Wal-Mart in 2005 A” Case (UV1346-PDF-ENG) from your Harvard Case
Studies Course Pack. The questions you will need to specifically answer are:
-Identify the primary issues facing Wal-Mart. Should the retailer have been able to anticipate the issues it now faced?
-Sam Walton had three founding principles and beliefs, which he articulated in 1962 as the Wal-Mart credo:
-Respect for the individual
-Service to our customers
-Strive for excellenceHow do these principles and beliefs resonate in the 21st-century world and for the Wal-Mart that existed in 2005?
-By focusing on the concerns and critiques of any of these stakeholders, does Wal-Mart risk losing its competitive advantage? Which particular stakeholder might pose the bigger threat?
-As the largest retailer in the world and the largest private-sector employer in the United States, should Wal-Mart strive to be a model or should it focus primarily on its principal stakeholders: the associates and the customers?
-By 2005, Wal-Mart had a network of 10,000 suppliers under constant pressure to lower their prices. What effect does this have on the suppliers and the customers, as well as other stakeholders? Are Wal-Mart’s techniques “clobbering” or “creative and innovative”? (Consider, for example, the fan manufacturer mentioned in the case that had to move its factory to China just to compete. Faced with Wal-Mart’s demands, Carolina Mills CEO Steve Dobbins said the company “could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.”)
-In the case of Wal-Mart, are there trade-offs among stakeholders?
-What lessons can we learn from studying how Wal-Mart dealt with the many issues and criticisms it faced?