Sam Walton on Leadership Transition

Samuel Robson Walton, born in Tulsa on October 27, 1944, the oldest of Sam and Helen Walton's four children, was prepared by temperament and training for the chairmanship he assumed two days after his father's death. A College of Wooster and University of Arkansas business graduate with a Columbia law degree, he practiced at the Tulsa firm Conner & Winters, which represented Walmart, before joining the company as a senior vice president in 1978; he became vice chairman in 1982 and was named chairman of the board on April 7, 1992. He held the chair until 2015, shepherding the family's control through decades of professional management, and with his siblings pledged roughly two billion dollars to the Walton Family Foundation between 2008 and 2013. A well-known collector of automobiles, he later led the family ownership group that purchased the Denver Broncos in 2022 for a record four-point-six-five billion dollars.

David Glass, born on an Oregon County, Missouri farm in 1935 and educated at Southwest Missouri State College, built Walmart's operational machine. He joined the company in 1976 as executive vice president of finance, administered its financial and accounting responsibilities, and served as vice chairman and chief financial officer before being named president and chief operating officer in 1984. In February 1988 he succeeded Sam Walton as chief executive, a post he held until January 2000, presiding over the expansion from the one hundred twenty-three stores that existed when he arrived to more than four thousand nationally and internationally by 2005. The retail industry named him Retailer of the Year in both 1986 and 1991, and he sat on Walmart's board from 1976 until his death in 2020. His tenure compressed Walmart's regional dominance into national and then international scale, executing the logistics blueprint his founder-employer had drafted.

The final thirty months of Walton's life compressed Walmart's transformation from regional powerhouse into multinational. American sales had quadrupled to thirty-two billion dollars over the previous five years by 1990, the year Walmart acquired the food-service distributor The McLane Company. In 1991 the company opened its first store outside the United States, in Mexico City, and launched the Sam's American Choice brand under the Made in America initiative, meant to stimulate American suppliers to produce more products at lower prices. On March 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush presented Walton with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Walton died on April 5, and his eldest son, S. Robson Walton, took over as chairman of the corporate board on April 7, 1992 — a year in which Walmart operated in forty-five states. Eighteen months after his death, in December 1993, the company's stores crossed the billion-dollar mark in sales in a single week.

In 1988 Walton stepped down as chief executive, handing the role to David Glass while remaining chairman of the board, and the first Walmart Supercenter opened that year in Washington, Missouri. The succession coincided with the culmination of the growth arc: by 1988 Walmart led all American retailers in profitability, though Kmart and Sears still outsold it in total value until late 1990 or early 1991, and by 1990 it stood as the largest American retailer by revenue. Through the same years the supply base was quietly going global — by 1984 Walton had begun sourcing between six and forty percent of his company's products from China — planting the tension between everyday low prices and domestic manufacturing that dominated his final public campaign on behalf of American-made goods. The same year brought a restructuring of senior management that elevated a cadre of executives to positions of greater responsibility.

Walton was treated for hairy-cell leukemia in 1982 and diagnosed with bone cancer in 1990, undergoing radiation and chemotherapy at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, and he died of multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, in Little Rock on April 5, 1992 — a week after his seventy-fourth birthday and three months shy of Walmart's thirtieth anniversary. Days earlier, according to his son, he was still reviewing sales data from his hospital bed. Word of his death went out over the satellite network to every one of the 1,960 stores of a company that then employed four hundred thousand people and generated nearly fifty billion dollars in annual sales across 1,735 Walmarts, 212 Sam's Clubs, and 13 Supercenters. In March 1992, a month before he died, President George H. W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in retail.