- September 8, 2026
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Lee Scott wasn’t looking for a job when he pulled into the corporate offices of Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas in 1978.
He was coming to collect $7,000.
That was the amount the retailer owed the company Scott did work for, Joliet, Illinois-based Yellow Freight. A dispute over the payment led to something of a stalemate. So Scott didn’t leave with the $7,000. He instead left with a job offer to work at Walmart from the executive he dealt with that day, David Glass, who would go on to become CEO after founder Sam Walton.
“David said he was very impressed with me,” Scott recalls. “but I told him, ‘why should I come work for you guys, when you can’t even pay a $7,000 bill?”
Glass kept at it with Scott, checking in with him over the next year. Eventually, in 1979, Scott took a position with Walmart, then a 17-year-old business. He started as an assistant director of the private truck fleet. Three promotions later he was named president and CEO Walmart U.S. A year later he was COO and vice chairman of the entire business. And in 2000 he was named president and CEO, a position he held for nine years. Walmart’s sales increased 243% during Scott’s tenure, surpassing $400 billion, and its global locations expanded from 10 to 16 countries.
Now 77, Scott has been retired for more than a decade and living, part-time, in Sarasota. Over a recent breakfast at a St. Armands Circle coffee shop, Scott talked about his biggest leadership lessons and challenges during his 35 years with the retail giant.
While Sarasota is his home base, Scott has spent most of the past year, he says, living on an 82-foot Viking boat he bought in 2025. He named the boat Linda Gale, after his wife of the same name, who died in May 2025 from ALS. Scott, along with a crew and his golden doodle, George, has traveled up and down the Atlantic Ocean on the Linda Gale, from Canada and Maine to Panama and Costa Rica. In July, Scott entered his first fishing tournament, the Bermuda Triple Crown, and won the top prize with an 838-pound Blue Marlin catch.
Lee and Linda met at Pittsburg State University in Kansas when she was 19 and he was 20. They were married for 55 years, raising two children together. (They have five grandchildren.)
“After she died it was really difficult,” Scott says. “I sat around the house for a month doing nothing but eating pizza. It was terrible.”
Not only was his marriage to Linda a love story, but asked to talk about the best decision he made in his career he pointed to her — and the importance of having a life partner.
“The most important decision you make in your life is who you are going to spend it with,” he says. “I didn’t know where I was going in life until I got married. That was the best decision I made in my life.”
Other key takeaways, from both our conversation, and a one-sheet “Top 10 things I’ve Learned at Walmart” Scott shared with me, include:
“The more credit you give away,” he says, “the more it enhances you as a leader.” Scott cites as an example Walmart’s 2006 decision to sell dozens of generic drugs for $4 a month — a move that turned out to be a big win for the company and a major industry disruption that left competitors chasing Walmart. Scott would hear from people worldwide about that move, from suppliers to vendors to customers. “Anytime someone wanted to compliment me,” he says, “I always told them the names of the two people in the pharmacy department who came up with the idea.”
Scott says this is akin to being careful what you wish for. An example: Soon after being named CEO, he went on a tour of stores to meet associates and management. One pattern he spotted was cluttered and messy stock and backrooms. So Scott worked with his leadership team to send out the message: those rooms need to be cleaned up — both for organizational purposes, and to get more merchandise on the floor. (Scott assumed the second part — stuff can’t be sold if it’s in a stockroom — was rather obvious.)
At one store visit, Scott recalls, a manager excitedly approached him. The manager wanted the CEO to see his immaculate stockroom. And it was. “I said, ‘wow,’ this is amazing,’ Scott says — and he asked how the manager pulled it off.
“He said, ‘I rented a small building across the street and put it all in there.”
Scott chuckles at the memory of the ‘never assume’ people know what you mean lesson.
Scott recalls he wasn’t afraid to go into Sam Walton’s office and ask why he made a certain decision. One time, he recalls, most of the senior leadership team was excited about a presentation they heard to build a one million square foot warehouse, a project the planner said would position the company well for its five-year growth plan. Walton, founder and CEO from 1962 to 1988, rejected the proposal.
Scott asked Walton why he said no. “He told me, ‘I’ve never heard of a company going bankrupt from under-building. Five years from now, if we’re really big enough to need it, we can build it then.”
Scott is succinct on this point. “When you see somebody that you think can rise in his or her career you have to ask him or her questions and challenge them,” he says. “If you avoid difficult conversations, you are really cheating that person.”
Walmart went through a well-documented transformation starting in 2005, when its role as the biggest brick and mortar retailer in the world came under criticism from a bevy of entities. The list included environmental activists, government officials and corporate governance leaders. Scott led the response and strategy to many of these areas, which he kicked off with an Oct. 23, 2005 speech called 21st Century Leadership.
That speech addressed the company’s big-picture role in the environment, waste, product sourcing, employee healthcare, wages and more. Yet on a one-on-one scale, Scott traces this lesson to Sister Barbara, a nun from New York City. She would trek to Bentonville at least once a year to meet with Scott — normally with a list of issues, like how to help women at Walmart’s headquarters break the glass ceiling or how to boost the under-representation of Native Americans in the corporate ranks at the company. “A lot of the executives (at the time at Walmart) were Catholic students when they were in high school, and they were afraid of Sister Barbara so they had avoided the meeting,” Scott quips.
On a more serious tone, Scott says he also was open and curious about what Sister Baraba was talking about, and it’s how he learned “your loudest and harshest critics might be the most powerful voice for you to change.”
Starting with Walton, a core standard at Walmart was to never take gifts, big or small, from vendors or suppliers, from notepads to New York City diners. Scott says he learned as a leader, when you bend on standards like that, the consequences are usually negative.
Talking about one of his biggest regrets, he mentioned a senior leader who was ultimately terminated from Walmart under his tenure for violating several rules. This leader was also a high performer, he recalls. To cite one example, Scott let it go when he spotted the leader in question drinking alcohol on a company plane during work hours — against Walmart rules. The lesson? What you allow is what you will get. “If you let people break rules in small ways,” Scott says, “don’t be surprised if eventually, they make a bigger and (worse) decision.”
Scott was born and raised in Baxter Springs, Kansas — the same hometown as baseball Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle and three-time U.S. Open golf champion Hale Irwin. His mother was a music teacher, while his father owned a gas station on Route 66 in Joplin, Missouri.
Scott began working at that gas station when was 12. He washed car windows and checked under the hood. And he cleaned bathrooms, according to his profile when he was named a Horatio Alger Award winner in 2018. "My father put a premium on hard work and living up to your commitments," Scott says in the story. "He taught me that when you sign up for work, you work.”
A middle child, Scott had successful brothers, too. One was president of Pittsburg State, while another was an official in the Reagan administration (though neither of his brothers were named to Time magazine’s 100 most influential people list, like Scott was in 2004 and 2005). Which leads to an obvious question: did Scott ever consider running for political office?
“Someone asked me once about that in Arkansas and I turned it down right away,” he says. “I’m not sophisticated enough to run for office. Walmart is really the only company I could ever become CEO of. It’s the kind of company where if you put in your time in, were loyal and worked really hard, you could go really far.”
“When I left Walmart,” he adds “I wasn’t just a better leader. I was a better person.”
