The Wal-Mart Triumph

Two of the toughest challenges for any company are leadership transitions and rapid growth. How do you replace an enormously popular and beloved CEO? And how do you maintain a rapid growth rate without losing the culture and focus of a small company?

Over the past ten years, since the death of the legendary Sam Walton, Wal-Mart has passed both challenges with flying colors. It’s now the first company to rank number one on both the Fortune 500 and the Fortune Most Admired lists. Sam Walton’s successors have taken the company into far-flung new markets and new directions, without losing the down-to-earth retailing culture that made Wal-Mart thrive in its early years.

With unprecedented access to Wal-Mart’s press-shy senior executives, Robert Slater offers new insights about how the company manages its people and its operations, how it is expanding around the world (even in China), and how it is dealing with its many critics and competitors.