Name: How Walmart Beat Silicon Valley at Its Own Game
Uploaded: 2026-02-13T12:00:00Z
Duration: 2 min 11 s
Description: Outgoing Walmart CEO Doug McMillon reflects on the "David vs. Goliath" pivot that helped the company join the $1 trillion club and take on some of Wall Street's biggest tech giants.

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Outgoing Walmart CEO Doug McMillon reflects on the "David vs. Goliath" pivot that helped the company join the $1 trillion club and take on some of Wall Street's biggest tech giants. Photo: WSJ Leadership Institute

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260205/9914e265-d1d3-4e7c-a147-3c85cf66c1e6/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Outgoing Walmart CEO Doug McMillon reflects on the "David vs. Goliath" pivot that helped the company join the $1 trillion club and take on some of Wall Street's biggest tech giants.

How Walmart Beat Silicon Valley at Its Own Game

If you can, go back to what was in your mind in February of 2014, what did you think the problem was that you had to solve?

Well, I was very focused on e-commerce, but the first thing that needed to be done was to get the US Supercenter comps up. I had been in Sam's for six years and then International for five, so it'd been 11 years since I'd been in our Walmart US business and we'd had several quarters of negative comps and some ups and downs there over the last few years leading up to 2014. And so the company set me up well. Mike Duke started immediately talking to me about the need to change strategy and empowering me and others to drive change. And I used the time between the announcement date of me taking this role and actually taking it to go to Walmart stores all over the US and ask our associates what we needed to do. Just grab a yellow pad and ask 'em, you know, what do you think we ought to change? And they gave me a great plan. It was not an unfamiliar plan, it was our wages are too low. You need to raise our wages. You need to help us with schedule certainty. You've gotta get inventory out of the back room and get back to everyday low price and flow inventory, basically wrote a prescription. And so the US Supercenter comp was job one, e-commerce became job two, and then there were other jobs down the road.

And on the ecommerce piece, Jason Del Rey in his book "Winner Sales All" said you made a trip out to Silicon Valley, talked to some of the leaders. He talks particularly about a meeting with Larry Page where he said, "No chance a legacy retailer can beat a technology provider like Amazon at this game." Do you recall it?

It was basically a dumb pipe message, like your margins will go away and, you know, you're gonna struggle to survive and you should be giving us all your ad dollars so you have a shot at doing that. But that wasn't the only conversation that kind of went that way.

You had many of them.

Yeah.

It had to be a little discouraging to be told you're a dumb pipe.

You know, we're from Arkansas, we love being underestimated. Sam Walton was underestimated. So we're better when we're David rather than Goliath and we were definitely in the David box at that time.

You felt encouraged by that?

Yeah, motivated by it.

The WSJ Leadership Institute Presents: Leaders. A new podcast series bringing you revealing conversations with top executives shaping business today. Hosted by Alan Murray, president of the WSJ Leadership Institute, the series goes beyond headlines to explore how leadership really works in times of upheaval, transformation, and uncertainty. Our first episode was released Monday, Sept. 22, at 5:00 a.m. ET, with new episodes every other Monday.