Restoring Wal-Mart

摘要

Eduardo castro-wright could see the problem instantly. One of his first exercises as the newly appointed president of Division No.1, the highfalutin internal designation for Wal-Mart's 3,500-unit domestic discount chain, was to map every underperforming store in the country. Most of the worst were clustered around big coastal cities like Boston and Los Angeles. As he toured those stores, Castro-Wright could sense they weren't connecting with their neighborhoods. And neither were the managers—they weren't in Arkansas anymore. "You'd talk to managers and they'd ask, 'If I do a good job, can I come home in two years?'" he says. Who other than Yankees fans would consider two years in Boston to be hard time? "It was an indication that something in the structure of how we were organized and how we went to market was not working," he says.