Walmart CEO started his career unloading trailers at the warehouse—he says raising his hand led to his success

For the past decade, Doug McMillon has been CEO of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, and earns more than $27 million a year. But he made a mere fraction of that when he started at Walmart four decades ago as an hourly worker.  Since McMillon became CEO of Walmart, the company has grown about 43% from roughly $476 billion in revenue in 2014 to more than $680 billion today.

McMillon got his start in 1984 picking orders and unloading trailers at a Walmart warehouse making just $6.50 an hour. After graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1989 and earning his MBA from the University of Tulsa, he made a jump to corporate work at Walmart in 1991 as a fishing-tackle buyer. 

From there, McMillon had inadvertently launched a multi-decade career at the world’s largest retailer. He climbed the corporate ladder, serving in several senior leadership positions before becoming chief executive in 2014. One thing McMillon said hasn’t changed over the years is the “team support” Walmart employees give each other.

McMillon had to go beyond his job description to raise the ranks at such a large company, which consistently tops the Fortune 500, this year with more than $680 billion in revenue and 2.1 million employees. One of his top tips for being successful is to volunteer for something above and beyond the call of duty, or to raise your hand for something exceedingly difficult. 

“One of the reasons that I got the opportunities that I got was that I would raise my hand when my boss was out of town and he or she was visiting stores or something,” McMillon told Stratechery in April 2024.   McMillon would also attend meetings in his boss’s place, which showed other leaders at the company he was reliable and could get the job done.   “I then put myself in an environment where I became a low-risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job,” McMillon said.

This also ties back to McMillon’s focus on teamwork. During his 2017 interview at Duke, he said the two things that have kept him at Walmart are the challenges and company culture.   “The values of Walmart aligned to my personal values, and I haven’t been bored one single day,” McMillon said. “This is a really challenging industry, and I like that a lot.”

McMillon recalls being able to climb the corporate ladder so fast because of the amount of responsibility he was given his first day working in corporate. He walked in on his first day, he said, and was given almost $1 billion worth of purchasing power—without virtually any training. This experience gave him responsibility, and subsequently accountability, to grow his career at Walmart. But that level of responsibility didn’t stop McMillon from continuing to raise his hand.  “I kept volunteering,” McMillon said during the Duke interview. “I would find myself in these situations where sometimes I didn’t know the answer, and I got comfortable—as we’re encouraged at Walmart—in saying, ‘I don’t know. But I’ll find out and I’ll get back to you quickly.’”  He added, “It’s a good formula for success inside our company.”    “Don’t take your current job for granted,” McMillon said. “The next job doesn’t come if you don’t do the one you’ve got well.”

show less