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Doug McMillon

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56

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2018-11-08

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2018-11-08

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1. “Where you find them. It's the best way to find that person, that key person who will help you grow your business. And this is why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn. That's bonkers every 10 seconds. So head to linkedin.com forward slash Tim and get $50 off your first job post. That's a LinkedIn.com forward slash Tim T-I-M to get $50 off your first job post. LinkedIn.com forward slash Tim. Take a look.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Important to find the right person. But where do you find that person? You can post a job on a job board and hope that that right person finds your job, that they are on the internet happening to scan something here and there and then find you. But think about it. How often do you hang out on job boards? The answer is probably not very often. So don't leave finding someone great to chance when you can post your job exactly where people go every day to make connections, grow in their careers, and discover job opportunities. That is LinkedIn. Most LinkedIn members haven't recently visited the top job board, but nine out of ten members are open to new opportunities. And with 70% of the U.S. workforce on LinkedIn, posting there is the best way to get your job opportunity in front of more of the right people. And you can be very, very highly targeted and specific. People who are qualified for the role you have and ready for something new.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Episode of the Tim Ferris shows brought to you by LinkedIn, The Right Hire, can make a huge impact on your business. The wrong hire can crater your business. And I have seen example after example from thousands of my readers at a minimum where they have told me stories of how finding the right person at the right time. And in some cases, not even asking what should I do, but asking who should I find because that person can help me determine what exactly to do more intelligently. And I've had a chance to hire two such people in the last year that has just made my business take a quantum leap forward and my complexity in my personal and business life get cut dramatically. And this type of simplification cannot be overvalued. We think a lot about hiring. And I think a lot about hiring. And it is a skill that I've had to learn.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

4. “Like I'm deaf, like I'm dead, it's over. And this lasts for like two, three days because the tab is a week long. So you don't get to just get up the next day and forget about it. You got to live with it for a week. And there was one person in the whole company that reached out to me. And his name's J.R. Campbell. JR was a DMM, a divisional merchandise manager supervising buyers in another area unrelated to mine. And he called me over to his desk. We had an open office environment at that time. And in front of other people around, he gave me a pep talk and said, you screwed up, but I believe in you. Never do this again. Learn from it. Get your head up and get back to work. And that's all I needed. And it all worked out. But I learned empathy from that mistake. I learned what it's like when somebody that you think is really good makes a bad mistake.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “So that's true. I've left their name out because that's true. So I go to tell Bill Fields that we've made this mistake and that didn't go well. And so the solution was put back on me like, what are you going to do about it? And Frida Lay gave us a coupon for a free bag of chips for any customer that complained west of the Mississippi, and we printed them at PMDC down the street and mailed them out in 24 hours so that store managers had something to give to the customer when they complained. But that didn't totally satisfy the customer. So it was really bad. So nobody would talk to me. Like I was, I don't know, what do you call her, pariah? So everybody knows how bad that is. So I'm walking down the hallways and people that I thought were my friends, they had their head down”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

6. “So I'm in my 20s. Shelly and I have a young child, and I'm thinking this is it. This is how this ends. This is really, really bad. And to make a long story short, like it was so bad. I went to my supervisor once I figured out it was happening and I said, here's what's happened. And he looked at me and said, you need to go tell Bill Fields. And Bill was the chief merchant. And if Bill were here, I would say the same thing. So I'm not talking out of school. He's like Darth Vader in my mind. Imagine Darth Vader. I love him, but he's scary. And so I said, okay, let's go tell him. And my supervisor said, I ain't going.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

7. “Lays and cheetos, and right there in the front, lime and chili flavored toasted. And the tab hit and the phone started ringing and we learned that Fritole didn't have that item west of the Mississippi. Yeah, that was the feeling.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

8. “Yeah, a bunch of them. The one that was so memorable for me was early. That's why I left such a mark. But if I tell the story briefly, I was the chip buyer. I had a bunch of categories that I was responsible for in food and frito-lay chips was one of my items. And I got really excited. This is early 90s because Frito Lay brought out lime flavored tostitos. Lime and chili flavored tostitos. And so I wanted to put it on the front page of the Walmart tab. And we did back then print tabs, mailed American homes, you know, tens of millions of them. It's a big deal. And everybody knew that if the merchant screwed up the tab, you were dead. Like you had no career. Nobody makes the tab mistake. Every item, every picture, every price, all the in stocks got to be there because we print 100 million of these things. It's got to be great. Well, we put, I got the whole cover of the tab. I talked marketing into letting me have the whole thing and we fanned out.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “There's a bigger At play here, and it's bigger than any of us. And realizing that and realizing that if you grip that steering wheel too hard, you will fail Is the moment where that fire break comes or you let go and say, okay, I'm listening. So that prayer is frequently not me speaking, it's me listening. It's being quiet. And he'll put people in my life. It feels like this happens frequently where there's no other reason I can think of that that person said that to me, gave me that idea at that moment other than some other higher calling that I think is. Know very real and tangible for me personally given my faith, but also helpful to the company. You know, my prayer is that the company will bless God.”

   2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “One experience we had in Walmart one time, this lady that worked for Walmart was teaching us about change management, and she had us take our watch off and put it on the other hand. And just leave it that way for a day, and it bugs the heck out of me. It's such a little thing, but it's indicative of how hard it is for us to change personally. So I'll put this on my right wrist. But by tonight, that'll be back on my left wrist because I won't be able to take it anymore. So, if you recognize that in yourself, you got a shot at doing something about it.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “Probably more than one thing The realization that Without it, we are going to have a problem. The retailers that fail by decade, that feeling that if we don't really open ourselves up to change here, which starts with us, you know, change is really cool when it's for somebody else, but when it's for yourself. It's really hard”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

12. “But it's kind of liberating. And once you survive one, the next one's a little more comfortable. And if we can get everybody thinking that way, we got a shot.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “The influence of other people and it's an openness to change. And I describe my morning routine for you. I would say years ago my whole life was more routine And now the pivot Is to let go more and be more open to change and more open to risk, realizing that continuing to do what I've always done won't result in me being the person that the company needs me to be. And if I'm rigid and routine and disciplined too often, So will everybody else. And so in an environment, we were talking about risk today with our officers and trying to encourage them to take risk. Well, they won't take risk if they don't see us taking risk. And so some of the things we've done lately, I'm a really conservative person. I would not have wanted to take those risks or historically expected to.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

14. “It's by myself Need that time by myself, but I run into things that I don't know, and so I'll run out and interrupt place a phone call and say, I'm working on this problem. What do you think? And then I'm trying to put the phone back down or walk back to my office and work on the next turn of the crank on the problem.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

15. “Here, you've got insurance, how does that work? How could you help somebody be healthier and make a margin at the same time? And how could clinics play a role in that? For me, I'm a visual learner. And when I can't solve a problem, I'm constantly trying to draw a picture of it and trying to get other people to draw a picture of it.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

16. “In the classical music, what does it look like? It's drawing pictures Schematics of how strategy works or how a problem is deconstructed. So there are people that work with me in the room. I can't hardly have a conversation with Brett without the whiteboard. And I'm so thankful. I see Jim and Lynn there. Sam Walton had a pegboard in his office. And I'm thankful for that because I had to put up a whiteboard and people said, you can't do that at Sam Walton's office. And I'm like, nope, look, there are pictures here. He had a pegboard. A whiteboard's not that different than a pegboard. Because I live kind of in a library or a museum in Sam's office. It's hallowed ground, so you don't mess with it too much, right? But we got this big whiteboard and we have conversations where Brett's got a marker and I've got a marker and we're drawing pictures of, well, if the customer experience went this way or went that way or the financials look like this instead of that, what does healthcare really look like? You've got a life here. You've got...”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

17. “Yeah, it's usually thinking, it's strategy. We have a collaborative environment and it's definitely collaborative as it relates to strategy. And I'm a blend of an introvert and an extrovert. There are times when I got to have interaction with people and I get energy that way. And there are times when I need to have some quiet time and just shut the door in the office to rethink that kind of stuff. Like when we, is it Berkman you take? It's one of the tests where you can kind of assess yourself and You can be on one of these extremes. I'm kind of right in the middle and pivot both ways, so there are times when I just”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

18. “So sleep's real important for me personally, sleep's real important. I wish I needed less, but I need seven or eight hours. Time with family is really important. So protecting weekends as much as I can. I work every day some, but try to manage that in a way that's not too disruptive with my family. My family is a huge priority. Shelly, I have two boys. They're in their 20s now, but man, that was really important to me. So I protected that a lot. So like getting this basketball game in on Sunday afternoon is a big deal. If I can get a good sleep on Saturday, Sunday, get in some basketball, get enough sleep while I'm traveling, I'm in pretty good shape. The other thing that happens sometimes is Paula, my assistant, I call them firebreaks. Every once in a while, I just have to, because it's too much, you just have to go back and say, I know what I was supposed to do on Tuesday, but clear it. Because I just need some time to get back up on my feet, read a few things. So we will call an audible and put a fire.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

19. “Was like Argentina, I'm going to get to once a year. China, we're going to get to three times a year. We're going to schedule it out in this way. We're in 27 countries now. So I just copied his method and like right now, in fact, for about a month now, I would be able to tell you for next year where I will be by day. Some of the days are kind of planned out with board meetings, and we have this thing we call meeting week where we bring everybody together, Mark Lori lives in New Jersey, and we just had people distributed. So we come together for one week, kind of three or four days every month where we all get on the same page, and then we disperse out again. So all those kinds of things drive the calendar and the discipline. We pretty much stick with it. But within a day, it can get crazy because things come up.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

20. “And Lou is responsible or working with a healthcare company, and he read in the news that we were working on healthcare. So it's hilarious. I got to ask him, what would you do? Could you fix Razorback football? Because we won one game this year. And he said, yeah, by the second quarter, which I thought was hilarious. Well, come do it, man. So you just never know, you know, you can walk down the hallway and Shaquille O'Neill will be walking down the hallway, and then you go into a meeting on compliance in China, and you learn about how to manage ethics within that country. So it's just a ton of variety every day. And there's really not a down minute, and the days are never what you think they're going to be. But you try to plan. So like I learned from Mike Duke, my predecessor, when I moved into our international job, that I couldn't manage my international travel without a really good plan. So when I moved into the job, one of the things Mike did for me was to hand me his schedule by week for the last three years. And Mike's an engineer, and he's very disciplined.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

21. “And so try to get there early enough to get a little bit of quiet time to get ahead on reading these days we get a lot of reading materials. Like people will send you a white paper or a deck and say this is for tomorrow's meeting and it's 40 pages. We have a board meeting that's got a thousand pages of reading material. So you've got all this incoming data and it's helpful because we're trying to get into meetings and not have old-fashioned PowerPoint flipping but get right to the root of issues. So it's really helpful if people can read things beforehand. So there's a lot of that going on. And then there's just a ton of variety. I mean, I talked to Lou Holtz yesterday, the former Arkansas Razorback coach. Yes, he coached at Notre Dame and won a national championship, but we know him as the Arkansas Razorback coach.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

22. “Yeah, there's a lot of variety, which one thing I love about it. I try to get there early enough to get a little bit of quiet time going. We've already seen sales, so when we get up in the morning, the first thing that we all do is look at our device, and you can see in seconds how we're sales around the world yesterday by format, by country. So we already know what happened.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

23. “Read out loud, not out loud, but I'm in the kitchen, I've got CNBC and Squawk Bucks on. I'll mute it for a second. I'll read the daily devotional. Then I'm into the Wall Street Journal, glancing at the New York Times, CNBC app, CNBC's playing in the background, CNBC's in the car, watching Squawkbox, and then I get to the office.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

24. “Yeah, very much so. It gets disrupted by travel, and we travel a lot. But if I'm in town, you know, shave, shower, get some food, I'm reading the same thing. I'm reading the Wall Street Journal. Well, first, there's a daily devotional. Right now, Tony Dungey's got this daily devotional book, so I start with that. Doesn't take a lot of time, but I do it every day.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

25. “Oh, I'm super competitive. Look, I don't like to lose anything. It's bad actually sometimes because I play basketball on Sunday afternoons with a bunch of friends and my son and it's a longstanding tradition we have on Sunday afternoon and I hate losing so bad that sometimes I'm not as friendly as I should be. I should be like the wise guy at this point that's nurturing these young men and I'm out there battling them. I would like to be a bigger person, but I'm not there yet.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

26. “Like most of us, it probably comes from your parents and your upbringing mostly. My dad's like that, and the older I get, the more I see my father in me, which I have mixed feelings about. My mom is super competitive. She is literally the most competitive person I've ever met. So she's like, we took a summer vacation this year where we brought everybody together. We had like 18 people staying in this one house. And a bunch of them are 20-year-old young men, our sons and my nephews. And we play beach volleyball two a days for a week. So we'll be out there before it gets too hot. We'll be out there after it gets cooler. And those boys are spiking the ball off her forehead and she just keeps coming. It's for real. Her nickname, her grandson's nickname for her is Killer.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

27. “Those were more PR and buzz related, but we didn't overcharge for it. It wasn't a $200 hamburger. It was a good price on the jet. But you do blend with our merchandising assortment, whether it's online or in stores, Walmart or Sam's or other brands, you blend together the practical with the more aspirational all the time, trying to attract people to come to your place.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

28. “Didn't make a lot of money, but it generated a lot of buzz. But we've sold like a wine basement. We've sold extraordinary travel experiences, $70,000 price points. We sold a cool Harley one time that was $75,000. We bought one and we told everybody in our ad, we have one. So whoever gets there first gets it. And we sold it to some plumber in Indiana, if I remember correctly.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

29. “When you go to a Sam's club, you should experience great quality fresh food and then other items that you didn't expect to see that are affordable luxuries that make it feel like there's a bit of a treasure hunt. Like what's around the corner? Like when you sell a swing set, it should be a special and big swing set. When you sell a cooler, there should be something about it that's different than Walmart or some other place. And a long time ago, when I was at Sam's, the most extreme example I could remember is we sold a jet during our holiday period. Jet. We had a holiday catalog. And we made a commitment for a jet and sold it”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

30. “Every hour of every day to change it, navigate the market, which is exactly what you need in India because it gets disrupted in so many different ways. They have to be quick. You have to be agile. You've got to be on the ground. You got to know the business. You got to be able to solve problems together as a team. And they have that characteristic. And it was that set of things that caused us to say, we should do this. There just aren't very many opportunities in the world that are that big. And for a company like Walmart that needs to move the needle in a big way, you have to take some big bets. But if you're going to take that much risk, the rewards got to match up. And in the case of flip card, it does.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

31. “To aggregate business more than bust it up in some cases, and there are few e-commerce players. Flipkart was one of them. And then you get to what is Flipkart. Well, Flipkart is actually not just an e-commerce business, it's an ecosystem of businesses. There's a last mile delivery component. There's an e-commerce component related to apparel. There's kind of a traditionally commerce business. There's a payment system called Phone Pay. They're doing all kinds of interesting things with AI. They're even designing apparel with AI. So it's an interesting set of positions in the country, not just a pure e-commerce business selling dry grocery items at a loss. And then you get to the leadership team. How do you feel about values? How do you feel about their capability? We were really impressed with their ability to solve problems. And we recognize that this is not a situation where the business model is figured out and they're just going to execute it. It's a situation where they have a business model and they're iterating.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

32. “So, first one is do you believe in India? And the environment's 1.2 billion people with a growing middle income, with a lack of infrastructure, they've adopted mobile, they're moving to digital forms of currency. There's a lot of change happening there. A lot of challenges, a lot of governance issues. It's a very diverse place. It's not really one country. It's enormous. We've been there for more than 10 years. I've been there quite a few times. But do you believe in India? Check. Second question, what type of business in India? And the e-commerce business in India is under 3% of the total business, and we're certain it's going to get bigger. So you got a big pie and it's getting bigger, and you've got a small section called e-commerce today. Is that going to get bigger? Yes. Who are the players within that? There aren't very many. The number's been whittling down, which is what we're learning about digital businesses and e-commerce businesses. It turns out”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

33. “And then the job that I'm in right now, I get exposed to incredible people and you can use that collective wisdom by asking questions. So that's definitely part of it. But the other thing that runs through my mind is what do you have to believe? If you want to go do this, and this is the calculated bet you're making, What do you have to believe is true? And if you can get to a point where after thinking about it, you come back to the same things and you're convicted, I really do believe those things are true, then take the risk and go for it.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

34. “Were collective wisdom for sure, and one of the great things, it's always been true in these jobs at Walmart because people will talk to you when you're a buyer at Walmart, you can call a CEO of a company and they'll take your call.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

35. “These decisions we believe are necessary for a variety of reasons, which we can talk about if you want to. But once you do it, you take on those losses, you take on those people and responsibilities, and you've got to execute in a way that makes that a really good decision. And boy, we fret over those. And we're moving faster now. We're taking more risk, but that's an area where I have a lot of self-doubt. You have a meeting and you hear about the strategy and you think, yeah, we got to do this. And then you go home that night and you're about to go to sleep and you think, I can't do that. And then you get up the next morning and you go back through it. And we just iterate to a point where finally you got to make a decision and go for it.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

36. “There are a lot of them, but I guess one of the themes that comes to mind is acquisitions. These are not small decisions to acquire a company, big or small. There are founders, Andy Dunn sitting on the front row, Andy founded Bonobos. He's got a baby, and if he wants to put it in the family, that's huge risk for him. And I don't want to let him down. Then you've got Flipkart. We invested Stuart $16 billion to buy 77% of a company that loses a lot of money. Sounds brilliant, doesn't it? And before that, we did the board and management jet.com and jet.com was like a billion dollar run rate and lost money and still does.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

37. “Truth is, we have a consistent purpose that we got from our founder, some values that we share. Those are persistent too. It's not just change, but the fact that that's the thing that people underestimate about Walmart right now is that it has an ability to change. They think it is going to be what it is right now. And in some cases, I might argue most cases, they don't understand what it is right now because it's only been explained to them through the media. They've had no personal interaction behind the scenes other than in the stores or online. But they certainly don't anticipate what it's going to become And if we can keep that kind of attitude, we got a shot at surprising people and being here in the future when a lot of people think we won't be.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

38. “The retailers that were before them, Sears is interesting to talk about this week, they thought they had it. I mean, who are these upstarts? Walmart started in Rogers, Arkansas. Where's Rogers, Arkansas? No one was scared that day when the first Walmart started. So you can go away. The thing that can keep one of the things that can keep you from going away is an openness to change. And that's the point. So if we were, there are some Walmart people in here, but if you were all Walmart people and you had a leader up front and that leader were to say the only thing that's constant at Walmart is. Some Walmart people”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

39. “Because retailers grow and die. And I've been doing this almost 30 years now, which is amazing to me because I still feel like in some ways we're just getting started. You're a student of retail, I suppose it's probably true for other industries more or less, but in retail they have a good idea, they have a great founder, they start moving, they expand, and then something happens over time, they get complacent, they have too much success. Don't manage inventory and they go. So if you go back and look at when Walmart, Kmart and Target started, which all started in 1962, Dollar General, I think, did it the same year.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

40. “Or 10 times bigger than this, and she grabs the microphone and starts giving her personal testimony. It was awesome. And we've just been pen pals since then. And I've been to Montgomery a couple of times and eaten at her place. And she sent me this big cross and these wonderful notes.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

41. “I think that go for it was a phrase we used in one of our annual, we had kind of a theme for the year and we were growing so fast and that was really a rallying cry at one point. For me personally, the first thing that comes to mind is a cross that I have in my office. There's a Sam's Club member that I met years ago named Martha Hawkins and we happened to see Martha in Montgomery, Alabama a couple of weeks ago. She runs a restaurant, but she's got an incredible personal story overcoming a drug addiction and serving others. And we asked her to come to a Sam's Club meeting and give us feedback on what we could do better for small business owners and restaurant owners. We don't rehearse these things and I'm standing in front of all of our club managers with a group, you know, that's”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

42. “But you can use VR in ways that get you off the sales floor, let you have an opportunity to really learn when you're not interrupted by customers. And we'll have 17,000 VR headsets deployed by the end of the year for things like that.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

43. “You did in that conversation, watching the other purse, the avatar's facial expressions and the words that come back. So we're trying to help people grow for the jobs we have. And as automation happens and some of them go on to other jobs, help prepare them for more than that. But we also teach people how to do routine tasks. So you know Ivanka Trump is interested in workforce training. And she heard about the programs we were doing and wanted to come to a store. So I met her in Mesquite, Texas about a month ago, and we put VR goggles on her, and she stocked our vegetable wall, what we call the wet wall that's got leafy greens on it and stuff like that. She scored a 12 out of 20. So we got a little work to do there.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

44. “Yes, so our U.S. leadership team, Greg Foreign, Judith McKenna, and others a few years ago, took an idea that they'd seen us practice in the UK to put training academies in our stores. And now around the United States, we have about 200 locations dotted around the map that are 138 of them actually are in the back rooms of stores. We've been able to reduce our inventory and create classrooms. So they're nice classrooms equipped with technology, mobile technology, large screens, really, really well done. And as you're getting trained on, interesting things, not just how to execute a retail store, but also some soft skills like we're teaching people how to have a difficult discussion using VR. If you are a supervisor or a leader at Walmart, you probably weren't trained to coax someone for improvement. You might shy away from conflict, for example. So these VR headsets have an avatar, and if you put one on right now, Tim, you would have a conversation, and at the end of that conversation, when you take the headset off, it would score you and tell you how.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

45. “Yes, automation will do things that the humans might not want to do mundane routine tasks at store level or in a warehouse or elsewhere. But it's that personal interaction, that sense of community that I think people will want in the future and it won't be just digital. I mean, you see next door or Facebook or others that are creating a digital sense of community as we're all learning. That has some flaws associated with it. sense that you can have when you come to a place, and we hope it's a store sometimes, where you interact with others could be special and warm and safe. And if you can do that while delivering good prices and all the other stuff we got to do, we think we've got an advantage.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

46. “I'm finding that one hard to read, but most of the ones that I've been choosing on my own are related to change management and specifically becoming a digital enterprise because the transformation that's underway in the world, in business, and certainly at Walmart is largely a data and technology and automation transformation. Leading through that, while still retaining who you are as a company and the DNA and the values and the culture, one of our officers today during the Q&A grabbed the microphone. Her name's Jody. And Jodie said, you said it earlier, but I just want to underline it. The thing that will cause us to win is our humanity. And yeah, we need to learn how to become a digital enterprise, but we understand we're a company made up of $2.2 million associates and that human interaction in the future will matter.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

47. “I bet some of you in the room have the same situation I do. I don't have a shortage of books because they're constantly being sent to me. The challenge is filtering through which one you're going to read next. So right now I'm about a third of the way through Ray Dalio's principles and that's because Greg Penner, our chairman, asked me to read it. So it went to the top of the stack.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

48. “This is on all of us, not just me, and you now know pretty much everything I know. So those principles that you can glean from books and things like that really helpful.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

49. “Who's awesome. We've spent time together. He's been to Bentonville. I've been to his place. He talks about a few principles. One of them is shared consciousness. And when he was in his role in the military, he took silos that had been around for a long time, army, marines, CIA, all of those historic silos, and figured out a way to get him to work together. Once you have shared consciousness, you know what I know, I know what you know, then you can pivot to empowered execution. Now that you know what I know, I expect you to act without seeking input. Go. And even today in our officers' meeting, we've got a few hundred officers. We were talking about what our strategy is again, giving people a chance to ask questions and then saying to everybody, Andy, go.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “You need to understand what you're up against But a team of teams has been huge. I'm still giving that one out. The truth is, if my house is not far from here, if we went over there right now, my stack of books to read is like more than knee high right now. I'm behind. I'm trying to catch up. But I'm trying to learn. And we've got to, Brett's on the front row, Brett's our CFO this morning in our officer meeting. We were talking about learning and curiosity because retail is changing so fast and the business we have today is different than it was a year ago, certainly five years ago, and it's going to be different in another year's time. So we are spending a lot of time trying to learn new things. So if you looked at my last month in the pie chart of time allocation, you'd be surprised how much of that time was learning about U.S. healthcare becoming a digital company, other things other than how to run a brick and mortar retail store because we're trying to figure out how to get this company positioned to be here in 50 years' time. So like on team of teams, Stan McCrystal.”

    2018-11-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #345: Doug McMillon — CEO of Walmart · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT