This article was originally published on LinkedIn.
A year ago, Adam Stoverink, Ph.D. and I opened the fall semester by explaining why we built our Walton MBA - University of Arkansas Leadership and Organizational Behavior course around Walmart as a case study. If you are new here, that piece is still worth a read, and it lays out the fuller reasoning behind this choice.
We are back in the classroom this week with a new cohort of students, and while the foundation of the course has not changed, a few of the lessons have as we evolve. We are still using Walmart's scale and history as a living lab for leadership. What has changed is what we are teaching inside that lab, and I wanted to walk through a few of those changes for anyone curious about what is different this fall.
The first change is a new week we built into the course from scratch, dedicated entirely to leading in the age of AI. Our students are already using these tools at work and in class, often without much guidance on how to use them well. So this fall we wrote AI directly into the syllabus, not as a shortcut but as a leadership skill. Students are permitted to use generative AI on every assignment except the quizzes they take in class. The instruction we give them is simple. Use AI to think with you, not for you. Keep what helps your thinking, and change what does not fit. You stay the one accountable for the final product.
The second change is the majority of the guest speakers. Most of our lineup changes from year to year, which is part of how we keep the course current. Two speakers have stayed constant no matter what, because they set the foundation for understanding Walmart's history and why studying it matters at all. Kurt Templeton, Senior Director of the Walmart Museum and Heritage Group, and Nicholas Graves, the company's own historian and archivist, will return again this fall. This time however, we are coming to them. This year we added an in-person tour of the Walmart home office campus and museum as one of the class sessions, giving students a more well-rounded picture of the company's history and how it shapes leadership today. Julie Barber, EVP and Chief Merchant for Walmart U.S., will also join us as part of that visit, giving students a direct line into how leadership decisions get made in the business today.
Teaching a course a second time is its own leadership lesson. The first time through, you are experimenting, testing which topics and formats resonate. The second time, you have real feedback to work from, from the students who sat in those seats last fall and told us honestly what helped and what did not. Adam and I spent time this summer reworking the sequence of topics and the way we frame certain weeks because of that feedback. It is a small, practical example of something we teach in the course itself, that good leaders build a way to hear the truth about their own performance and change something because of it.
I am excited to be back on campus with a new group of students. Throughout the semester, I plan to share what I take away each week from our guest speakers, the lessons that stood out to me, and how they connect to what we are teaching in class. If you want a window into this semester as it unfolds, follow along here.
