Stumbled across Sam’s Rules for Building a Business over at Wal-Mart.com today. It’s a distillation of the wisdom offered up in Sam Walton’s Made in America, which I haven’t read or purchased though I will. I love Wal-Mart as a business, though I rarely shop there myself.
The ten rules laid down by Sam are a mix of your commonsensical, homespun aphorisms to amazing insights that take on new meaning in today’s environment. Relevant to today’s earlier posting about corporate blogs, Sam suggests Rule #7:
<blockquote>Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking. The folks on the front lines—the ones who actually talk to the customer—are the only ones who really know what’s going on out there. You’d better find out what they know.</blockquote>
There’s also a healthy mix of customer service and TCB suggestions. This just bumped his book up in the queue.