you’ve got to give folks responsibility, you’ve got to trust them, and then you’ve got to check on them. If you are good to people, and fair with them, and demanding of them, they will eventually decide you are on their side

1. sharing information and responsibility is a key to any partnership

2. if you were a customer, how would you buy that item?

3. his mind is just so inquisitive when it comes to this business. Going into a competitor’s store trying to learn something from it

4. not only do we stock more of our merchandise in our own distribution centers, we also rely on our own private truck fleet to a much greater degree than our competitors do

5. think one store at a time

6. keep lowering our prices, keep improving our service, and keep making things better for the folks who shop in our stores

7. Some basic rules:

8. communicate, communicate, communicate

9. push responsibility and authority down. Give more and more responsibility for making decisions to the people who are actually on the firing line, those who deal with the customers every day.

10. force ideas to bubble up

11. stay lean, fight bureaucracy. Operate on 2% general office expense structure. Never have more than four layers from the chairman of the board to the lowest level in the company

12. Ten Sam’s rules:

13. commit to your business

14. share your profits with all your associates, and treat them as partners. Encourage your associates to hold a stake in the company.

15. motivate your partners. Set high goals, encourage competition, and then keep score. Make bets with outrageous payoffs. Have managers switch jobs with one another to stay challenged. Don’t become too predictable.

16. communicate everything you possibly can to your partners

17. appreciate everything your associates do for the business. Nothing else can quite substitute for a few well chosen, well times, sincere words of praise. They are absolutely free and worth a fortune.

18. celebrate your successes. Have fun. Show enthusiasm

19. Listen to everyone in your company. And figure out ways to get them talking.

20. Exceed your customers’ expectations.

21. control your expenses better than your competition

22. swim upstream. Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. You can’t just keep doing what works one time, because everything around you is always changing. To succeed, you have to stay out in front of that change.To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.