David Glass - Pres, CEO of Wal-Mart Inc - The Power Players

Discount Store News, Dec 4, 1995 by Richard Halverson

When David Glass offered a cup of coffee to a visitor to his office a while back, he fished in his pocket for two quarters and fetched the brew himself from a vending machine, rather than summon a secretary.

The anecdote illustrates two fundamental points about Glass and Wal-Mart, says Peter Monash, a Columbus, Ohio, consultant who helped Wal-Mart launch hypermarkets, mother of its supercenter division. That one moment showed that cost control at Wal-Mart starts from the top down and that Glass, even though he heads the most important retailer in America, shuns the trappings of high office.

Monash said he has often seen Glass carry papers to, say, a New York City conference in a plain manila envelope, rather than tote an expensive leather briefcase.

When visiting stores, Glass pins on a name tag just like any other associate, with just his first name.

And whenever anyone talks to Glass about WalMart's accomplishments, he usually responds, "We could have done better."

Glass has taken the helm from Sam Walton without missing a beat and continues the courageous, yet conservative growth of Wal-Mart.

From Glass' career, retailers can learn one basic lesson, Monash says: stay the course and have the guts to try new things, admit soon when you've made a mistake and cut your losses early.

Glass is a warm, "down-to-earth" man who is interested in others, says Walter Loeb, a retail consultant in New York. Glass delegates well and helps others grow by giving them latitude.

As a former Wal-Mart cfo, Glass understands the dynamics of finance for a rapidly growing organization, Loeb says. Glass also helped Wal-Mart grow phenomenally by keeping it lean and focused, avoiding the temptation to diversify.

Under Glass, Wal-Mart continues to demonstrate its flair for innovation. In 1990, the year he was named for the second time DSN's Discounter of the Year, Glass began the policy of opening discount stores and Sam's Clubs side by side to exploit the marketing synergy between both concepts.

This year, Glass launched a real estate division which controls $16 billion in real estate assets, in order to improve returns.

In another innovation, Wal-Mart is developing a market database system that incorporates demographic and economic research, which will help the company improve micromarketing at the local store level.

Wal-Mart manages the company store by store. "You can't manage a $100 billion company" is one of Glass's favorite dictums. You have to do it "store by store," he says.

In still another innovation, Wal-Mart just opened a 150,000-sq.-ft. discount store in Columbus, Ohio. The store features two entrances, apparently a design move to get customers in and out more quickly. Glass says that Wal-Mart will open such large stores in markets where they will do enough business to make them profitable.

At a recent analysts meeting in Bentonville, Ark., Glass hinted at A concept on the opposite end of the scale: a convenience store such as Dollar General, which caters to low-income customers who can't afford to shop at Wal-Mart.

Glass expressed admiration for the concept, although he stopped short of saying Wal-Mart would either launch one of its own or buy another company. But in the past, such asides have been tips about later developments, such as when Sam Walton casually mentioned supercenters and then opened one two years later.

One of the major tenets of the Glass Gospel of Leadership is innovation. The "I have a dream" approach inspires people, Glass said at a symposium conducted a few years back by the Texas A&M Center for Retail Studies in Dallas.

A very low resistance to change is another tenet. "If it ain't broke, it soon will be," Glass said.

During a recent interview with DSN, Glass sums up his philosophy of retailing: "The customer is the boss, and you have to work really hard to respect that fact.

"Then if you take everyone who's involved in the company and make him or her a partner in the business, rather than having employer/ employee relationships, you empower the people to actually make decisions and act in serving the customer."

In some ways, Glass' career has come fall circle.

He worked his way through college at Southwest Missouri State University, Springfield, Mo., as a night dispatcher for a trucking finn, and now he has built Wal-Mart into a powerhouse based on low-cost distribution of goods. At Wal-Mart, Glass was also head of distribution, as well as its chief financial officer.

Moreover, when Walton hired him in 1976, he was general manager of Consumer Markets, a supermarket chain in Springfield. Now, of course, groceries in Wal-Mart supercenters are the major growth vehicle for the chain as the decade draws to a close.

While a student at SMSU, Glass worked to support himself and his family. He met his wife, Ruth, then a teenager, while serving in the Army before college. They have three children and five grandchildren.

His college interests provided a foretaste of things to come.

Glass grew up in a modest blue-collar family in Mountain View, Mo., where his father ran a feed mill and his mother supervised workers in a uniform factory.