Steal Only What They're Doing Right
Walton made it a personal practice to walk competitor stores with a notebook, and later a tape recorder, recording what was working, not what was failing. He believed he had spent more time inside Kmart stores than any Kmart executive outside of store-level employees. When he opened his first store in Newport and found a competitor across the street doing double his sales, his immediate response was to go into that store and figure out why. Charlie Kate, the manager of the first Walmart, remembered Walton saying it this way: "Go in and check our competition. Check everyone who is our competition. Don't look for the bad. Look for the good. If you get one good idea, that's one more than you went into the store with. We're really not concerned with what they're doing wrong. We're concerned with what they're doing right." Gilbert makes the point on the podcast that the disease in most startup cultures runs the opposite direction. Founders and management teams look for the worst in competitors because it feels good. It is a comfort mechanism. Walton treated a competitor doing something right as a free gift. He woke up every day asking where the next one was coming from.