Among the merchandise, files and customers at Walmart are the associates. The people who greet the customers and keep the shelves stocked. This book looks into the lives of the people this company will forever be connected to, like it or not. It tells of the beginning of the end of Walmart. This is the warehouse, the truck driver and the system keeping count of it all. This is a written view from the inside. It takes an in depth look at associates, individual stores, salaried management and the corporate offices of this company listed on tickers of the New York Stock Exchange as wmt. For updated info go to www.walmartassociatescentral.com
Since Sam Walton's death in 1992, Wal-Mart has gone from being the largest retailer in the world to holding the top spot on the Fortune 500 list as the largest company in the world. Don Soderquist, who was senior vice chairman during that time, played a crucial role in that success. Sam Walton said, "I tried for almost twenty years to hire Don Soderquist . . . But when we really needed him later on, he finally joined up and made a great chief operating officer." Responsible for overseeing many of Wal-Mart's key support divisions, including real estate, human resources, information systems, logistics, legal, corporate affairs, and loss prevention, Soderquist stayed true to his Christian values as well as Wal-Mart's distinct management style. "Probably no other Wal-Mart executive since the legendary Sam Walton has come to embody the principles of the company's culture-or to represent them within the industry-as has Don Soderquist," Discount Store News once reported. In The Wal-Mart Way, Soderquist shares his story of helping lead a global company from being a $43 billion company to one that would eventually exceed $200 billion. Several books have been written about Wal-Mart's success, but none by the ones who were the actual players. It was more than "Everyday Low Prices" and distribution that catapulted the company to the top. The core values based on Judeo-Christian principles-and maintained by leaders such as Soderquist-are the real reason for Wal-Mart's success.
We live these days in a virtual nation of cities and celebrities, dreaming a small-town America rendered ever stranger by purveyors of nostalgia and dark visionaries from Sherwood Anderson to David Lynch. And yet it is the small town, that world of local character and neighborhood lore, that dreamed the America we know today—and the small-town boy, like those whose stories this book tells, who made it real. In these life-stories, beginning in 1890 with frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner and moving up to the present with global shopkeeper Sam Walton, a history of middle America unfolds, as entrepreneurs and teachers like Henry Ford, George Washington Carver, and Walt Disney; artists and entertainers like Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Carl Sandburg, and Johnny Carson; political figures like William McKinley, William Jennings Bryan, and Ronald Reagan; and athletes like Bob Feller and John Wooden by turns engender and illustrate the extraordinary cultural shifts that have transformed the Midwest, and through the Midwest, the nation--and the world. Many of these men are familiar, icons even—Ford and Reagan, certainly, Ernie Pyle, Sinclair Lewis, James Dean, and Lawrence Welk—and others, like artists Oscar Micheaux and John Steuart Curry, economist Alvin Hansen and composer Meredith Willson, less so. But in their stories, as John E. Miller tells them, all appear in a new light, unique in their backgrounds and accomplishments, united only in the way their lives reveal the persisting, shaping power of place, and particularly the Midwest, on the cultural imagination and national consciousness. In a thoroughly engaging style Miller introduces us to the small-town Midwestern boys who became these all-American characters, privileging us with insights that pierce the public images of politicians and businessmen, thinkers and entertainers alike. From the smell of the farm, the sounds and silences of hamlets and county seats, the schoolyard athletics and classroom instruction and theatrical performance, we follow these men to their moments of inspiration, innovation, and fame, observing the workings of the small-town past in their very different relationships with the larger world. Their stories reveal in an intimate way how profoundly childhood experiences shape personal identity, and how deeply place figures in the mapping of thought, belief, ambition, and life's course.
Examines the origins and rise of Wal-Mart, the world's largest company, through a review of the traditional beliefs and business philosophies of its founder while delving into the impact this giant has had on the global market throughout the years.
Internationally renowned experts assess the role of retail work in modern industrial economies in Retail Work. Chapters are arranged thematically to capture four aspects of retail work: the nature of work and the shop floor; work across the supply chain and the wider productive system; the skills used in retailing; and workers as a collectivity.
As a former employee, Bergdhal had the opportunity to see the Wal-Mart executive team in action and to work directly with Sam Walton. This unique perspective provides him with a treasure trove of great lessons and stories from behind the scenes.
Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, Sam never lost the common touch. Here, finally, inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure if his ambitions and achievements. Sam shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style. In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.
‘Organizational research methods’ (ORM) are making an ontological turn by studying the nature of Being, becoming, and the meaning of existence in the world. For example, without ontology, there is no ‘ground’ and no ‘theory’ in Grounded Theory (GT). This book explores ten ways to develop fourth wave GT that is grounded and theory. 1st wave GT commits inductive fallacy inference, 2nd wave GT bandaids it with positivistic content coding. 3rd wave GT turns to social constructivism, but this leaves out the materiality and ecology of existence. The first three waves do not address falsification or verification. There is another theme. Qualitative research methods is a discipline craft, not mere science or something that automated text analysis software can displace. Quantiative narrative analysis (QDA) is one more way to colonize and marginalize indigenous ways of knowing (IWOK). Without an ontological turn, its the death of storytelling predicted by Walter Benjamin and Gertrude Stein predicted. The good news is Western Empirical Science is beginning to listen to IWOK-Native Science experiential living story method of relations not only to other humans but to other animals, plants, to living air, water, and earth in living ecosystem of an enchanted world There is a gap in the qualitative research methodology practices and comprehensive advanced approaches causing a split between practice and theory. So called Grounded Theory (inductive positivism) . Organizational Research: Storytelling in Action is about how to conduct ten kinds of ontological Research Methods and conduct their interpretative analyses, for organization studies, in an ethically answerable way. It is aimed at people who want a more ‘advanced’ treatment than available in so-called Grounded Theory or automated narrative analysis books.
