Long before Doug McMillon recruited Marc Lore to force Walmart out of its comfort zone, the Walmart CEO had to learn to do the same to himself. In the 1990s, McMillon, then a young merchandising leader, met with his boss and longtime Walmart merchandising exec, Don Harris, to fill him in on a potential deal with Disney that he was about to sign. Harris was a Walmart lifer or, in his own words, a “Walmart brat,” whose father, Claude, was Walmart’s first buyer and a member of the company’s executive leadership team alongside Sam Walton. The younger Harris would follow in his father’s footsteps and go on to serve on the executive committee as well.
Back when McMillon first joined Walmart as part of a leadership training program, the younger Harris, a senior buyer at the time, was asked to show McMillon the ropes—choosing what products Walmart should sell in its stores, starting with the seasonal candy category. Though McMillon was hand-selected for the program, his earnestness and eagerness shone through immediately.
“There are times when you meet people who just get it,” Harris recalled. “He was completely unflappable, completely humble, didn’t come in thinking he was hot stuff or walking with any kind of strut.”
Years later, Harris found himself working alongside McMillon again, this time as his boss. Harris was the executive vice president overseeing Walmart’s entire general merchandise business; McMillon ran the largest product division for Harris, overseeing toys, electronics, and sporting goods. On this day, McMillon was briefing Harris on a big deal he was about to ink with Disney. Under the terms of the agreement, Walmart would get its hands on some of Disney’s most popular movie inventory, but there was a catch: the brick-and-mortar retailer would have to carry some of Disney’s less popular titles as well.
By then McMillon had developed a favorable reputation among big Walmart suppliers for being more amenable to win-win negotiations than his cutthroat predecessors had been. “He realized that in order for something to be good for Walmart, it helps if the other guy is also happy,” Moe Nozari, a former top executive for 3M, the parent company of Ace bandages and Scotch tape, told me. So to McMillon, naturally, the Disney agreement seemed like a good one. Both sides were getting what they wanted, after all.
But while Harris had long been an admirer and internal champion for the younger McMillon, he couldn’t have disagreed more with the terms that McMillon was about to agree to.
“‘I thought our job was to buy an assortment of goods that customers want,’” Harris recalled, decades later, having told McMillon. “‘I mean, seriously, you’re gonna allow them to dump their warehouse on you? I don’t care if they give it to T.J. Maxx or somebody. But when did we start buying stuff that we know customers don’t want?’”
Seated across from McMillon in 2022 inside the same wood-paneled office that each of his predecessors once inhabited, the CEO chuckled as I brought up this flaw, if you could call it that, of niceness.
“I still like to think I’m a nice person,” McMillon told me, flashing his down-home, “Please, after you,” smile, yet not disagreeing with Harris’s assessment. “But I was criticized for that in the beginning.”
McMillon has come a long way since then, in more ways than one. When I met him inside Walmart’s squat brick home office on a sunny 70-degree late winter morning, the CEO was dressed in an ensemble more reminiscent of a New York creative agency leader than the chief executive of a retailer that has become a symbol of America’s working class. He sported an untucked but crisp white button-down shirt, tailored navy-blue chinos, and black suede sneakers from the Los Angeles designer James Perse that retail for $395. An Apple Watch adorned his left wrist, and a Tesla, I had been told, was his vehicle of choice. The idea of McMillon holding the same role as a predecessor known for driving a dilapidated pickup truck and donning trucker hats could understandably seem downright laughable.
But contradictions like these partly explained why the Walton family and Walmart’s board chose McMillon to replace his predecessor, Mike Duke. The new CEO needed to lead the company through a period of necessary, if not desperate, transformation as Amazon continued to suck up market share, talent, and consumer adoration. To thrive, Walmart needed to head in a much different direction, and McMillon personified an intoxicating mixture of Walmart DNA and higher-minded ambition.
“We needed a forty-something CEO with a tech bias because Mike wasn’t the right guy for where we needed to go,” Don Harris told me. “Nothing against Mike; I love him to this day. But it was time.”
If you were to artificially concoct a company ambassador for a powerful, yet controversial and floundering, titan of American capitalism, Walmart could have done a lot worse than McMillon. At six foot two, with a short salt-and-pepper cut, he looked like he could have played Coach Taylor in Friday Night Lights, if acting had been his thing years earlier. When he spoke, it was hard to imagine him capable of raising his voice much above what was necessary for a “Dinner’s ready!” invitation to the kids. His temperament was that of someone who wouldn’t hesitate to inform a stranger that a sliver of spinach was wedged between their two front teeth, but somehow do it in a way that didn’t make them yearn for a sinkhole to swallow them up whole. Plus, for Bentonville long-timers, his religious beliefs seemed like icing on the cake.
“Great faith. Great grace. Very Christian young man,” was how Burt Stacy, who ran the Bank of Bentonville when McMillon was a summer intern in the 1980s, partly described the Walmart CEO.
To those whose universe centers in northwest Arkansas, McMillon was the model of a company golden boy, and one tasked with resurrecting his lifelong employer from a long, dark hour.
What Would Sam Do?
The Walton family placed myriad challenges in front of McMillon when he became Walmart’s fifth CEO in 2014 at the age of forty-seven, the youngest Walmart chief executive since Sam Walton himself. Striking the balance of investing in the low-profit future of Walmart e-commerce while nurturing the profit-boasting store business that employed more people than any other retailer, was at the top of the list.
But Walmart’s—and thus McMillon’s—hurdles extended far beyond that. How do you mesh the best of the low-key, sweat-the-details, hit-your-numbers Bentonville belief system with the flashy, shoot-for-the-moon ambition of those tech startup folks? How do you move a highly successful—and immensely prideful—organization further away from a top-down, centralized, decision-by-committee structure and more toward a mindset where small teams are empowered to imagine, and act on, new visions of what the Walmart of the future should be? How do you achieve buy-in from both old-school and new-school leaders on a unified path forward when their incentives are divergent? How do you jump-start sales momentum in your gargantuan store network that has been stagnating for too long while winning back in-store shoppers from rivals like dollar-store chains and other discounter competitors? And how do you convince Wall Street investors that they should stick along for the ride, even though your stock price increase over the prior five years was only half of the S&P 500’s?
The issues McMillon faced also extended outside US borders. McMillon inherited federal investigations into allegations that Walmart intermediaries in Mexico, India, Brazil, and China were guilty of bribery on behalf of the retail giant’s foreign subsidiaries. (The company paid $282 million in a settlement five years after McMillon became chief executive. The CEO ran the company’s international division during some of the alleged misconduct but was never personally implicated in wrongdoing.)1 And in the promising market of India, where Jeff Bezos and Amazon were announcing billions in investments, Walmart had just abandoned plans to open retail stores because of government regulation. McMillon was being offered the opportunity of many lifetimes with the CEO appointment, but there was a catch. Many catches, in fact.
“The startup thing sounds cool to me, but I haven’t heard one yet that is more challenging than what we’re trying to do,” McMillon told an audience of Stanford Graduate School of Business students in 2015. “I mean, if you want hard, try to take a fifty-two-year-old business that’s at this size and change it. That’s hard. And it’s worthy. I mean, creating a situation where 2.2 million people stay employed, and have a life. That’s a big deal.”
Of course, there were many reasons why the Walton family had entrusted McMillon as the steward of Sam Walton’s empire, of which the family continues to own around 50 percent. It starts with McMillon’s almost-too-good-to-be-true, Bentonville-centric backstory.
Born Carl Douglas McMillon in 1966, the future CEO moved to Bentonville from Jonesboro, Arkansas, when he was sixteen. A noncompete agreement had forced his father to relocate the family to set up a new dental practice.2 McMillon knew next to nothing about Bentonville, which sits about six hours east of Jonesboro, where his parents had raised him and a younger sister up to that point (a younger brother was born after the family’s move to Bentonville). But on a trip to break the news about the move to his then-girlfriend, her father predicted what would be in store for the youngster.
“You’re gonna end up working for Sam Walton.”
“And I said, ‘Who?’” McMillon recalled years later.
“You shop at Walmart, don’t you?” the father asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re gonna end up working for that company because that’s all there is in Bentonville,” his soon-to-be ex’s dad predicted.3
Sure enough, McMillon spent the summers before and after his senior year of high school loading and unloading boxes at the local Walmart distribution center, making $6.50 an hour, which was at least a better wage than the town McDonald’s was offering at the time. The work was bumpy from the start, literally; McMillon rear-ended his boss’s car the first day on the job. (As he later told it,4 the teenage McMillon was following behind his boss in his old Honda Civic and accidentally accelerated at a stop sign while reaching to turn down the volume on a boom box.)
When he wasn’t in class or playing real-life bumper cars with his superiors, McMillon played point guard for the Bentonville High basketball team, sharing a love for the sport that his father, Dr. Morris McMillon, instilled in him. The eldest McMillon ran a weekly pickup game nearly every Sunday afternoon for almost forty years5 before his death on Thanksgiving Eve 2020, just seven months after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor.6
“Glioblastoma is undefeated, so you know what the outcome is gonna be,” McMillon told me, his eyes welling, composing himself for seven seconds that felt like seven minutes, before responding.
In his final months, the elder McMillon stressed to his family the service aspect of the life he lived.
“Some dentists make a lot of money,” McMillon said. “If you study Dad, Dad didn’t make a lot of money. And he’s like, ‘I just felt like I couldn’t overprice them.’ So he had a life of service that became even more clear to all of us through that process. He’s buried over here in the cemetery, not far from Sam Walton. When I drop by there, which is frequently, and think about them, that service aspect—are you helping people today?—is what hits me.”
After high school, McMillon attended the University of Arkansas, in Fayetteville, just a half hour’s drive south of his new home in Bentonville. He worked at the Bank of Bentonville during summers, where he met his future wife, Shelley. On one Fourth of July during this time, the bank’s president, Burt Stacy, the best friend of Walmart’s second CEO, David Glass, asked McMillon to dress up like Uncle Sam for the festivities. Sure enough, McMillon donned a red-white-and-blue top hat, matching wide-legged pants, and a blue tailcoat, and greeted folks outside the bank’s entrance, where popcorn was being handed out for free.
“Someone asked me what I was doing,” McMillon would tell Stacy years later, “and I told them, ‘I was doing what I was told to do.’”
After graduating with an accounting degree in 1989, McMillon pursued an MBA at the University of Tulsa. Between the first and second years of the two-year program, the story goes, he phoned Walmart executive Bill Fields to accept an offer for a buyer-trainee program at the company. Fields told him there was a job for him right away as an assistant manager at a Walmart store right there in Tulsa. Despite fears of how he would juggle his second year of school with the job, McMillon wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity and made it work.7 It was the beginning of a trend.
The first day on the job, McMillon found a Post-it note amid a pile of paperwork, showing the price of Walmart fishing line alongside a lower price next to the name “Kmart.” In his telling, the note was from Sam Walton himself, who had retired as CEO in 1988 and would die in 1992 from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer.
A series of promotions over the next decade would follow. The main thread tying them together? You could call it overachieving, or butt-kissing. McMillon called it volunteering.
“When there was a project or my boss was out of town and somebody needed to go to a meeting,” he told Duke University graduate students in 2016,8 “I would say, ‘I’ll go.’
“I would find myself in these situations where sometimes I didn’t always know the answer [but] I got comfortable, as we’re encouraged to at Walmart, in saying, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll find out and I’ll get back to you quickly,” McMillon added. “It’s a good formula for success inside our company. So, people saw me handling a responsibility one level up, which made it easy for them to promote me.”
McMillon was also unwaveringly curious, and a true lover of the retail trade. Don Harris, the longtime Walmart merchandising executive, said he could quickly tell that for his understudy, “the notion of buying and selling merchandise at a profit was something that was fun.
“If you don’t have that gene,” he added, “it’s really hard to enjoy the business.”
When he was just thirty-nine, in 2005, Walmart named McMillon CEO of Sam’s Club, the Costco rival named after Sam Walton. To Walmart insiders with ambition of their own, it sure seemed like the Walton family was turning the company into McMillon’s personal IDP, as it was known internally—an Individual Development Plan. Sure enough, four years later, in 2009, McMillon was appointed to the top Walmart role responsible for the company’s businesses abroad, as CEO of Walmart International, where he was exposed to both the immense opportunity and humbling complexity of the next great retail markets of China and India.
That exposure, even if helmed from an office in Arkansas, was one key reason some powerful company voices were confident he could navigate the flurry of change threatening the retailer’s future.
“I told the board that I thought that he would be the best CEO since Sam,” Lee Scott, who served nine years as Walmart’s third chief executive, told Fortune magazine in 2015.9 “I think he’s prepared so much better than we were. And his view of the world, his understanding of the context of Walmart within that world, his age and youth in an environment that’s changing so quickly—all of that I think is going to give him more energy to embrace change rather than try to simply cope with change.”
His charm and friendliness are said to have been another factor in the Waltons choosing him as Duke’s successor. Kathryn McLay, the CEO of Sam’s Club and, according to some insiders, a dark-horse candidate out of three potential successors to McMillon, told me that the CEO is “extraordinarily personable.” If there were such a grading system, McMillon would likely score an A+ when it comes to what Walmart refers to as CBWA, or Coaching By Walking Around. His memory of faces, names, and stories, up and down the hierarchy of Walmart staff, is literally unbelievable to many. Even from his elevated perch, he was seen as a listener who talks with people, not down at them.
Kevin Systrom, the cofounder and former CEO of Instagram, who served on Walmart’s board from 2014 to 2018, once referred to McMillon as “intensely friendly,” adding that he had never met another business leader in Silicon Valley or afar who matched the depth of friendliness in the Walmart CEO. Jeff Bezos, McMillon was not.
“Intensely friendly in the sense that his focus is on you, like there’s no other thing going on in his mind when he’s talking to you,” Systrom said.10 “He’s not distracted. He’s not thinking about a meeting he has next. He’s one hundred percent focused on you.”
That attention and charisma extended to larger group settings. Talk to enough Walmart veterans and you’re bound to come across many who bring up McMillon’s world-class orator skills. One former Walmart corporate manager compared his speaking ability to “early Barack Obama level.”
Scott Hilton, a former Jet and Walmart.com executive, said that while he and other leaders might nail 60 percent of a presentation, even with a teleprompter, McMillon could recite an entire talk without even a glance at a screen, sometimes with just a single once-over of a script beforehand. McMillon chalked up his oration skills to often being put on the spot for answers in Friday afternoon executive meetings as an up-and-coming company leader.
“A little bit of training years ago, but not much,” McMillon said in our 2022 discussion. “Just at-bats.”
“I used to always say ‘Doug should be president,’” said Jenny Fleiss, cofounder of Rent the Runway, whom Marc Lore would hire at Walmart to incubate and run a Walmart-owned startup called Jetblack.
Moe Nozari, the former top executive at 3M, was not at all joking when he told me in early 2022: “I wish he was the president right now. Doug’s extremely charismatic and he has a high level of intellect that doesn’t rub people the wrong way.” (Later, McMillon shook his head side to side before I could even finish my query about potential interest in running for public office. “I don’t see that,” he said. “That doesn’t look like a very fun process.”)
McMillon’s skill set was why it was so frustrating to many internally who believed that Walmart didn’t take advantage of the CEO’s abilities enough. Instead, inside the Bentonville home office, new e-commerce hires were shocked to discover just how often Sam Walton still came up in conversations and meetings, nearly two decades after his death.
“Someone said, ‘What would Sam do?’ and I looked around and it wasn’t a joke,” one former e-commerce manager told me.
But the “What would Sam do?” mindset is not all that surprising when you consider what longtime employees have been staring at every single workday for several decades in some cases. Photos of Walton—and quotes attributed to him—adorn Walmart walls both inside and outside the home office. In the early 2000s, the level of Walton adulation was even shocking to a group of Russian software engineers, who had joined Walmart in a dot-com acquisition.
“They saw these pictures of Sam Walton everywhere and were like, ‘This feels like Russia, with big pictures of Russian leaders,’” a Walmart employee from the time told me.
Even McMillon himself has poked gentle fun at the adoration, once telling a reporter, “Sometimes I wonder if he really said all that stuff,” as the duo passed a sign inside a Walmart warehouse that featured a quote attributed to the founder.11
But years later, in our sit-down interview, McMillon still maintained that all the Walton talk has a forward-looking purpose—a crucial one.
“The reason that we should still talk about Sam Walton is because of the characteristics that he had; it’s not about hero worship or being too stuck in the past,” McMillon told me. “It’s about servant leadership works. Listening to associates, having a sense of urgency, some of the things like the Sundown Rule.” (The Sundown Rule is the directive that Walmart employees should respond to any customer or vendor request or complaint by the end of the day it is received.)
“Being authentic and human and treating customers in a way like you’d want to be treated,” McMillon continued. “Those values are timeless, and they still work.”
Of course, it’s fair to wonder what else the company’s biggest cheerleader was supposed to say. McMillon never did actually work for Walton, unless you wanted to count those summer gigs as a high school student. McMillon’s first full-time job at Walmart, as the assistant store manager in Tulsa, began the year after Walton handed the CEO role to David Glass. You could imagine that fact might release a leader, even subconsciously, from some of the mental shackles that could have influenced McMillon’s CEO predecessors to not stray too far afield from a future Walmart that Walton may have himself wanted.
Yet, even several years after McMillon moved into the CEO office that Walton himself once inhabited, the refrain of “What would Sam do?” remained—bafflingly, to some—alive inside Walmart headquarters.
“You have Doug, a very charismatic guy, living in a modern era,” a former Walmart executive told me, his voice pregnant with exasperation. “If you’re a modern company, you really need to shift off of what Sam said. I get it—Sam was an iconic leader; Sam wrote the book. But Sam is dead.”
Social Capital
In the summer of 2016, Americans across the country got an up-close introduction to Doug McMillon even if they couldn’t previously tell his face from the neighbor down the street’s. The CEO starred in a thirty-second commercial that ran for three months on TV and social media and was a first for a Walmart chief executive.
“I’m Doug,” he says, looking directly into the camera as he stands in front of a Supercenter produce section. “Here at Walmart, we’re committed to taking care of the people who take care of you.”
McMillon highlighted a $2.7 billion investment the company had recently announced focused on training its store workforce and improving minimum hourly wages for its workers, first to $9 an hour, and then $10 the year after that. Still, at $9 an hour, store workers would have to log more than 1,000 hours of work to take home what McMillon earned in a single hour at the time.12 No critic was arguing that workers stocking shelves should get pay equal to that of the executive responsible for making decisions that impact more than 2 million employees and hundreds of millions of customers. But that outrageous a disparity certainly called into question the authenticity of the company’s “servant leadership” mantra, no matter how kind McMillon appeared to be.
“The amount of money that Doug McMillon makes is outrageous compared to what workers are getting paid in stores,” Cynthia Murray, a Walmart store worker of twenty-two years and a leader with the worker organizing group United for Respect, told me in 2022.
Back in 2016, McMillon’s debut TV ad gave a glimpse of his Instagram account, where the CEO—with the help of his staff—features frontline staff he meets on regular visits to company stores across the country.
“I grew up in Walmart, I am a product of Walmart, I am proud of Walmart,” McMillon once told a student audience.13 “And I understand Walmart in a way that those of you that don’t work there don’t.”
By the time he took over as CEO, Walmart was already nearly a decade into a reputation makeover. For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Walmart was viewed as the big, bad bully of retail, known for cutthroat negotiations with brands that forced more US manufacturing jobs to China, resulting in bargain-basement prices that were great for consumers but terrible for vendors and the Main Street shops unable to match them. Critics also targeted the company for its low wages, anti-union stance, and environmental impact. Walmart found itself at the center of an especially embarrassing firestorm over a company policy that essentially locked in store employees who worked overnight shifts.14
But under former Walmart CEO Lee Scott, the executive team reached a point in the mid-2000s where it decided to no longer ignore or roundly dismiss its critics, and instead underwent a wide-reaching listening tour—a shrewd but wise approach that Amazon still hadn’t adopted more than a decade later as scrutiny of its own labor and business practices mounted.
“You might be surprised about what we heard,” Scott said in a 2005 speech.15 “Many of these individuals and groups see things differently than we do, but they also have ideas. In fact, many of our most vocal critics do not want us to stop doing business, but they feel business needs to change, not just our company, but all companies.”
It was an awakening, albeit a self-serving one. And, according to McMillon, it started with a natural disaster. A month before Scott’s talk, Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans, killing more than 1,800 people in Louisiana,16 plus hundreds more throughout the Gulf Coast, and displacing more than a million others. On a conference call with Walmart executives days later, as the business leaders watched news coverage of the desperate conditions of those who survived, Scott recommended a new approach to his leadership team.
“‘What if, instead of doing the things we just kind of habitually do that may help a little bit, we recognize how significant this problem is and we just throw everything we’ve got at it,’” McMillon recalled Lee saying years later, pointing to the call as an inflection point for Walmart as a corporate citizen.17 “We decided to do that, and we stopped counting what we were sending, and we sent not only goods but we sent a lot of money and we sent our people.”
Less than a year later, Walmart hired a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, Leslie Dach, to help remake the company’s image—not merely through PR campaigns but with bold new business practices that, at Walmart’s size, could have real impact. The company, for the first time, set large renewable energy goals and, in 2011, committed to source $20 billion in products for its US stores from women-owned businesses over five years.
The changes in mindset and actions took years. Top leaders had to reverse their thinking about ignoring the opinions of outsiders who didn’t know their intentions. That view could be traced all the way back to Sam Walton himself. But Walmart emerged from Dach’s tenure with a much better public image than when he joined. In 2007, Walmart had a score of −5 on a scale of −100 to +100 of YouGov’s BrandIndex Buzz, according to the New York Times.18 When Walmart announced Dach’s departure in 2013, that number had risen to around 10, “in line with the discount retail industry as a whole,” the Times reported.
Yet there were two significant areas where Walmart did not accomplish what Dach had hoped during his time at the company: wages, and guns. Following Dach’s departure, McMillon decided to make big moves in those areas, even if they were more reactionary than progressive, with some critics and many employees still labeling them as insufficient.
On wages, McMillon and his US stores CEO, Greg Foran, recognized that if they were going to limit employee turnover and improve the customer shopping experience, they had to increase pay. But by the time Amazon raised the bar with a $15 minimum hourly wage announcement in the fall of 2018, Walmart was still only offering $11 an hour to its lowest-paid workers.
On guns, Walmart removed assault-style rifles like AR-15s from its US stores in the summer of 2015. A company spokesman at the time said the move was made because of waning consumer interest, not the national gun debate. But gun control activists were nonetheless pleased by the move.
In 2018, Walmart stopped selling guns and ammunition to customers under the age of twenty-one. A year later, shortly after a gunman killed nearly two dozen at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, McMillon announced that the company would curtail selling the type of ammunition used in the assault rifle at the massacre, as well as all handgun ammunition. Walmart was one of the largest sellers of ammunition in the US at the time, and the company said they expected the decisions to cut their market share in the space from 20 percent to as low as 6 percent.19
The move was met with strong criticism from gun supporters but McMillon must have understood the trade-off. While Walmart long carried a reputation for serving rural communities where gun control policies were unpopular, the CEO had to know that the company’s ambition in e-commerce meant it would attract more customers from bluer states, where support for gun control runs high. With the acquisition of Jet in the New York City area, and Walmart’s longstanding e-commerce outpost in Northern California, Walmart’s employee base was also evolving in a left-leaning way. If McMillon wasn’t going to take a stand after a massacre in one of his own stores, when would he? Plus, McMillon already had enough corporate problems to deal with.
The Amazon Dilemma
Of the many corporate dilemmas that Walmart faced under McMillon, the decision about when to chase Amazon from behind versus when to chart its own path was a consistent topic of debate. The first step, of course, was acknowledging that Amazon was a problem to begin with.
In September 2009, five years before McMillon became Walmart CEO, the New York Times published a feature story about Amazon with the headline “Can Amazon Be the Wal-Mart of the Web?”20 The story, and its title, did not go unnoticed at Walmart. The CEO of Walmart.com at the time, Raul Vazquez, snapped back in a subsequent interview with the Wall Street Journal, “If there is going to be a ‘Wal-Mart of the Web,’ it is going to be Walmart.com.”
By the time McMillon took over in 2014, Amazon had made it clear that it was indeed the Walmart of the Web. And then some. Rather than deny Amazon’s success, or ignore it, McMillon, a self-proclaimed “gadget geek” who was an early adopter of the Apple Newton and the Palm Pilot,21 showed some admiration for what Bezos and company had built.
On one of his first days as CEO, McMillon joined a longtime Walmart truck driver named Ricky Oliver on a haul from a Walmart warehouse in Mississippi to one of its stores three and a half hours across the state.22 The driver was candid with McMillon about where Walmart.com was lacking in comparison to Amazon, and the new CEO was receptive in receiving the criticism. At the end of the chat, McMillon told Oliver that he would soon send him a book that had been published just that fall: The Everything Store, by the journalist Brad Stone, part biography of Jeff Bezos and part exploration of Amazon’s ascent. McMillon also gave a copy to each of his company officers after he was promoted to CEO. McMillon was not shying away from Amazon’s impact.
“Clearly, Amazon is teaching the world what’s possible,” McMillon told one interviewer that same year.23
Still, McMillon balanced that reality with a healthy dose of confidence in Walmart’s ability to fight back. Take, for example, a meeting I learned about in the course of reporting for this book. Shortly after McMillon took over as CEO in 2014, he paid a visit to Google cofounder and CEO Larry Page, and a few other executives from the tech giant, on one of his pilgrimages to Silicon Valley. Despite significant cultural and business model differences, Google and Walmart had one big reason to work closely together: a shared rival in Amazon. (Amazon was Walmart’s rival for obvious reasons, but the threat to Google was not as clear to many outsiders just yet. “Many people think our main competition is Bing or Yahoo,” Google chairman Eric Schmidt said in a speech in Europe that year. “But, really, our biggest search competitor is Amazon.”)
During the meeting, Page was straight with McMillon about his business worldview, according to people familiar with the discussion: Traditional companies like Walmart had no realistic chance at a successful enough pivot to the digital world to take on an internet giant like Amazon. Especially not on their own. They needed a Silicon Valley savior like Google to give them even a fighting chance. One person I spoke with told me that this was just Larry being Larry; he had no intent to disparage Walmart or to insult McMillon, and this was the same version of a sales pitch he gave to many corporate titans of yesteryear; he was just telling it like he saw it.
But another person privy to the conversation told me that Page’s remarks went over with McMillon as well as gun control proposals do with the National Rifle Association. It was at that point that Walmart stopped considering partnering with Google on a cloud-computing deal, this person told me. What’s more, the two companies, despite the common threat that Amazon posed to their futures, would not partner in any significant way for several years, until well after Walmart’s Jet acquisition.
The following year, on a call with Wall Street stock analysts, McMillon made a more public proclamation that seemed to highlight his view of Walmart’s chances to overcome Amazon.
“Is it easier for an e-commerce company to build out a massive store network and create a customer service culture at scale?” McMillon asked rhetorically. “Or are we better able to add digital and supply chain capabilities and leverage our existing stores? We like our chances.”
Internally, however, McMillon took a different tact at times. On several occasions over the years, the CEO broke down, in detail, the brilliance of Amazon’s business model to company leaders and even the board of directors. He talked up the existential threat that it posed to the fifty-six-year-old retail giant he so loved. He proclaimed that if Walmart didn’t invest in drastic change going forward, it could soon end up as one of the once-great retailers that had since faded into irrelevance—a list of which McMillon carries on his phone as a constant reminder. You can either choose to disrupt yourself, or be caught flat-footed when disruption chooses you. If Walmart didn’t adapt quickly, he liked to tell those before him, it was unlikely the retail titan would live to see its centennial.
You had to wonder: How much of McMillon’s rhetoric was spoken with candor and how much was messaging to some inside Walmart who doubted the threat Amazon posed? When McMillon took over, and in the years that followed, the top boss faced varying views of the risk level of Amazon from his executive teams and rank-and-file staff. While you could break them down into two large sections of believers and nonbelievers, each section contained multiple factions.
Among the nonbelievers, some doubted Amazon’s retail operation would ever be consistently profitable and trusted that the money-losing would come back to haunt them in an undetermined significant way. Others in the group thought that Walmart would be saved by the fact that Amazon was not a significant player in the grocery industry, which was the brick-and-mortar retailer’s strength and represented more than half of all Walmart sales.
On the opposite side, some employees and executives did recognize the Amazon threat but believed that with the right digital strategies, ones that played to Walmart’s strengths and advantages, the Amazon risk could be neutralized at best, or minimized at worst. McMillon appeared to fall in this camp. But there was another, smaller group that was obsessed with the Amazon threat, to an extent that puzzled and concerned Walmart newcomers who had previous experience working inside the Bezos Borg.
“I don’t think there was a day that went by where I didn’t hear about Amazon,” a former Walmart logistics executive who previously worked at Amazon told me. “Jeff [Bezos] says don’t worry about competitors, worry about customers—if you take care of the customer, the other stuff works out.”
McMillon, for his part, tried to strike a balance. In meetings with his leadership team, he would flag other company results or news announcements as a way of keeping his staff on their toes and guarding against complacency. He also made efforts to command digital literacy among his direct reports, so the company “was evolving with a sense of pace and paranoia,” according to Kathryn McLay, Sam’s Club’s CEO. The goal, in her view, was to stress the “importance of this colossal battle that we’re in to make sure that Walmart remains relevant.”
McMillon, a CEO in title, was, in practice, Walmart’s internal narrator of the retail revolution. He could only hope his executives didn’t tune out the story, because unlike his Amazon counterpart, Jeff Bezos, McMillon rarely got involved in the thousands of daily decisions that percolate inside an organization the size of Walmart.
“I don’t make every decision in Walmart [and] don’t wanna make every decision in Walmart,” he once said. “If I do my job well, I’m not making very many decisions because the team is doing it.”
When you’re dealing with the level of leader like the ones who report to McMillon—several who’ve run their own large companies elsewhere—making decisions for them could come across as undermining, which runs the risk that you’ll—to use a sports phrase that McMillon is likely familiar with—“lose the team.”
Yet in time, significant disputes between Walmart leaders with different priorities, different goals, and different incentives would threaten the progress the company was making to better compete in the new world of retail that Amazon was leading. Some executives who were otherwise strong supporters of McMillon found themselves praying to the altar of Sam Walton for their CEO to start making decisions and step in. But whether it was McMillon’s stance on empowering his leaders by leaving the vast majority of decisions to them—the CEO admitted to me that he’s had to overcome his own “tendency to be slower on decisions because I’m trying to build consensus”—or what some described to me as his natural aversion to conflict, he allowed internal rifts to widen. To many newcomers, it seemed like the pace of change that had been improving under new Jet leadership was starting to slow.
“Doug is a coach,” one longtime Walmart partner told me. “Not a player.”
The question was whether the hands-off approach was a strategic decision in and of itself, with intended consequences that only McMillon had mapped out in his mind, or the sign of a leader who had spent too much time inside the Walmart machine to recognize the fallout that might come next.