Wal-Mart: Key Insights and Practical Lessons - Essay Example

Wal-Mart’s corporate management team has over the past decades toiled inside its ‘Bentonville Bubble’ in order to win the approval of zoning commissions and committees. This entails focusing on operational efficiency, the growth of the company, and its subsequent profits. However, this has proved not efficient enough and the company has widened its sights, built networks of employees, government agencies, nonprofits, and suppliers to ‘green’ its supply chain. By seeking the approval of zoning commissions and committees, Wal-Mart will be in a position to increase its profitability.

In order for the company to excel, it has cultivated closer relationships with its suppliers that have immensely contributed to initiatives. Moreover, Wal-Mart has gone further to build bridges between environmental nonprofit organizations and suppliers (Roberts and Berg 149). Most importantly, relying on external network collaborates such as the NGO’s has allowed the company to accomplish most of its objectives devoid of major investments since suppliers tend to absorb most of the costs of certification.

Arguably, retailers often face a fast-expanding, multi-pattern competitive set that deprives them of the opportunity to realize where they are heading. Wal-Mart as one of the leading companies in terms of sales may face quite a range of challenges once it runs significantly smaller stores. Change in technology and the use of new technological skills will be a challenge to smaller stores (Roberts and Berg 148). Customer service becomes a problem and incompetent to the consumer. Moreover, too many stores may lead to frequent price-cutting that may lead to low-profit margins and unreliability to the customer.

It is necessary for a business to expand in order to meet the consumer’s needs and wants. Running smaller stores will not enable Wal-Mart to expand dramatically thus consequently leading to the incapability of the company to meet the consumer’s needs. In conclusion, Wal-Mart has proved to be potential enough to excel in the world of business by changing from cheap retailer stores to something beyond pure operational efficiency. As a good example, Wal-Mart has shown the way towards sustainable business models that can be significantly measured in quite numerous ways.

Other corporations need to design at least similar ways and approaches in order to succeed economically.