Walmart’s Eight Big Bets, and What Leaders Can Steal

Last updated: September 30, 2026

It began in 1962, when Sam Walton opened his first discount store in Rogers, Arkansas. More than six decades later, the retailer he founded is staking a claim in a space where DoorDash and Uber Eats have set the terms, through a new partnership with Dunkin' that could eventually cover most of the chain's 10,000 US locations.

CEO John Furner put it plainly in June at Walmart's headquarters: experimentation means action, feedback, and treating setbacks as information rather than defeat. That philosophy—borrowed, tested, revised—is still running.

At a glance

• Founded in 1962, Walmart began as a single discount store in Rogers, Arkansas.
• A new partnership will let Walmart deliver from most of Dunkin's roughly 10,000 US locations.
• Furner publicly positioned the company as a fast-rising force in restaurant delivery.
• He credits constant experimentation as part of the company's DNA.
• Business Insider listed eight major bets the retailer has placed outside its core business.

The Dunkin' move, decoded

This is not Walmart politely dipping a toe into restaurant delivery. The company staked out a lane as an up-and-coming player in the category—direct language aimed at the platforms that have dominated the market.

Walmart already has logistics infrastructure and last-mile delivery capabilities. Adding coffee and breakfast runs through Dunkin's footprint gives it a morning-food category it did not previously own. The move sets up a direct confrontation with DoorDash and Uber Eats.

The timing matters. By announcing bold ambitions, Walmart signals intent to the platforms, to consumers, and to its own workforce. Whether it executes fast enough to matter is the question.

The deeper pattern: test, learn, repeat

What stands out is less the specific deal and more how Furner talks about Sam Walton's method. Borrow a promising idea, give it a real try, watch what happens, capture the lesson. Run it again.

Furner put it this way: learning is constant, the direction of markets is always shifting, and some experiments yield results while others do not—but the company extracts value either way.

For a project management audience, this lands close to a core lesson. The cost of a small experiment is dwarfed by the cost of missing a category shift. The rational move is to keep running experiments and feeding the learnings back into the roadmap. Agile teams have said versions of this for years, but hearing a CEO of this scale endorse the loop out loud carries different weight.

What this means for you

Read the Walmart story through a leadership lens and one practice jumps out: separate the act of running experiments from the act of capturing lessons. Most teams blend the two—celebrate the win, mourn the loss, move on. Walmart's framing forces a different question after every bet: what did we actually learn, and what changes because of it?

Try this at your next retro. Say your team just killed a feature after six weeks of work. Run the conversation in two parts. Part one: was the kill call correct? Part two: what did we learn about our assumptions, our users, and our process that we would otherwise have lost? If you cannot fill part two, the experiment was wasted no matter how smart the decision was.

What to watch next

The signals to track are straightforward. Will Walmart fold restaurant delivery into Walmart+ to undercut the third-party platforms on subscription value? How will DoorDash or Uber Eats respond? And will Walmart share any public accounting of bets it walked away from—which would be the clearest proof the culture really works?

Key takeaways

• Walmart's edge is not any single bet—it is the speed at which it cycles through them.
• The Dunkin' deal is a direct challenge to DoorDash and Uber Eats.
• The underrated retro move is grading lessons learned separately from experiment outcomes.

Source: businessinsider.com