Wal-Mart's size and scale is so vast they literally have the ability to change the face of the entire country. If Wal-Mart were to make a decision tomorrow to refuse to sell a single product made with partially hydrogenated oils, for example, we'd probably see rates from heart disease decline a few years later. That's how powerful Wal-Mart is.

Quality effective leaders have the confidence to trust others to try, succeed, and sometimes to fail. We very often confuse personality with leadership. In other words, leadership is not about being a nice person or not a nice person.

When I was in college, my school newspaper accepted an ad from a Holocaust revisionist organization. This would have been offensive on most college campuses across the country, but I went to a school with a very large Jewish population, so the ad, as you might expect, stirred absolute outrage.

Leadership is a choice to protect the person to the left of us, and protect the person to the right of us, and sometimes that may come at a cost. It may cost us our benefits, it may cost us our comfort, it may sometimes cost us our perks, whatever it is, credit.

Leaders don’t complain about what’s not working. Leaders celebrate what is working and work to amplify it.

Like a good parent can't also be his child's best friend, a leader with authority requires some separation from subordinates.

Failure is not tied to money; it is a mindset. Failure is when we accept the lot we are given.