Every Saturday morning, Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton gathered his team for the same ritual.
First, they’d review the week’s sales in detail. Then, they’d discuss one question: what is a competitor doing that we should be paying attention to?
Employees would share observations from visits to Kmart, Walgreens, Sears. There was one strict rule: you could only talk about what competitors were doing right. Things that were smart and well executed.
Walton didn’t care what they were doing wrong. That couldn’t hurt him. What he cared about was not letting any competitor get more than a week’s advantage on something innovative.
It’s a beautiful way to institutionalize curiosity. And to steer a room full of people away from the instinct to talk about why they’re better – toward the harder, more useful question of what they can learn.
A Learning a Day 