We’re gonna miss you…

I recommend Sam Walton’s autobiography, Sam Walton Made in America ©.  I never knew about the history of Walmart.  I love reading about the business titans of our time; I love reading about greatness.  Another one of my favorites is Idea Guy ©; Paul Allen’s account of hiring Bill Gates and how they led the herculean effort to create Microsoft. 

The Google Story © was a different story.  Here were a couple of computer scientists, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who simply wanted to sell their search engine intellectual property for $25 million.  After trying and trying, their Stanford University advisor finally told them if they wanted financial gain they would have to start a company.  Reluctantly - unbelievably reluctantly - they launched Google.  The rest as they say is a history of untold riches!  If you google (verb) google (noun) you’ll get, “The term google itself is a creative spelling of googol, a number equal to 10 to the 100th power, or more colloquially, an unfathomable number.”  Yep – unfathomable! 

Another favorite of mine is Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle ©.  This hit particularly close to home for me because I was there during the depiction of chaos during Oracle’s explosive growth period.  My work as an Oracle Financials Application Sales Rep, literally selling version 1.0, was the most wild ride in my entire career!  

Speaking of version 1.0, I can’t remember what software “version” comes first:  alphaware; betaware; visionware; vaporware; or demoware? 

Without a herculean effort Larry almost lost his company.  The stress almost cost me my marriage.  Thankfully, we both came out successful. 

Some of the books I’ve read address great companies (and great people) failing and then resurrecting themselves.  I particularly liked Who Says Elephants Can't Dance © and IBM’s return to greatness.  I love this quote from their then-CEO: 

There were times when we lost money on every PC we sold, and so we were conflicted - if sales were down, was that bad news or good news? 

Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. 

Back to Walmart.  Sam Walton stated at the start of his book, there are lots of opinions from others about Walmart; mostly negative.  After reading his firsthand account I have a much better appreciation of what he did to build the Walmart empire and why.  The “why” can be summed up simply to sell what the customer wants, at a good price, and stand behind it.  Who doesn’t want a company to do that?

Business success is certainly not limited to the behemoths.  I remember to this day a story one of my clients told me about one of their clients.  I was the Master Sales Enablement Advisor at Oracle/NetSuite and one of my NetSuite resellers in Kentucky (Oasis Solutions) had one of their clients utter the phrase, “We’re gonna miss you”.  You see, their client just bought NetSuite ERP directly from NetSuite.  The client didn’t realize Oasis also sold NetSuite.  No one had informed the client.  Sam Walton would have frowned on that reseller and probably coaxed them to stay closer to the needs of their customers. 

Afterall, who doesn’t want our vendors, stores, advisors, and other providers to stay close enough to us to understand what we need?  As it turns out, many times greatness doesn’t require the herculean feats of a Bill Gates, Paul Allen, or Larry Ellison.  It's less stressful to pay better attention to our clients. 

                                                            GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.