The World is Flat is one of the best books I have read in the recent past. Amidst of various case studies, one can find the interesting WalMart story.

Tom Friedman, in his interviews with a few folks at WalMart managed to find the way how WalMart started way back in time. Being a small retailer originating from Bentonville(Arkansas), WalMart had to face many hurdles in inventory, logistics etc – No one was ready to supply to WalMart owing to the size of business and geographical location.
The article talks about how WalMart managed to devise its strategies amidst of all the constraints and yet ensured the model is indisputably successful.

My inference of the interview Friedman had with one of WalMart executives. The interviewee says “Having little Options and being small in size” increases productivity tremendously and encourages the need for optimized hard work. As mentioned earlier, no logistics vendor was ready to supply the needs of WalMart, the company had decided to have its own logistic mechanisms including self-run trucks. Having started as a small retailer, every penny spent needs to be justified, with this background; the Retailer managed not just to have a setup in place but was efficiently used for picking-up goods as well as acted as a delivery mechanism. This is one of the arrangements WalMart had made which had helped him to stay in Retail Industry “Hall of Fame” for a real long time.

Sounds quite familiar in “Problem Solving” area. But from the aforementioned stories, it is quite evidential the approach may not necessarily be applied for problem solving alone; it can very well be part of every thing we do.

It is interesting to note the model does not only increase the win rate, but also efficiently manages how things are done – I am sure, little options (without stretching to the edge of confinement) would lead to far better results.

Incidentally, we can find a correlation of this approach in Google’ way of managing new initiatives/projects, where the team size never goes beyond three or four. How successful google is something time will answer shortly.