam Walton, famous founder of Wal-Mart Inc., the world's largest retail company, and is a good example to show one of the factors that created the incredible success of Sam Walton's business. To examine these factors, and to analyse how Walton's personality, his management styles and leadership skills influenced them, is the aim of the following text, which will be introduced by a short outline of Sam Walton's biography.
Samuel Moore Walton was born on 29th March 1918 in Kingfish, Oklahoma, United States of America (USA). His drive towards achieving goals and his natural ability to lead people was already apparent in the early years of his life, for example in school or later at university, where Sam Walton led several student committees. Graduated from the University of Missouri, and having been a trainee with J.C. Penney's, a famous retail company in the USA, Walton opened up his first store as a franchisee of Ben Franklin Stores in 1945. But being a franchisee and therefore having low entrepreneurial freedom, Walton was not satisfied for long and went to open up his own store, the first "real" Wal-Mart, in Rogers, Arkansas, USA in 1962. His business concept, combining low prices and great service, created immediate, but enduring success. Starting with only four employees and a single shop, Wal-Mart today employs over 1.1 million people in more than 4,200 shops worldwide, generating a turnover of more than 170 billion US Dollars. In March 1992, Walton received the highest civil award of the USA, the "Medal of Freedom". It was his last public appearance, as he died on 5th April 1992, aged 74, from bone cancer.
Nevertheless, Sam Walton's managerial approaches and the Wal-Mart corporate culture created by him are still key points in the company's ongoing success in the last decade.
As management is widely known as the structural framework of how goals are achieved, including planning, organising, directing and controlling (Schwartz, 1984 p.4), those key points are adopted to analyse Sam Walton's management styles.
Walton always believed in the importance of staying involved and controlling the daily business, and therefore initiated several traditions, as it was for example the introduction of the so-called "Saturday-morning-meetings", a meeting where all executives come together once a week to discuss all problems arising in their departments. This allowed Walton, even in a fast-growing company, to control the every-day-business on a regular basis, to identify the core problems and to make plans of how to solve them. It has to be clear that he did not intend to solve all problems on his own, but rather to delegate the solution to his associates, as all employees are referred to at Wal-Mart, in order to show his confidence and to encourage them. Walton therefore also put emphasis on the fact that he never wanted his word to be sacred, as he was conscious of having some weaknesses, and therefore relied on others where he thought they would do better than him (Walton, 1992 p.147).