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Biography
Alice Louise Walton (born October 7, 1949) is an American heiress to the fortune of Wal-Mart
Stores, Inc. She is the daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and Helen
Walton, and sister of S. Robson Walton, Jim Walton and the late John T. Walton. With
a net worth of $40.8 billion she is the wealthiest woman in the world,
according to Forbes. In September 2017, she was reported to own
over US$11 billion in Walmart shares. She
graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, with a
B.A. in economics and finance. Walton was born in Newport, Arkansas.
Career
In her early career,
Walton was an equity analyst and money manager for First Commerce
Corporation and headed investment activities at Arvest Bank Group. She
was also a broker for E.F. Hutton. In
1988, Walton founded Llama Company,
an investment bank, where she was president, chairwoman and CEO.
Walton was the first person to
chair the Northwest
Arkansas Council and played a major role in the development of
the Northwest
Arkansas Regional Airport, which opened in 1998 At the time,
the business and civic leaders of Northwest Arkansas Council found a need for
the $109 million regional airport in their corner of the state. Walton
provided $15 million in initial funding for construction. Her company,
Llama Company, underwrote a $79.5 million bond. The Northwest Arkansas
Regional Airport Authority recognized Walton's contributions to the creation of
the airport and named the terminal the Alice L. Walton Terminal Building. She
was inducted into the Arkansas Aviation Hall of Fame in 2001.
In the late 1990s, Llama Co.
closed and, in 1998, Walton moved to a ranch in Millsap, Texas, named Walton's Rocking W
Ranch.An avid horse-lover, she was known for having an eye for determining
which 2-month-olds would grow to be champion cutters. Walton listed the farm for
sale in 2015 and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, citing the need to focus
on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Bentonville, Arkansas, art
museum she founded that opened in 2011.
In his 1992
autobiography Made in America, Sam Walton remarked that Alice was
"the most like me—a maverick—but even more volatile than I am
Art
Walton purchased her first piece of art when she
was about ten years old.
It was a reproduction of Picasso's Blue
Nude she got from her father's Ben Franklin Dime-Store. She and
her mother would often paint watercolors on camping trips.Her interest in art
led to her spearheading the Walton Family Foundation's involvement in
developing Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the heart of Bentonville,
Arkansas. Crystal Bridges, opened in November 2011, is envisioned as a
premier venue for a national art institution dedicated to American art and
artists, and a place of learning and community.
In December 2004, the art collection of Daniel
Fraad and wife, Rita, went up for public auction at Sotheby's in New York. Since
almost every collector was at the auction, no one could figure out who on the
phone was bidding such high prices. It was later discovered that Walton
purchased at least $20 million worth of art that day. She bid for most of
the items while on a three-year-old gelding named IC LAD preparing to compete
in the first qualifying round of the National Cutting Horse Association
Futurity at the Will Rogers Coliseum in Ft. Worth, Texas.
In 2005, Walton purchased Asher Brown Durand's
celebrated painting, Kindred Spirits, in a sealed-bid auction for a
purported US$35 million. The 1849 painting, a tribute to Hudson River
School painter Thomas Cole, had been given to the New York Public Library in
1904 by Julia Bryant, the daughter of Romantic poet and New York newspaper
publisher William Cullen Bryant (who is depicted in the painting with Cole). She
has also purchased works by American painters Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper,
as well as a notable portrait of George Washington by Charles Willson Peale, in
preparation for the opening of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in
Bentonville, Arkansas. In 2009 at an undisclosed price, Crystal Bridges
museum acquired Norman Rockwell's iconic "Rosie the Riveter" painting
for its permanent collection.
John Wilmerding, an advisor and board member to
Crystal Bridges said Walton has collected the work of some artists in depth,
quietly buying substantial bodies of work by Martin Johnson Heade, Stuart
Davis, George Bellows and John Singer Sargent.Walton's attempt to quit smoking
led to the purchase of two great smoking paintings by Alfred Maurer and Tom
Wesselman. In a 2011 interview, she spoke about acquiring great works by
other artists. She described Marsden Hartley as "one of my favorite
artists-he was a very complex guy, somewhat tormented, but a very spiritual
person, and love the emotion and the feel and the spirituality of his
work". She went on to say "and Andrew Wyeth-the mystery and
loneliness that is expressed. How do you paint loneliness?"
Lessons to Learn
1. On Wal-Mart's key to
success
"It (competitor's poor profits) all boils down to not taking care of
their customers, not minding their stores, not having folks in their stores
with good attitudes, and that was because they never really even tried to take
care of their own people. If you want the people in the stores to take care of
the customers, you have to make sure you're taking care of the people in the
stores. That's the most important single ingredient of Wal-Mart's
success."
2. On capturing ideas
"Go in and check our competition. Check everyone who is our
competition. And don't look for the bad. Look for the good. If you get one good
idea, that's one more than you went into the store with and we must try to
incorporate it into our company."
3. On ignoring others'
opinions
"If we fail to live up to somebody's hypothetical projection for what
we should be doing, I don't care.” That discomfort rising inside when someone
imparts their clever wit on you. Not just any kind of wisdom, but the one that
makes you feel small, in a here-you-go, punch-to-the-stomach kind of way. A
covert little criticism implying that you might not be doing something right or
have the wrong ideas. Zoom out of yourself to place a particular opinion in
perspective. Keep going upward until it's nothing more than a speck of sand.
These opinions look quite different from 100 miles above. Or imagine looking
back from ten years’ time. This incident will fade into shameful
insignificance. As if it never happened. Think about this as you're weighing up
a certain opinion's merit
4. On Alice Walton himself
"When Alice feels a certain way, She is relentless. She will just
wear you out. Week after week after week—until finally everybody capitulates
and says, well, it's easier to do it than to keep fighting this fight. I guess
it could be called management by wearing you down [MBWYD]."
5. On her employees
"I sure owe it to them to at least hear them out when they're upset
about something. Partnership involves money—which is crucial to any business
relationship—but it also involves basic human considerations, such as
respect."
Why did Sam Walton and Alice Walton succeed? Because They listened to
themselves, which most of us don't do. Because they ignored negativity from
critics, which most of us also don't do. They parlayed his superior intuition
and persistence into the largest discount retail empire in the world. A gift of
business genius like Sam Walton's is one-of-a-kind, but we can all learn from
his original philosophies and strategies as we work to turn our own dreams into
reality.
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