RIM lessons from the Brave New World of Business.

• Author: LeFevre, William W.
• Position: Book review

The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business

Author: Nelson Lichtenstein

Publisher: Picador

Publication Date: 2010

Length: 432 pages

Price: $17.00 in paperback

ISBN-13: 978-0312429683

Source: http://us.macmillan.com/default.asp

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Nelson Lichtenstein's The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business is an important read for records and information managers interested in the increasing globalization of business practices. It explains the history of Wal-Mart and how it used political and legal savvy and embraced the power of data to drive its business practices and become the world's largest company.

On its own merits, The Retail Revolution would be an interesting resource for many people. Looked at through the lens of records and information management, it becomes a cautionary tale about the importance of the use of business data in the 20th and 21st centuries, the importance of safeguarding business information, and how business will increasingly use records and information management tools in the days of increased globalization.

Lichtenstein, a professor of labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, devotes the second chapter of the book to Wal-Mart's use of data and logistics to drive its business. He argues that it was the early embrace of such technologies as bar codes, a massive data center, and the world's largest private, satellite-based communications system that made Wal-Mart difficult to beat in the worlds of logistics, management of inventory, data mining, and manufacturer negotiations.

Wal-Mart had the information management tools to track what consumers wanted in ways the competition could not and used those tools to drive everything from supply and demand to pricing, and, eventually, who would and would not survive as Wal-Mart suppliers.

Lichtenstein's book also explains some of the retailer's bad records and information management decisions and their unintended consequences. For example, Flagler Productions of Lenexa, Kansas, was, for many years, the outside contractor Wal-Mart used to tape its...