Management Archives - Page 2 of 2

PDF + Summary: Sam Walton, Made in America (Wal-Mart Founder)

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer on the planet. It had $500 billion in sales in 2017 – almost 3x the size of Amazon – and runs 12,000 stores worldwide.

This retail titan began in 1945 with founder Sam Walton managing a single store in Newport, AR, a town of 7,000 people. In this small town, Walton learned the retail and management strategies that became the foundation of Wal-Mart’s staggering worldwide growth. (Amazing that Wal-Mart now has more than one store for every person in the town in which it was founded).

Sam Walton wrote his autobiography Sam Walton: Made in America in the last year before he died, as he struggled with cancer. Made in America is a candid, energetic retelling of the Wal-Mart story and the principles that led Walton and his partners to incredible success.

If you’ve ever read The Everything Store, a deep dive into Amazon, you’ll see Amazon’s core principles reflected in Wal-Mart, half a century before Amazon and the popular internet even existed. No surprise – Made in America is one of Jeff Bezos’s essential must-read books for his management team. If you want to understand the clash of retail titans Amazon and Wal-Mart in the coming years, you have to read these books.p>

In this Made in America summary, learn:

What Wal-Mart did in its early life that every major competitor ignored
How Wal-Mart borrowed its competitors’ best ideas – and did them better
Sam Walton’s favorite management tactics to motivate his team
Why Sam Walton always flew coach

Best Summary + PDF – The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt

Want to increase your personal output, or the output of your team? Do you feel like there’s a bottleneck constraining you? Have you tried brute force effort with little results?

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu Goldratt, is a classic management book, on Jeff Bezos’s shortlist of books recommended to his senior Amazon managers. This book introduced the Theory of Constraints, which identifies the constraint in a production system and restructures the organization around it. It upended traditional obsessions with cost efficiency to focus on what really matters.

Unique among management books, The Goal is written in the form of a novel, detailing a plant manager’s journey to save his factory from closing. The story itself is entertaining and teaches in a Socratic way, helping you identify and overcome your own constraints.

In this book summary of The Goal, you’ll learn:

Why optimizing activities that seem productive can be pointless
How to identify your personal bottleneck
How to increase capacity at your bottleneck to increase output
How to apply these manufacturing principles to your everyday life

Best Summary + PDF – Principles: Life and Work, by Ray Dalio

Ray Dalio is founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. In his book Principles: Work and Life, Dalio shares the guiding principles powering his success and Bridgewater’s.

Principles is a master class in rational thinking. The main theme is that finding truth is the best way to make decisions, and that ego, emotion, and blind spots prevent you from discovering the truth. Dalio shares his major strategies to circumvent these weaknesses, including radical open-mindedness, thoughtful disagreement, radical transparency, and believability-weighted decision making.

In this Principles: Work and Life summary, you’ll learn:

How the rational you and the emotional you fight to control your life
How to get past your ego in pursuit of your goals
The 5-step process for getting what you want out of life
Why you need other people to improve your probability of being right

Best Book Summary + PDF: Blue Ocean Strategy

Tired of competing head-to-head with other companies? Do you feel like your strategy differs little from the competition surrounding you?

You may need to redefine the rules of competition by defining a new strategy. In this Blue Ocean Strategy summary, learn:

How blue ocean strategies create more customer value and cut costs at the same time
How Cirque du Soleil broke out of the circus market and created its own category of entertainment
How Apple created multiple blue oceans in quick succession and upended traditional hardware/software markets
The 6 ways you can discover blue oceans in your own industry

Best Book Summary + PDF: Drive, by Daniel Pink

Are you feeling unmotivated in your job and life? Are you finding your current goals unsatisfying to work toward?

Drive, by Daniel Pink, believes that your work structure is to blame. Historically, employers have motivated employees through financial rewards and kept workers on a tight leash. These principles worked well when people were primarily working in assembly lines, but today’s creative work demands more: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

In this Drive summary, you’ll learn:

Why financial rewards can lower your motivation and tempt cheating
How every human, including you, is motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose
Why some companies give unlimited vacation days and pay you to work on personal projects
Why paying people to donate blood actually reduces donation rate
How to convince your boss to adopt changes and give you more freedom

Best Summary + PDF | Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

Want to motivate your employees and teammates to do a better job? Does your team seem unhappy, unmotivated, and distrustful of your organization?

In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Paul Marciano argues that engagement stems from respect. Employees don’t want to be treated like cogs in a chain. Instead, they want to feel empowered, have autonomy, receive supportive feedback, and be treated considerately. Breaking any of these makes teammates feel disrespected, which causes motivation to plummet.

In this Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work summary, you’ll learn:

the major non-monetary components of what employees want
how to diagnose whether you’re a great or terrible manager
simple actions you can take today to engage your team