Originally published in Successful Meetings
magazine, March 2007Whether you admire or detest Wal-Mart, the company has developed a winning business strategy.
Michael Bergdahl spent two years working at Wal-Mart, directly with founder Sam Walton, and left when Walton passed away. Bergdahl had worked for PepsiCo prior to his stint at Wal-Mart and learned its business standards; in future roles, though, he found himself returning to Wal-Mart's strategies over PepsiCo's.
"It's not that PepsiCo's aren't great, but they are more complicated. Wal-Mart's are simpler to understand," he explains.
While working at American Eagle Outfitters 10 years ago, Bergdahl began receiving invitations to speak. "I got requests because of my background at Wal-Mart, and because I was involved in the turnaround at American Eagle Outfitters. Turnaround specialists are of interest to organizations—it gives me a certain level of credibility," says Bergdahl.
He hit on an audience need with a keynote based on Wal-Mart strategies and packaged with a convenient acronym: Price, Operations, Culture, Key item promotion, Expenses, Talent, and Service, or POCKETS. Bergdahl's primary focus as a speaker is on improving your organization's ability to compete, and one of his favorite keynotes is "Change/Challenge/Choice." "It developed as a result of all of the off-shoring taking place," he says. "It's about getting your company to be quicker on its feet, the challenges that organizations face and that every person in that organization needs to step up to."
Bergdahl, who is the author of
What I Learned from Sam Walton: How to Compete and Thrive in a Wal-Mart World and
The 10 Rules of Sam Walton: Success Secrets for Remarkable Results, has a third book in the works that he says "will complete my Sam Walton trilogy." Sam Walton's son Rob wrote the foreward for the
10 Rules book, and Bergdahl says that he thinks Sam "would be surprised at how I packaged the Wal-Mart practices . . . but he viewed it as a transparent business. There really are no secrets in merchandising; all of the merchandising practices are open to anyone to see."
As Wal-Mart continues its unprecedented expansion, exploring markets such as health insurance, banking, gas refining, travel agencies, and book publishing, "If you're not competing with Wal-Mart today you probably will be in the future," Bergdahl says. "Wal-Mart figures out ways to continually grow their business. They rework strategies every week in Saturday morning meetings while the Kmart executives are lining up on the first tee. That's why this story is so compelling."
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