Nightly Business Report Presents Lasting Leadership: What You Can Learn from the Top 25 Business People of our Times

6. Using Price to Gain Competitive Advantage

Sam Walton was just plain cheap. He learned the value of a dollar early from his parents, who struggled to raise their family during the Great Depression. His father worked at a mortgage company and foreclosed on farms; his mother set up a family-run milk business. The two quarreled incessantly, except about one topic. “One thing my mom and dad shared completely was their approach to money: They just didn’t spend it,” Walton writes in his autobiography, Sam Walton: Made in America.

That devotion to a bargain became the foundation for Wal-Mart. Walton always resisted the temptation to move up profit margins at the expense of price; he lived by a simple formula: “Say I bought an item for 80 cents. I ...