Question

How sustainable is Walmart’s strategy? In its traditional markets and in the new ones. Why?

Answer 1

Walmart’s Emergent Low-Cost Sustainability Strategy (The Growing Demand for a Low-Cost Sustainability )

The first major strategic inflection point in Walmart’s efforts to imple- ment Lee Scott’s goal of selling sustainable products relates to efforts to move beyond stories as the company recognized the demand for a systemic index to define, measure, and compare product sustainability. This is described as a set of learning points along Path A in Figure 1. With experience, sustainability leaders increasingly sought a holistic measure of what actually constituted a sustainable product, so that they could better measure their own progress toward meeting Lee Scott’s goal to sell sustainable products and, at the same time, better commu- nicate to customers what exactly they were selling.

At the beginning of the broader sustainability initiative, the telling and retelling of individual stories provided the momentum to encourage a wide search for possible product and marketing innovations. Storytelling did not require for- mal measurements of all potential attributes of sustainability but instead relied on the internal and external dissemination of individual cases that clearly achieved success on some commonly understood metric. For instance, in Scott’s 2005 speech, he provided concrete stories about reducing toy packaging, which con- served natural resources and saved money, and using organic cotton in yoga out- fits, which were quickly demanded by customers, thus providing tangible illustrations of the way in which a company like Walmart might both sell sustain- able products that excited customers and engage in innovation that improved the impact of the company’s products on the environment. Andy Ruben, Walmart’s first vice president for sustainability, who deliberately encouraged story-telling as a tool for building momentum for the sustainability program across the organiza- tion, noted “We did end up with those stories; but instead of three to four, we had hundreds of them.”