Week 4 in the Walton MBA: Mastering Decision-Making

This week, our focus is on effective decision-making. This is a leadership behavior that often separates strong leaders from struggling ones.
September 8 , 2025  |  By Matt Waller

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Matt Waller, dean emeritus of the Sam M. Walton College of Business, shares lessons learned from his Leadership & Organizational Behavior course he is teaching this fall in a series for Walton MBA students.

Adam Stoverink, Ph.D. and I are teaching Leadership and Organizational Behavior in the Walton MBA this semester. We designed the course around Walmart as our living leadership laboratory because its scale, culture, and constant evolution provide lessons in how leadership theory becomes practice.

So far, we have:

  1. Launched the foundation by distinguishing leadership from management and introducing the Leader–Follower–Situation framework, which emphasizes that leadership effectiveness depends on context, not a one-size-fits-all style. 
  2. Explored leader traits and attributes such as IQ, EQ, and the Big Five personality dimensions.
  3. Examined leadership behaviors that can be practiced, including warmth and competence, balancing consideration with structure, and authentic leadership.

Each of these discussions has built toward our central theme:  Unleash your leadership; empower others.

This week, our focus is on effective decision-making.  This is a leadership behavior that often separates strong leaders from struggling ones.  In some ways you could consider this an extension of last week’s coverage of leadership behaviors.  We are just focusing on one of them this week.  An important one.

We examine why even experienced leaders sometimes make poor choices, spotlighting four common cognitive biases: 

  1. Confirmation Bias – seeking only data that supports what we already believe.
  2. Anchoring Bias – clinging to the first number or idea we hear.
  3. Availability Bias – overreacting to vivid, recent experiences.
  4. Sunk Cost Bias – continuing to invest because of past effort, not future potential.

To counter these, we introduced the WRAP Framework from Decisive (Chip & Dan Heath):

  1. Widen Your Options – don’t get trapped in false either/or choices (Walmart’s ecommerce expansion).
  2. Reality-Test Your Assumptions – run small experiments before scaling (Walmart’s InHome delivery).
  3. Attain Distance Before Deciding – step back to avoid heat-of-the-moment pressure (Walmart’s expansion east of the Mississippi).
  4. Prepare to Be Wrong – plan for uncertainty with tripwires and exit ramps (Sam Walton’s Hypermart USA experiment in the 1980s. Walton launched only four giant 225,000 sq-ft Hypermarts (Garland & Arlington, TX; Kansas City, MO; and Topeka, KS) and set up weekly metrics to track operating costs and sales per square foot. When the concept ran into high costs and underperformance, he converted them into smaller Supercenters).

One highlight of our Walton MBA Leadership and Organizational Behavior course has been learning directly from leaders who live these principles every day.

So far, we have welcomed:

  • Doug McMillon, President and CEO, Walmart. Purpose and values stay constant while everything else adapts.
  • Nicholas Graves, Senior Archivist and Walmart Historian. Early lessons from Sam Walton and the culture they created.
  • Kurt Templeton, Sr Director - Walmart Museum and Heritage Group. How Walton’s approach shaped durable leadership practices.
  • Julie Royall, Market Manager, Walmart Neighborhood Markets NWA. Behaviors that build trust, psychological safety, and results.

We are grateful for the insights our guest speakers have shared, and with Week 4 just beginning, we are only getting started.

Reflection question: What decision-making habit has helped you most?

#Leadership #DecisionMaking

References

Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.001

Bass, B. M. (1990).From transactional to transformational leadership: Learning to share the vision.Organizational Dynamics, 18(3), 19–31.https://doi.org/10.1016/0090-2616(90)90061-S

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams.Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Fiedler, F. E. (1967).A theory of leadership effectiveness.McGraw-Hill.

Goleman, D. (2004). What makes a leader?Harvard Business Review, 82(1), 82–91.

Heath, C., & Heath, D. (2013).Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work.Crown Business.

Kotter, J. P. (1990). What leaders really do.Harvard Business Review, 68(3), 103–111.

Walton, S., & Huey, J. (1992). Sam Walton: Made in America. Doubleday.