The Commando Entrepreneur: Risk, Innovation and Creating Success by Damian McKinney

Author:Damian McKinney
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Urbane Publications Limited
Published: 2015-07-02T14:00:00+00:00

An interview with Bill Simon

“Many people in the business world do strategy,” says Bill. “But few do execution well. It’s what businesses lack. You need to be tenacious – a commando quality – to make your strategy happen, and you have to be fearless – run to the sound of gunfire, not away from it.”

“What matters is aligning with the mission. It’s the critical issue for business. That’s what mission leadership is about and I’ve seen it working in companies of all sizes. I believed it would work in Walmart, although the mass scale of everything Walmart does throws up particular leadership challenges.”

“We talked about this soon after I arrived at Walmart. As a result we set up the Leadership Academy, modelled on a military staff college. The aim was to accelerate the progress of talented people, to gain seven years’ experience in two years. We saw young people being transformed from timid juniors to seasoned executives through this compression of seven years into two. Some of them are now vice-presidents in Walmart.”

“Our thinking was that Walmart equipped managers well with technical training, but it was not so successful at training people for leadership. These are massive stores, small companies in themselves, with a thousand people working in a store. The store managers are well-paid and we could hire people from grocery stores but this was a different magnitude and complexity. We had no incubator to bring people on. That was the role of the Leadership Academy.”

I ask Bill about risk-taking and adventure. How did he see these characteristics in people around him? Were there people he identified as commando entrepreneurs?

“The love of adventure is closely tied to risk. We’re adrenaline junkies. A risk-averse personality leads to a lack of adventure, a lack of confidence means you seek safety. That’s not going to succeed in business. I’m constantly pushing people further – very rarely do you have to pull anyone back.”

“It is linked too to making a difference. You must want to achieve more than picking up the pay check. When I joined Walmart, I looked at the healthcare business – this was 2006. The high cost of prescription drugs was a problem in the US and around the world. Canada and the UK subsidised the cost of pharmacy medicines but in the US the drug companies and pharmacies charged high prices. In my first three months I decided Walmart would lower the cost of generic medicines to $4 per unit.”

“I had no idea if it would work but I was sure it would be worth achieving. I remember going home and saying to my wife ‘this might be the shortest appointment of my career’. She said to me: ‘What better way to get sacked?’ so we did it, and it worked brilliantly. We knew within 15 minutes that it would work, it caught on like wildfire. Although we had planned its introduction to last over a year, we had to roll it out in weeks.”

“This made a difference in a number of ways.

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