Business Archives - Palladian Park

Sam Walton’s 10 Rules for Running a Successful Company

Sam Walton, Sam Walton: Made in America, Walmart

Sam Walton began in retail as a management trainee at J.C. Penny in 1940. While there, one of his managers told him he wasn’t cut out for retail. Fast forwarding a few years, Walton was operating the most successful Ben Franklin store in the entire franchise system. He then went on to found his own retail company: Wal-Mart. Today, the rebranded Walmart has outlived Walton, employs over two million employees globally, and is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Clearly, Walton had a business framework that worked.

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Who Are You Really Competing Against?

Competitors are oftentimes clearly defined. Think sports, debate, and political elections. When entering those arenas, you know exactly who you are going up against. But life isn’t always that way. Sometimes competition comes from where you least expect it.

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Avoid the Disease of Victory

Adolf Hitler, Alex Ferguson, Blockbuster, Jocko Willink, Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United, Marc Randoff, Maria Konnikova, Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, Napoleon, Netflix, Olympics, That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea, The Dichotomy of Leadership

The problem with victory—especially frequent victories—is that it breeds arrogance and complacency. This phenomenon, known as “the disease of victory”, has ensnared countless individuals and groups throughout the ages. Be aware of this tendency and guard yourself against it.

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Performance and Trust in Elite Teams

Lights Out by Thomas Gryta, Navy SEALs, Performance, Simon Sinek, The Infinite Game, Thought Experiment, Trust, Warren Buffett

Elite teams are comprised of high-performing people who trust each other. That’s the recipe: performance and trust. Although both qualities are important, one is much more so.

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How Zappos Capitalized on Inversion

Delivering Happiness, Inversion, Mental Models, Tony Hsieh, Zappos

In 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos for roughly $1.2 billion. The story of Zappos’ success is full of hilarity and wonder, but one factor in particular stands out: inversion. Inversion gave Zappos an edge against other retailers by focusing on—and succeeding at—what others weren’t.

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Businesses are not Families

Netflix, Shopify, Toby Lutke

Organizations of all types use the term “family” to describe themselves. In a time when loneliness is pervasive, this can be a heartfelt sentiment. It plays into our inherent need to belong to a group, our tribalism. But it’s misleading and produces a false sense of security. It often does more harm than good.

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Misperceptions of Mutual Exclusivity

We can often see much of the world as mutually exclusive: either something is one way or it isn’t. But we do this despite knowing full well that the world is not black and white. There are infinite shades of gray called nuance. While it may be easier to see the world in binary terms, it can be detrimental. Thinking spectrally and probabilistically can help combat the effects of binary thinking, but just how wide reaching can illusions of mutually exclusivity be?

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