Walmart CEO, Doug McMillon: Leading 2.1 Million People - [Glue Guys, EP.16]

I showed up in the lobby at 7 by 7:30. I was the fishing tackle buyer for Walmart and I think I had like 200 plus million dollars of open to buy.

Oh my gosh.

I had this huge business with no training and it's like, here you go kid. See what you can make of this. And I just. That entrepreneurial nature of that is still here.

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Welcome to Glue guys. We're your hosts, Shane Battier, Ravi Gupta and Alex sm.

And we're bringing you behind the scenes of the locker rooms, the boardrooms and the living rooms that taught us everything we know about what it takes to be great leaders and even better teammates and friends.

We hope the conversation helps you bring more ambition and more joy to your own work life and relationships. It certainly has for us.

We have Doug McMillan who is the CEO, CEO of Walmart, you might have heard of it. And he is joining Blue guys today. And Doug has had just a ridiculous career. What's incredible about it is that it's basically all at Walmart. You know, he started at 17 years old after growing up in Arkansas and packing trucks in a distribution center. Then, you know, worked at Walmart before business school, went to business school, came back as a buyer for fishing tackle and then worked his way all the way up, you know, to the CEO of Sam's Club, then the CEO of Walmart International and ultimately in 2014 took over as CEO of Walmart, which is obviously this iconic company. But I think more than his career, he's somebody who's made a big impact on me personally. You know, I tell this story, but Doug had one of the more notable meetings ever for me when he first, when I first met him, where he started with gratitude for what Walmart has done for him. He started with vulnerability, about being nervous about getting the meeting wrong. And it just taught me so much about leadership that this guy in this ultimate position of strength, you know, would start a meeting with gratitude and with vulnerability. And it's something that stuck with me. And he also is just always has time for people that he cares about. And I'm so happy that we get a chance to spend time with him today. All of us are very grateful that you're here. I really admire you as a person and as a leader. And so the fact you decided to come on our podcast is amazing. We're going to get right into the hard hitting stuff if that's okay.

It's your time. I don't know why I'm doing this. Robbie, you're just very persuasive.

Well, the hard hitting stuff, Doug, Shane.

And I say this exact same thing.

I know.

Exact same thing.

I know.

So he got you. He got you too, Doug. You know, so welcome to the club.

Welcome to the club.

Yeah, yeah, listen, you know, if closed mouths don't get fed, that's what I've learned. And so Doug, my hard hitting question for you is, what was your game like when you were a point guard in high school? We want to know the style, we want to know how you played, and we want to know a current NBA player. Comp.

I had an above average high school career. I'm no Shane Battier, let me put it that way. And you can tell I've now chosen a different career and that's worked out just fine. But I love playing ball. I still play basketball. My son runs the game now, but we actually have a 40 year tradition 40 of playing basketball on Sunday afternoon that started at our preacher's house. When I was a teenager, my dad had the game at his house for a while. Now it's at my house. My son organizes it and Yesterday we had 12 guys out in 49 degree weather playing ball in the backyard. And I love it. It's still my highlight of my week.

I love hearing you say that because Shane gives me a lot of grief. I still play on Sunday mornings and the guys who play in our game would be dramatically offended if I did not call it out as us playing basketball Sunday mornings. But Shane tells me it's a young man's game and that I need to be more careful about. About playing basketball on the weekends. I don't know. Shane, what do you think?

Well, as someone who assesses risk for a living, you know, I don't think you do a very good job. Rovi on. On Sunday mornings. All right, so Doug, you look like a shooter. All right, so I, you know, it seems to me like your game is just, you know, three point line. A three point line, which is, which is good and safe. You know, don't, don't go to the bat. Don't go to the hoop anymore.

See, that's the problem. That's the problem with my. I have no game. I've told you guys this. Like, it's just pure hu. And. And grit on the course for me. Like there's no nuance to my basketball game. So the last pickup game, you know, I played in it, it got. I took a head, I took a header to the lip. I put my tooth through my lip and had to go to the emergency room. And, you know, Ravi's invited me to this pickup game and I've politely declined because of that.

We always ask, you know, athletes, you know, what have you taken from your athletic career to your corporate career? You know, what are the lessons you try to bring from the locker room to the boardroom?

I get a competitive spirit from my mom. She's the most competitive person I've ever seen, been around in my entire life, and I can't stand to lose. You know, winning you kind of forget, but losing sticks with you. And that spirit of teamwork, we have a scoreboard, we have an opponent that plays through in business, it definitely plays through in retail. And I think that that reminds me so much of what sports is about. And it's one of the reasons why I love doing what I'm doing. We get a. We get customer feedback and we get our scorecard all the time. And I'm driven by that.

Doug, if you don't mind jumping back to kind of the beginning and like, quickly, just that it's fascinating if people haven't read it or heard about it. Like your history with starting at Walmart in high school and then even when you were getting your mba and really, like, what. Why Walmart? Like, what. What was it that drew you to it and obviously made the career decision to kind of be a lifer.

In some ways, I think Walmart is unique, but I think in many ways, big businesses sometimes get bashed around and people make bad assumptions about what it's like and who they are and what drives them. And what I found out about Walmart as a very young person was how much people loved it and how much they cared and how much fun it was and what kind of challenge it was. My first job unloading trucks was with a guy named Johnny, who loved the company, had $200,000 in Walmart profit sharing, and had a new truck in the parking lot. And he was fired up. And that was. I was 17 years old at that time, and I'm like, huh, this guy's happy. And it is hot in this trailer and we are working our tails off and he loves it. And then I just got. My dad was a dentist. He moved us to northwest Arkansas and told me to go get a job to make money for school. And the highest paying job in town was unloading those trucks. So that experience kind of started it off. But everybody I met, the story I. The stories I heard about Sam and Helen and being around the Walton family and watching them and seeing the future Potential of the company got me excited. So when I finished my MBA program, they, they offered me a job as a buyer. And I got to be a buyer for fishing tackle. On my first day, I showed up in the lobby at 7. By 7:30, I was the fishing tackle buyer for Walmart. And I think I had like 200 plus million dollars of open to buy.

Oh my gosh.

I had this huge business and with no training and it's like, here you go, kid, see what you can make of this. And I just. That entrepreneurial nature of that is still here. We still have all these young people that are running these big businesses and it's just so fun. Very challenging, but a good group of people and a great culture.

Did I read correctly that your very first day as a teenager was setting up the shareholder meeting at the Bentonville High School gym? Is this the same gym, by the way, that you were hooping in?

Yeah, it was. So that's funny that the first day they said to a few of us, you are not trained. You don't know how to pick an order. You don't know how to unload or load a trailer. So follow us over to the high school gym, we're gonna set up for the shareholders meeting. And yeah, it was that gym where I was playing ball. And on the way over, I rear ended my boss with my car, not.

Your boss with the new truck.

So it gets worse. The boss that I rear ended was also one of the officials, the referees for high school basketball.

Oh, no. Disaster.

Small chat.

Disaster.

Brilliant start, Doug.

You know, it reminds me, though of one of the most notable things for me was the first time we met, which was seven, eight years ago. And, you know, you obviously were the CEO of this enormous and important company. And, you know, we were representing a very small company at Instacart. And I was shocked at how you started our meeting. You know, the first thing you did was you went on a relatively long discussion of your gratitude to Walmart, just what the company has done for you. And then you mentioned that you were nervous about the meeting, you know, and you were nervous about getting it wrong. And I've never seen somebody with this combination of gratitude and vulnerability, you know, from such a seat of leadership. And I've told so many people about this moment of like, I mean, I wrote it down, I think about it all the time, and it's so unusual and I've never seen it before or since. And I'm just curious, like, is that. Where did that come from? Where is that style from and is that the way you've always been? Is that something that developed over time?

We say to each other around here, the only thing that's constant here, other than our purpose and values is change. And in that moment in time, and still in this moment in time, I don't want to miss something that's significant. And we've missed things. I mean, we missed E Commerce for almost a decade, messing around with all these different beliefs that we had and not really getting after it when we should have been. And I remember when we first started talking to you guys at Instacart, I recognized how much people love your service and how fast you were growing and that it was going to be significant. And there was a question on our mind, which I think we were transparent about all along, which is, do we try to do this ourselves or do we partner? And if we partner, what are the pluses and minuses of that? And so I think not just with my leadership team, but with all of us here, there's a degree of humility that we know we can lose everything we've got, like, any day. Like, retailers come and they go and they die. And this business was born in 1962. I think it's worthy of being here in the next generation of retail because it has a really good and healthy culture. It creates lots of opportunity for people, and it is wired to save people money and help them live better. Like, our folks around here are trying to figure out how to sell things for less, not more. And most companies are not wired that way. So if we can make the digital transformation happen and get this company positioned for the next generation of retail, that's obviously important and first prize, and it's really motivating to me. So I think that spirit of openness to say we don't have all this figured out is so important, and I think it's represented here in large numbers.

Well, you should know. It's very affecting to me. It's something I've taken with me.

I'm curious, you know, as a leader. So here you have Doug McMillan walking into you, your office, and you're pitching him, and all of a sudden, he leads with an unbelievable, vulnerable moment and kind of caught you off guard, like, what was your reaction and what was your takeaway, and how did that shape that entire meeting and that relationship?

Really well, we were definitely in Doug's office. You know, we had. We had made the pilgrimage down to Bentonville, but that almost made it more affecting because he's sitting there and you have this impression of what he's going to be like. And it was totally different and so much better, right? We all knew he was going to be so impressive, but, you know, so much better than what we expected in that. And I think what it did was it made us want, it raised the stakes for us to do a good job, right? Because this person had obviously set it up. As you know, I'm interested in taking this meeting, I'm interested in learning. So we're like, we better show up. But the other thing was it was so much better because it inspired us to be more real, right. We didn't feel like we had to be perfect on every part of our business when we can say, hey, look, this is something that's going great, great. This is something that's not. It just set up for a much more of a real conversation, which was so much better. And if I recall correctly, and I'm certain I do, the meeting actually went much longer than it was scheduled. And we even noticed that because we said Doug was somebody who's going to spend time on something that was important. He wasn't going to be, you know, presidential in his schedule of, okay, it's been, you know, 42 minutes and someone brings in a post it note, okay, it's time to go. You know, he was spending time with us and yeah, it's something I think about all the time. And then the gratitude was a big deal to me. I still remember him just talking about what this company has done for him and it was a cool thing versus a lot of the CEOs you see, talking about what their role is. And you know, it was this thing of Walmart's going to live, existed before me and it's going to live after me. And it was a, yeah, it was very something I think about a lot.

This thing of keep keeping it real. Just to underline that, like when you're earlier in your career and you're trying to impress people, like I had meetings where I was trying to look the and be that person and some senior leader would just be super real and just dismiss everything, all the baloney that I just said and just cut to it. I think the older you get, the less patience you have for things that aren't real. And you get, you know, to a point where you just say, just say the truth and just speak it like it is. And I wish I could have done that earlier in my career.

I think we can all appreciate like when we're insecure and we try to project, you know, some image that we think people want to see and we don't. And I think that comes from a self doubt right like that maybe we're not good enough. And I know I live that. When I got drafted, I've talked a lot about that. Like my insecurities of what elite? I was a young kid in a, in a locker room with a, you know, a bunch of grown men. Like what, what is the leader? What should a leader say? And I always, I felt like I had to stretch myself and do more. And I just want to go back because I feel like you just talked about like all of a sudden you got the bait and tackle and it's $200 million and, or the, but whatever it was and you had no idea was there a. I mean obviously how have you handled your own self doubt along those way? All these stages, then to Sam's Club and then the international Walmart and then obviously to the biggest CEO job on the planet. Like how have you handled that? And then I think with that, has there been a culture where a growth culture like within Walmart it seems like, right, like that allows you to grow into that role and develop.

No doubt the company does a pretty good job. And I think most companies do. Like when I meet my peers, Most of the CEOs that I'm working with through Business Roundtable or things like that are people that have had 25, 30, 35 year careers and they've done all these jobs and they got tested like you got tested a dozen times by big jobs. So the leaders that get through that are really capable. And in our case here, we're moving folks all the time. I spend a lot of time now getting to do the, moving to say, hey, go try this, see if you can learn this, stretch that way. And back to your point about vulnerability. The people that earn trust are the ones that are transparent and vulnerable and honest. Like they'll say, I don't know and they'll ask for help. And we see instances around here now where there's something bad that's happened and you can watch someone draw inward and focus on I must solve this problem. Kind of the individual contributor mindset. Like if I, if I hunker down and focus on this, I'll bring back an answer. And then you see other people that are like, whew, that was bad. And part of that was on me. Can we solve this together? And what do you think we ought to do? And those are the ones that earn that trust and get pulled through the system. And I'm constantly trying to get those other folks to relax, take a breath. We know you're not perfect, and we know the situation's not perfect. And if you'll just let us all help you, you'll be fine. But some people actually seem to really have a hard time doing that, like, repetitively.

We talk about this all the time, especially with young people. And when we talk to senior leaders and executives, they say, you know, how do we reach, you know, gen zers? How do we reach the millennials who grew up in a generation looking at their. Looking at their phone and swiping up and down, and all you see are messages of perfection, right? And the narrative out there is, no, I gotta have the answer. I gotta be perfect, because this is what I see, and this is what success is, when it's like, every person has said the exact opposite. It's about failing, it's about learning, it's about collaboration, it's about being vulnerable. And so, like, how do we grow that message, especially with young people trying to figure it out?

You definitely can't. Can't do it over zoom.

We.

We've all taken some criticism for wanting people to come to work. In our case, we've got 2.1 million people and all, but for about 70,000 of those people, they're going to work every day in a store, a club, a distribution center. They're definitely in person. And the rest of us also benefit from being together, from going on store trips together and modeling behavior for each other and being around each other in the office, just to have a conversation when you're getting coffee or walking down the hallway about what's happening in the world or what's happening in our business. And so I think the answer, Shane, is modeling. You can say it, but if they actually see you do it, it does have an impact. And in our case, not everybody's going to get it, but the ones that do get it, that are leaning in, that want to learn, that want to grow, they get there. Those are the ones that will get pulled through the system.

You know, it's funny you said that, Doug. One of the things Shane taught us as an expression is we talk about parenting a lot, right? Because all of us are dads, and we're, you know, very focused on that. And he says the lessons we learn from our. He says from our fathers, but in this case from our parents are the ones when they're not trying to teach us anything, right? And it's just like what you said on the modeling. It's, you know, it's not the lecture, it's not the sit down. It's just what we see every day, you know, and then, you know, as kids we learn it. And that reminds me a bit. Look, you've had a pretty demanding job the whole way, you know, and you now you have kids that are 31 and 29. What did you do to stay connected to them? What did you do to stay close to them, you know, the whole way when you were doing jobs like running Walmart International or running Sam's Club, even before, you know, taking over as CEO?

First of all, Shelley did a great job. Marrying well is a big key to success. So sweetheart, full check on that. I got rid of everything else. Like for me, Faith, family and Walmart are it. Like, I haven't played golf in years. I like golf. I would like to play golf someday. I haven't had time to play golf in 15 years. You have to just give up some stuff. And those are the things that I gave up. And like I mentioned before, and you guys are the same way. I get my adrenaline and energy from competition and so I'm getting a lot of fulfillment from those things. And as it relates to family, I, I would fly around the world in Walmart International land on Friday night and on Saturday morning drive to Tulsa for a soccer tournament and act interested. You know, you got to be present, right? And you know, go to first day of school, go to practice, do what you can to prioritize. And I don't think our guys would say that I wasn't present and that I missed out a lot and it's because I just got rid of everything else.

No shortcuts, that's, you know, there's only so many hours in the day must.

Be present to win.

Doug, you talk about like the culture of Walmart and even obviously going back to when you started and then fast forwarding now and, and now you have this company, you have a team of over 2 million people, right? Like that's your locker room. That's. It's the biggest team in the world, right? And how was something of that scale, like your, the CEO office is so far removed from the frontline associates. How do you combat that? How do you create culture, right? Like, I just think now the whole image again of you setting up for that shareholder meeting when you were a teenager and now you are the focal point of it. It's so visible. It's no longer in the Bentonville High School gym, right? Like it's a big time event. And how do you, how do you combat the scale of the company to create culture. Right. Like, it's hard. I mean, it's gotta be insanely challenging.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun to try and perpetuate something that should be perpetuated. And what I've learned, at least in my experience, is repetition really matters on the most important things. I can't tell you how many times during the day I will say, our purpose is, our values are, our culture should be repetition, storytelling. People remember stories much more than they remember facts. I've done so many different presentations, been part of so many different conversations, and I get reflected back stories all the time, and no one reflects back data points and stats. Like, it just almost never happens. And then the other thing is, you've got to be on the front line a lot. You got to be in stores, you got to be in Sam's clubs, which is actually one of the most fun things that we do. And we do it almost always on a surprise basis. A few days ago, I was out in D.C. nobody knew I was coming. Every week when I'm not required to be here, I'm out somewhere, and you just show up and you're like, hey, my name's Doug. How's it going? And you can read body language. And people will eventually, if you're there for a couple hours, they eventually get comfortable enough to start telling you the truth about the challenges they're dealing with and that kind of lead. The leaders shape the culture at the top. We've got about 600 officers and my peers and I, our leaders, we invest in them. And then you go straight to the sales floor and you figure out what's really going on and try to solve problems. And if you view your job as a problem solver, which is what we're all doing, you get up every morning, you realize something's going to happen today that's not what we want it to be. And my job is to help figure out who's solving it. Do they have the resources they need and are we making progress? And it's really kind of simple. Manage the top and the bottom. I don't get to. Middle management is, you know, I wish an area where I wish I had more engagement, but I'm dependent upon some other folks to get to them.

Are the surprise visits a legacy of Sam Walton? Because I love the history of it. And I know he used everywhere he would go when he'd be traveling with his family, and he'd go, you know, checking out stores. And is that still kind of. Has that been in the company since you came up 100%.

And you probably remember from reading Sam's book, he flew around with his plane. And so we've got. It's a good book. We've got a bunch of planes and we're surprising people all over the place. This morning there were planes taken off and people don't know. Know where they're going. So, yeah, it's key.

What are the other legacies or lessons, you know, from the. From Sam Walton? I think one thing I remember from visiting is there's a giant for this rally, Shane, this giant font. I mean, I don't think I've ever. I took a big picture of it and it says there is only one boss that is the customer. Right. And I always joke with our kids that you could change that, that there is only one boss. You know, your mother. Right. That same sign could exist in. In the Gupta household. But there are all these things that are legacies, I think, from Sam Walton. What are some of the other ones, other than the surprise visits that you guys still have and you carry with you?

Yeah, Servant leadership would be at the top of my list. I mean, I think Sam's characteristics are still practiced here today because they work, not because we're nostalgic about them. And we talk about Sam Walton all the time. He passed away in 1992 and the company grew. One of the things that Sam did is he had a great team around him. Like, Sam managed his ego to the point that he let David Glass, Jack Shoemaker, and all these other people that after he passed away, took the company to extraordinary levels because he was giving away credit and he wasn't all about himself. And so servant leadership is at the top of the list. You see images of him on one knee in a store listening to our associates and taking notes and the most powerful voice. When Sam would come back, I had the privilege of being in some of the meetings on the weekends when he would come back from store trips and he'd have that yellow pad and he would say something like Sally in Tuscaloosa said, and whatever she said was gold. Like you couldn't. She was a department manager in toys or something. But she said, we have too many Hot Wheels and therefore, let it be known we have too many Hot Wheels. Eventually we got some data and the buyers, like me, started saying, well, actually, Sally only has 388 pieces and she needs 500. But Sally's word was gold. Sam taught us about servant leadership and he made this emotion occur in the company where we were all in it together. Didn't matter what your job was, you could get promoted to be a store manager. Today's store managers make a lot of money. You can, you can change your life. The American dream, which can be repeated in Mexico and other countries. You can live out the American dream here. You can start without a college education and you can become a vice president and you can change the trajectory of your family for a generation or generations. He made that happen.

Doug, do you think that servant leadership helps? And again, I kind of, I'm going to, I want to like the whole, the pressure to perform, right. Like you have immense pressure to perform and in all these positions they're there, right? Like that pressure sometimes can take you down a negative route. Right. Like negative self talk and doubt. And I do feel like when you the, the service leadership, the servant leadership, like when it's for others, I, I, it just spins you in such a different direction mentally. Right. Like a positive direction. And do you think that's something about the, the leadership culture at Walmart?

Yeah, I do think that helps a lot. When you're all in it together, you can share in that pressure and you can realize just as in sports, it's the input metrics that matter. The outputs are the outputs. What happens in the quarterly financials are just a reflection of the tiny little operating things that we did to keep a store in stock, to fulfill an E commerce order, to improve our code, to deploy generative AI, all the inputs. And so when I hear people like Nick Saban talk about focusing on the inputs, it really resonates with me. And when I feel pressure, I go get the team together to focus on the inputs.

How do you think about serial success?

Right.

We talk about most people don't know what it takes to win a championship, whatever your championship is, until they do it. And then once they do it, they say, oh my gosh, that was the hardest thing I ever had to do and you want me to do it next quarter and next year, next five years. So like, like, and you like your biggest enemy, not necessarily is your competitor, your biggest enemy is yourself because you know what it takes to win your championship and you gotta do that again and do it in a different way. So how do you think about climbing that mountain quarter after quarter, year after year and inspiring your folks to reach new heights?

Yeah, we laugh around here, Shane, about our daily sales. We look at our first thing we do in the morning is we wake up and look at sales. So you know, it's 5:30 in the morning. Morning. And you're looking at sales thinking, oh great, we had a good day. Oh no, we had a bad day. Now I have to beat it from day to day, quarter to quarter. I want it to be good, not too good, because then we'll have to beat it again. The bar just keeps going up and up and up. So change, change has to happen. You don't get growth without change and you don't have change without risk. And I'm a really conservative person, but in this job and in my previous role, we really had to take some big risks to get that growth. And I think that's the other thing that comes to mind is you have to create an environment where people at all kinds of levels are comfortable taking intelligent risk.

How do you think about risk, who do you listen to? And how do you process all the data points you're getting? I mean, you have more data points than anybody. How do you process all those little data points when you're trying to make a monumental growth change decision?

Yeah, intuition, gut matters a lot. You should use data. But data frequently can't tell you about the future. It can only tell you about the past. Generally speaking, it's not always true, but generally speaking. And I think you have to trust yourself and your team to go for it. Sometimes we have these things that face us that frequently are choose the best choice from a list of answers, not the right choice. Because every choice has some bad outcomes. There are trade offs in every one of them. And we try to do that together because we're. Collective wisdom is better than individual wisdom. But sometimes you just have to make a call and tell everybody you made the call. That's another thing I've learned that we have such a participative culture around here that if I don't actually say out loud I've made that decision, people will still think about it. It's all negotiable. And so sometimes you have to say, no, we had that conversation, here's what we're doing. Get on with it.

Doug, how do you allow, how do you enable some of the folks who are not in your seat to take risks the way you did earlier on in your career? Right. Is it that they kind of get full decision making authority on some level of stuff and you're like, even if I think you're wrong, I'm going to let you do it? Or is it, or, and, or is it something else where you encourage it and talk about your stories? How do you enable that at a company as big as Walmart?

Yeah, when there's a failure that everybody can see, but, you know, it was well thought out and well intentioned and still didn't work. You have to praise people publicly for taking that risk and get them up off the ground and let them get on with it. When the pandemic happened, we had to really change quickly. We were on a kind of weekly and monthly cadence of decision making. There was a rhythm to the company. And when the pandemic happened and all these questions were flying our way related to supply chain issues, keeping stores open, keeping our associates safe, how we treat our suppliers. There were all kinds of state regulations, and we operate in 19 countries, so each country was processing it differently. One of the things that happened was we pretty quickly figured out that my leadership team needed a morning meeting every morning. And so we started the day together, and we would run the zoom and ask, okay, Ravi, what's on your plate today? We'd all listen to that. And then by the end of the call, we were like, okay, these decisions need to be made. I don't have any more information than you do, so you make that decision and let us know tomorrow what you decided. And the speed of the business really picked up. And I got to see the quality of decision making by our leadership team levels down and was really impressed with it, which gave me kind of conscious confidence to give them more and make fewer decisions. And now my inner voice has still had to remind myself, don't make too many decisions. If you're being directive, be deliberate about being directive. Otherwise, let them decide because they're closer to it and they'll make better decisions. And you've got confidence, confidence in them.

That.

That pandemic experience brought that all to life in color.

Doug, what do you look for in that leadership team, like, when you're making personnel decisions? I mean, where does talent rank amongst trust and motivation? We talk about all the time, like the motivated person, right? The guy or girl that's got the chip on their shoulder and wants to go, you know, prove something it can do, you know, like, where. Where do all these things rank? And what do you look for?

Which is all talent. All right, Talent is very, very, you know, true.

I mean, more than the operative word here.

Ale.

I have eight direct reports, and some of them have big leadership jobs where they're running businesses. John Furner runs Walmart us. Chris Nicholas runs Sam's us. Cath Maclay runs our international business. And then I've got a people leader, a finance leader, functional leadership. And they have to work together to Create the best outcomes. And when we're interviewing for those jobs and jobs at the higher level of the company, we're looking for a degree of not only competence is obviously very important, experience sets very important, but character. Is it about you? Usually when I'm sitting down to interview somebody from outside the company, that's my number one question, is you're accomplished or you wouldn't have gotten here. But is this all about you? Because if it's all about you, you're not going to make it here. This organization will eventually kick you out. So you want great people that are willing to let others join in that success and do it together because these are too big, these issues are too significant for us to try and to do them individually. So that's a big thing. And internally you get that tested through experience you can see. But externally it's riskier to hire folks.

Alex, you should share your coordinator versus culture leader theory from the NFL with Doug and see what he thinks of it.

Oh yeah. So you know, in there'll be. Every year there's going to be 7 head coaching job, you know, openings. And the pool of candidates almost exclusively comes from offensive, the hottest offensive coordinators and defensive coordinators. And those positions are very strategic. Like being an offensive coordinator, you're very in the weeds. It's very schematic, right? Like putting your players in positions to succeed and, and really coaching the fine detail, those are not the things it takes to be a head coach. They're very different. Right. Like, and I think to lead the room, to put your staff together, right? And I think to like you talked about, to lead your leaders and then I think to have your pulse on the locker room like, like Dan Campbell to me comes to mind. He's just such a. Right. Like this guy was never the X's and O's guru. He is an unbelievable head coach though. And I think he got looked over for a long, long time because he wasn't the hot shot coordinator. And so often we've seen these gurus, like the savants, they don't make great head coaches. Right. And so I think there is no trying to find the talent pipeline to be a good head coach like in the NFL, they haven't found it yet. I think it's a little bit of.

A guesswork that totally resonates. And some of our jobs, like the job that Kath McLay is doing now, leading international, she's got a leader for Mexico and Central America, another couple of leaders for India, another one for China. And so she has to be the one that manages the room. She's the Dan Campbell. And sometimes I've had people that have gone on to do that kind of a group job, that kind of breadth job and they don't like it because they want to go back to calling plays and designing the strategy. And it's not for everybody, like to your point. So sometimes we make talent choices to move people around out of some of those strategy roles into big leadership roles where you're just really leading people. That's the primary function that you have just to see do you like it? If you don't like it, you probably shouldn't be Dan Campbell. You have to have both of those skill sets to do the biggest jobs. Absolutely. A parallel.

Do they teach you that in business school?

No, no.

I mean I didn't go to business school obviously, but it seems like that's a pretty basic lesson of leadership.

Right.

So at you just got to figure that out and look around the room and say, okay, this is how to be a leader.

It depends on your duration. Shane, you know, if you have a short term view of leadership then the thing that matters is like this specific tactical decision. I think if you have a longer term view then you realize everybody, everybody who has any experience leading anything, they always come back to the same thing as it comes back to the people every time. Every single person always says that. But I do think it's a duration thing and I think I didn't go to business school but my impression is that it's just a shorter term set of stuff that they're trying to teach rather than the super long term which is how do you get the best people in the world to want to work with you and accomplish things together? Like one of the things that I've mentioned this Doug before, that's crazy. Walmart is a huge company with tons going on. Their responsiveness is as fast as the fastest startup in terms of like email responsiveness and text responsiveness. It's crazy. You'll ask them a question and it's really, it is remarkable how quickly they will get to you with we're going to do it, we're not going to do it or like here, talk to this person and at the highest levels of the company and I do think that that comes back from some idea of like these are people that Doug looks for and that's obviously a character trait that matters of the responsiveness and you can feel it. But I think it's duration is why they don't teach it.

Harvard case studies Typically teach you how to be a good offensive coordinator but not a good head coach.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Makes sense, Doug.

On that exact note, the kind of the MBA business school mentality I can't get out of my head. When you first, I believe first got the CEO job kind of 2014 and faced obviously with the looming Amazon E Commerce growth is kind of stagnated and you make the decision then to raise associate wages. Right. And, and the pressure from Wall street that looks so negatively on that. And I think the stock took a huge hit and I, I, I think I read it correctly that it was like the duality of it was the technically from your NBA side, it was the worst day possible right here, you just taking over this company and take this huge hit. But like on the other, the leadership side, it was the best day. Right. Like because of what you did for all the associates out there and the duality of that that I think I just can't get over. Right. Because it's not just the NBA thing, Shane. Right. Like it's not, there's so much more to obviously your position and your job and I don't know, can you just speak to that? I just found it fast.

Yeah.

And it worked. This is the other thing. I know it's like it was the right answer even though it was, you know, negatively received at first by certain audiences.

Yeah. I think Ravi's point about time horizon is kind of the headline here. If you're thinking about this long term, it's clearly the right thing to do. If you're thinking about it short term, it's not in a sense. But you're right. My best days in my entire career are the ones where we've raised wages for associates. That's my favorite thing to do. We want to do that as much as possible. And there are things staggered coming and things we've done that I'm excited about and proud of. And it can never be enough. Everybody deserves it. That's all good stuff. In that particular instance, we were not having a very good sales result in our Walmart super centers. And I had been an International for five years in San for six years before that. So 11 years outside of the Walmart U.S. business. And the Walmart U.S. business needs attention. So as I started doing surprise store visits and just taking my notepad, the associates tell you exactly what they need. Like my schedule's inconsistent. Our inventory is too heavy. We've gotten away from everyday low price. We need a wage investment. Our prices are a little high here and there. It's like a prescription from a doctor. They just tell you, so if you went with me, you'd be like, duh, like in Colorado. They told me the same thing they told me in Florida, the same thing they told me in this other place. So it must be the formula. So I come back with that plan with our team to talk to our board and our back to risk taking. I had a recommendation and it was at a certain level, and our board said, it's not enough. Go give them more. Which increased the pressure from Wall street in the short term and emboldened me that we were on the right track. And that was such a great moment in our history because the board and the Walton family said, we believe in the plan. We're willing to go through short term pain for long term gain. Go for it. In fact, go for it bigger. I'm really proud of them for that and grateful for that, and it set the tone for everything else. And so then you had a sequence, okay, we're going to do this first, and our associates will know we're listening to them and care about them, and we're going to make these other changes they gave us on our yellow pad. And then we're going to do this in E. Com and then we're going to do this in international. And it just laid out into a plan that came from them in the beginning, and that's really rewarding.

Do they make you guys have to be Bronco fans now, by the way?

Yes. Required.

Does Greg make you guys?

You know, I'm a lifelong Cowboys fan, so I'm finding it really easy to be a Broncos fan right now.

Yeah, that's great, Doug.

One thing that we ask everyone, and we'd love to ask you, you know, the name of our podcast is Glue Guys, and it can be Glue Gals, Glue People. But the idea is that there's a set of people that really matter in your life on your team who aren't always, you know, they don't always get the limelight. Right. And so who are some of the glue guys or glue people in your life? And we'd love to hear about them. We'd love to hear about what impact they've had on you.

Yeah. Personally, a tight knit family and lots of members of family that form that glue professionally. I get to sign associate service award certificates every month. People that are celebrating 25, 30, 35. Sometimes it's 50 years of experience. We have a few associates that have made more than 60 years of service. So there's this moment every month Where I'm reminded of who's actually doing the work. It's really cool. There's a big stack of them. There's a lot of them. Ricky Oliver and Greg Carter come to mind because we've been through these storms recently, the hurricanes that hit the Carolinas in Florida. These are two truck Dr. Drivers who have basically a ministry through Walmart. They're professional truck drivers all the time, but they, when storms happen, they have some specialized equipment to cook for people. They rally other associates, including other truck drivers, and they show up like I was in Augusta, Georgia, after the storms went through there. They were in Augusta for days, serving tens of thousands of hot meals to people that need food, food. And you'll go. You'll see them go from there to the Carolinas, to Florida as the storms work through. And by the time they're through, I think they serve something close to 100,000 meals to people. And I love them, and I love that. And they've been doing it for years. And they're part of the culture that holds these people together. So, you know, when you think about our truck drivers and how hard their jobs are, they are called to a higher purpose of serving others. And not just Ricky and Greg, but all of them that participate in this process get that fulfillment and stuff like that happens all over the company all the time. And those are the glue people at Walmart.

Oh, that's so good.

Yes, that's so good.

Ricky and Greg, I love it.

They're great. They text me all the time like, here's what's happening. We need a new truck. And I'm like, okay, whatever you guys want. Like, we'll get you a new truck, get you a bigger cooker, whatever you do the best.

I think the idea that there's these people, like you said, the ministry through Walmart, with the scale at which you guys operate and the kind of local approach that you guys have, it enables these incredible stories like that, Right? And I think that one of the things, Doug, we talk about in the past, I don't know if you've read the Phil Knight book Shoe Dog, but he talks a lot about the reason he was good at leading Nike was because he believed in it. He really believed it wasn't. It wasn't an act. And I think one of the things that comes through with you so clearly on Walmart is it's in there. It's in your blood. You believe it. You really believe in the impact that this company has and can have. And I can tell you it comes through in all the interactions that you have with others, too.

I would want to do a job you didn't really believe in. I think there's some people that do that, but that just sounds awful to me. It's got to be real.

Who are some of the other leaders that you respect or learn from or look to whenever you have something that matters to you?

Most of the people who had the biggest impact on me are former Walmart leaders. Watching what David Glass did after Sam Walton passed away and getting to spend a lot of time with him had a huge impact on me. For example, today I'm talking to a lot of technologists. I'm asking Satya and Sundar and Sam Altman and others for time. Can I come see you? Can we have a quick phone call? Like, are we being aggressive enough on generative AI? Are we investing in the right areas? Our strategy is different than some of our competitors. Is that smart? So those kinds of leaders. One of the great benefits of having the job I have is that you can call people and they'll call you back. They'll spend time talking to you. And I try to take full advantage of that to get an education and change what I know, change my mindset, change my habits in a way that helps keep this company contemporary. So I got a lot of advisors, a lot of peers that I've been fortunate to get to know well.

We really, really, really appreciate your time. This was absolutely fantastic. And I will end with one thing, that you got me in a little trouble last night, Doug, with my teammates here, because I was. Was excited about our chat and I texted these guys last night, being like, hey, you guys, remember, we have Doug tomorrow morning. So just trying to make sure you guys are, you know, all ready with your questions, are going to be on time. And they accused me of stereotyping the athletes, that they weren't going to be athlete bias on time or prepared for our meeting with our time with you. But I think. Exactly.

We know you're a busy man, Doug, and we appreciate your time. There's so many good nuggets, nuggets of wisdom on not just business, but life. We appreciate your thoughts and your energies.

Thanks for tuning in to Glue Guys.

We're on social media at Glue Guys Underscore podcast and we'll be back next week.