Sam Walton

You can make a lot of mistakes and still recover if you run an efficient operation. Or you can be brilliant and still go out of business if you're too inefficient.

Appreciate everything your associates do for the business.

Each Wal-Mart store should reflect the values of its customers and support the vision they hold for their community.

Celebrate your successes. Find some humor in your failures.

Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well-chosen, well-timed, sincere words of praise. They're absolutely free and worth a fortune.

In the beginning, I was so chintzy I really didn't pay my employees well.

All of us profit from being corrected - if we're corrected in a positive way.

Swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom.

I learned this early on in the variety business: You've got to give folks responsibility, you've got to trust them, and then you've got to check on them.

I had to pick myself up and get on with it, do it all over again, only even better this time.

I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.