Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/59887
Your Turn Wal-Mart: Teaching the Whole Story Is Wal-Mart a gigantic success story or an Enron waiting to detonate? It could be both or neither, which is what makes Wal-Mart perhaps the most prominent, most fascinating—and most contradictory—case study that has confronted business educators in a long time. With Wal-Mart, however, business educators face a common limitation, one they share with the media and stock analysts. Too often, we take a one-dimensional view of corporate behavior. We label corporations as either "failures" or "success stories," as either heroes or villains, depending on their most recent financial, ethi- cal, and social behavior. Companies that make the "best" lists—best to work for, best for women—are good. Those that succumb to ethical scan- dals, bankruptcy, or other such cor- porate ills are bad. We present our students with case studies so that they can learn the conditions under which a company succeeds or fails. It's often just not that simple. As a result, we sometimes get it wrong. Enron, once adored as the paradigm of good corporate citizen- ship and strategy, is now the poster child of corrupt corporations. Dow Corning was once seen as having the best business ethics programs in cor- porate America. Nevertheless, its seemingly infallible program failed to protect the company when problems with its breast implants surfaced in the mid-1990s, leading to a class action lawsuit and settlement that may reach $4.27 billion. As business educators, we are often forced to 54 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2005 by Munir Quddus change viewpoints retroactively, when a good company turns bad, or vice versa. Rarely do we have—or take—the opportunity to look at both sides at the same time. This illustrates the need for an important change in the way we teach. We must show business stu- dents that a company can be both good and bad. It's imperative that students learn to look at companies through two lenses at once. With a company like Wal-Mart, we have the national product. According to one industry observer, if Wal-Mart were a nation, it would be China's eighth largest trading partner. Wal-Mart's late founder, Sam Walton, had a vision for the company that still resonates positively today. For example, in his autobiography SamWalton—Made in America, Walton included a chapter on "Running a Successful Company: Ten Rules That Worked forMe." He lists many rules that are consid- ered the gold standard of good busi- ness: Exceed customer expectations, control expenses, communicate with employees, keep employees motivat- ed, celebrate successes, and ignore conventional wisdom. Walton also emphasized learning from competi- tors—he often sneaked into other department stores to discover new ways of approaching retail—and learning from one's own mistakes. Such apparent wisdom, along with Wal-Mart's prominence, would make Walton and many of his successors coveted guest speakers for any busi- ness school course. However, success inevitably Munir Quddus perfect opportunity. We can extract a course's worth of lessons from Wal-Mart's colossal success and well-publicized flaws to show our students that a company's character can't always be painted in black- and-white terms. As the largest retailer and compa- ny in America, with 20 million peo- ple shopping in its 3,500 stores every day, Wal-Mart is a true business titan. The company's $256 billion in annu- al revenue is equivalent to 2.5 per- cent of the United States' gross brings with it more attention from the media, politicians, and academ- ics. In Wal-Mart's case, that atten- tion has exposed a number of appar- ent shortcomings. For instance, Wal- Mart is the most sued firm in corpo- rate America—the company is cur- rently defending a class action law- suit that could eventually involve 1.6 million current and former female employees. In addition, Wal-Mart managers are accused of employing undocumented workers, requiring overtime work without overtime pay, and even locking their night-shift workers inside the store without a means of escape. Moreover, despite its enormous