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Sam Walton--The Big american Man.
In 1967, a lean, tanned visitor from Arkansas came to see Kurt Barnard, then the head of a discount retailers' trade group in New York. Barnard recalls promising the man 10 minutes. But for more than two hours, the intense Sam Walton grilled him on every aspect of discounting, taking notes all the while.


Walton already showed the drive that would turn his Wal-Mart (WMT ) discount chain into the world's largest company. His simple business model, with its fanatical focus on low costs and low prices, changed the way Americans shop. But the chain's impact goes beyond cheap underwear. With its unparalleled size and efficiency, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has dampened inflation and driven productivity gains throughout retailing and manufacturing. It also has been attacked for holding down wages, hastening the shift of production jobs overseas, and decimating small-town merchants.

Born in Kingfisher, Okla., in 1918 and raised in Missouri, Samuel Moore Walton stumbled into retailing. He honed his competitive drive on the high school football field. At the University of Missouri, where he earned a business degree in 1940, Walton waited tables, worked as a lifeguard, and managed newspaper routes, earning more than $4,000 a year. He contemplated business school but couldn't afford it. So he took an offer to be a J.C. Penney Co. (JCP ) management trainee. "I got into retailing because I was tired, and I wanted a real job," he wrote in Sam Walton: Made in America.

Walton's wife, Helen, was responsible for one strategy that fueled Wal-Mart's success: its early focus on small towns. Helen refused to move to any town with more than 10,000 people. So when Walton was ready to start his own Ben Franklin variety store as a franchisee in 1945 -- borrowing $20,000 from Helen's dad -- they landed in tiny Newport, Ark. Walton's small-town focus forced him to build his own distribution and...