Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook and the other tech billionaires who crowded onto the stage at the Capitol for President Donald Trump’s inauguration have all subsequently come up big losers, in terms of both wealth and esteem.
One business leader in attendance who sat out of camera range has since done considerable good for his company and the country and therefore, by his measure, for himself.
Doug McMillon was 17 when he started out at Walmart, and happened to rear end his boss’s car when arriving for his first day stocking shelves. He is now 58 and for more than a decade has been the CEO of the nation’s biggest retailer, with $648 billion in sales last year.
On Monday, McMillon was invited along with Target CEO Brian Cornell and Home Depot CEO Ted Decker to an Oval Office meeting with Trump. As the head of a company with 4,618 stores in the U.S.—more than Target and Home Depot combined—McMillion was in the best position to sway Trump.
And McMillion is the kind of businessman whose own idea of the art of the deal is to find common ground and make transactions that benefit everyone.
McMillon and the other CEOs reportedly warned Trump that he was creating a situation that would not be good for anybody.
They are said to have told him the negative effects of his tariffs—especially the 145 per cent on China—would kick in within two weeks. They suggested his policies could quickly lead to empty shelves nationwide.
Reason seemed to combine with continuing turmoil in the financial markets to temper Trump.
On Tuesday, Trump told reporters at a news event in the Oval Office that he had reconsidered the tariffs on China.
“145% is very high and it won’t be that high,” Trump said. “It won’t be anywhere near that high. It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.”
(Trump offered his own version of the meeting in a Time magazine interview published Friday and conducted on Wednesday. “I had the head of Walmart yesterday, right in that seat,” he told Time. “I had the head of Walmart. I had the head of Home Depot and the head of Target in my office. And I’ll tell you what they think, they think what I’m doing is exactly right.” That was hardly a contradiction of what)
If we are lucky, Trump will have many more meetings with the guy who started out stocking shelves and became an actually great businessman, not one who played one on television. The president would have done well to have ditched Musk and listened to McMillion from the start.
During a Q&A session at Stanford Business School last week, McMillion was asked, “How do you take a company and instill change and innovation without losing sight of the loyalty and DNA that helped build the company in the first place?”
McMillon replied that a new leader should be “clear on your purpose and the values and culture that you want your organization to have, and then behave that way, because it doesn’t matter what you say as much as it matters what you do.”
He said that in his case, “The team that I was working with took those first few weeks and months to really get away, listen to each other and think about strategy.”
He continued, “And one of the things that we concluded early on was the list of things that needed to change was very long, but the list of things that needed to stay the same and be strengthened and nurtured was relatively short and it’d be helpful to people if they knew what was going to be consistent.”
He said he and his team had assured the employees that the company would continue to adhere to certain core values: “Respect the individual, acting with integrity, service to the customer, striving for excellence. Those four values are what we want to see practice in our behavior every day.”
He and his team also believe in “servant leadership.”
“We’re looking for altruistic people that can put other people first,” he continued.
“There’s all these little signals and symbols of that, like when we go to visit stores, we park at the back, we grab shopping carts on the way in, pick up trash off the floor, be willing to do what we want anybody else to do.”
He added that he does not yell.
“If I did, it wouldn’t take very long until it was okay for a store manager to do that…The culture that we have has to be the culture you would want a customer to experience on the sales floor. That’s a really good way to think about it. So. You have to actually care about that stuff and kind of be wired that way.”
Imagine if Trump followed any of that when he began his second term. The president and all those tech billionaires who filled the stage at his swearing-in would be much better off.
Not to mention the rest of us.
The post Opinion: Why a Walmart Shelf-Stocker Became the Truth-Teller America Needs Now appeared first on The Daily Beast.
