Walmart’s and Target’s outgoing CEOs leave contrasting legacies

Specifically, among its accomplishments under McMillon’s leadership, Walmart expanded its delivery services to reach more than 90% of customers in three hours or less, launched its Walmart+ membership program and reworked its advertising business that would become a key revenue driver.

At Target, Cornell launched its strategy of using stores as online delivery hubs (though this is now being scaled back at some locations), launched drive-up pickup nationwide, and tripled revenue from its private labels like Cat & Jack and Good & Gather. During the pandemic in 2020, the company grew its sales by more than $15 billion, more than it had grown in 11 years. Its comp sales grew more than 19% that year, with its digital comp sales up 145%.

The two leaders leave behind two very different legacies. McMillon has been celebrated for turning around Walmart’s reputation from a big-box discount store to a retailer soaring in popularity with high-income consumers. “We didn’t know what the e-commerce model was going to look like today. We just knew customers wanted it, and it was painful to go through all those investments,” McMillon said at an investment conference in 2024. “It was a bet on the future.”

Target, however, reported poor performance throughout Cornell’s last full year and faced controversy around its pullback of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. “The world around us is noisier and more complicated, but that doesn’t change who we are,” Cornell wrote in a letter that was scrutinized by critics. “Every day our team lifts each other up, goes the distance to care for our guests and generously supports the communities we call home.” Many criticized Target’s decision to promote an internal candidate to CEO and keep Cornell on as executive chair of the company’s board of directors.

It’s worth noting, however, that Cornell’s and McMillon’s legacies have been defined by when they chose to step down; Cornell stepped out on a low note, while McMillon stepped out on a high note. But both have had their highs and lows, such as the pandemic-driven sales boom that Cornell oversaw at Target and Walmart’s initial struggles in e-commerce after the retailer spent $3.3 billion on online shopping website Jet.com.

Ultimately, Cornell’s name will remain attached to whatever happens next at Target, for better or for worse, as he will continue to serve on the company’s board. McMillon, however, will only serve on Walmart’s board until its next shareholders’ meeting.

But going beyond their resumes, Modern Retail spoke with two former retail executives who worked with McMillon, Cornell or both to get a glimpse into their leadership styles and how they will be remembered.

Scott Benedict of Benedict Enterprises — a retail consultant who held various leadership roles at Walmart between 1997 and 2017 — worked under both McMillon and Cornell when they were back-to-back CEOs of Sam’s Club. McMillon was CEO of Sam’s Club from 2005 to 2009, and Cornell then led the club retailer until 2012.

“I think the difference between the two really has to be in results,” Benedict added. “Obviously Doug’s results are much stronger, and Walmart is much better positioned today. … Both are strong leaders and great business people.”

Doug McMillon: An ‘artful communicator’ who drove growth

Being a former store associate and merchant, McMillon is often credited with understanding what it’s like to be an entry-level employee and climb the ranks within Walmart.

Even as far back as 2000, “everyone” knew that one day he would be CEO, said Matt Fifer, a former Walmart executive who worked at the company from 1993 to 2005 and has since founded industry networking platforms Conversations On Retail and Winning With Walmart. McMillon had a legendary slate of mentors to look up to over the years, including former Walmart CEOs David Glass, Lee Scott and Don Soderquist.

“Doug was just an artful communicator that had great chemistry with the people in the field, because he was one of them,” Fifer said. “He was a guy that just excelled wherever he was planted and gave a lot of us young people in the organization a lot of confidence that we could do the same thing — that we could work hard, operate with integrity and play well with others, and there could be a great, big future for us, too.”

Fifer describes him as thoughtful, a great listener and a great planner. “I just remember how much poise Doug always had,” Fifer said. “There was just never a bit of emotion; there was just never even a bit of a dent in the armor.”

As an example of how McMillon developed young talent, Fifer remembers the then-merchandising manager questioning him during a trip to the annual toy fair in New York City in the early 2000s.

“Doug wanted to know, ‘How has the company benefited by you being here? What have you learned? What do you intend to take back?'” Fifer recalls. “Everything about Doug was [about] learning from everything, taking it back and applying it to the business — because if you’re not learning and applying, then you’re just wasting everybody’s time.”

Benedict remembers when he was a senior buyer of consumer electronics at Sam’s Club, when Doug was CEO of Sam’s, around when the company was looking into how to show off the then-new high-definition displays within the clubs. Benedict, he said, implemented an end-cap display that showed off the HD capability in partnership with Sony. Previously, all the displays were powered by a standard definition signal, and the 52-inch screen was very large for the time.

McMillon stood in front of the display and stared for a while, trying to figure out if he liked it or not, according to Benedict — who heard this from a club manager at the time. Benedict said he had asked the club manager if McMillon was smiling.

“He said, ‘No, he just stood there and just looked at it,'” Benedict recalled. “Obviously, I didn’t get fired, so apparently he liked it. … He embraced taking a different approach to how we would display and tell the story of a high-spec, high-quality product.” Benedict added that McMillon had challenged all buyers to differentiate the Sam’s Club assortment to be higher quality than what was found at Walmart at the time.

In Benedict’s opinion, McMillon’s biggest contribution to the company was fully integrating digital into its operations, in a way that focused less on channels and more on customer journeys — instead of bolting e-commerce onto the side of a store-focused business.

“Even back when I was at Sam’s Club under Doug, he was already deeply focused on how scale, systems and member value had to work together,” Benedict said. “What we later saw at Walmart was that same mindset applied with much larger technology and capital investments behind it.”

Benedict said McMillon transformed the company through investments in infrastructure such as automation, inventory visibility, forecasting and AI-driven supply chain tech. This, Benedict said, turned Walmart’s omnichannel strategy from a defensive response to Amazon into a growth engine that positions it well for the era of AI, automation and retail media.

“He recognized early that Walmart’s store network was not a liability in e-commerce, but a strategic advantage — turning stores into fulfillment nodes, pickup points, and last-mile assets at national scale,” Benedict said. “That shift fundamentally changed Walmart’s cost structure and its speed relative to pure-play e-commerce competitors.”

The rise, fall and continued presence of Brian Cornell

Cornell and McMillon shared the top job at Sam’s Club around the same time, but they had very different backgrounds. McMillon was a Walmart lifer, while Cornell led a more diverse set of retailers and brands.

McMillon had grown his career within Walmart for decades, while Cornell came to Sam’s Club after holding leadership roles at Safeway and Michaels. He later worked at PepsiCo before going to Target.

“Both were excellent leaders, but were cut from a different cloth,” Benedict said. “Brian, also a very strong leader, [was] very focused on just on being professional and having a thoughtful plan for the business, [and he was] very easy to engage and talk to. Both leaders were, but I think that’s one of the things that struck me about Brian, as well.”

Cornell led Sam’s Club through the financial crisis. Benedict — still a buyer in consumer electronics — had filled its electronics departments with LED screens faster than other retailers, leading to a slowdown in sales, he recalled. So, Benedict was tasked with walking Cornell through a Sam’s Club store and explaining to him why this happened. This was because the pricing on LEDs had not come down enough yet to be reasonable to consumers. Benedict told Cornell he was working to bring the older but more wallet-friendly LCD screens back into the assortment.

Cornell listened and asked how he could help, Benedict said. “There was no yelling or anything like that,” Benedict added. “He just had a very rational, reasoned approach to listening to what I had to say as the buyer — my expectation or my explanation — and he held me accountable for that, and the sales did, in fact, improve.”

Still, Benedict said the biggest contrast between the two leaders was in that Cornell would quickly cut departments or initiatives if they weren’t working. McMillon, on the other hand, wouldn’t immediately jump to that conclusion and would rebuild those areas with the customer more in mind, in Benedict’s opinion.

One of Cornell’s first moves as CEO was to pull Target out of Canada in 2015, just after becoming CEO. Target Canada lost more than $2 billion from 2011 to 2014 as shoppers complained about higher prices than in the U.S., as well as inventory issues and a lack of product variety, per CBC News. At Sam’s Club, Benedict said Cornell quickly eliminated member services like auto and travel discounts — which Benedict later found himself overseeing under the next CEO.

“After Brian departed and Rosalind Brewer took over as the CEO of Sam’s Club, there was a realization that we had cut a little too much,” Benedict said, adding that competitor Costco ended up with an advantage in keeping those services.

On a similar note, Chris Walton, co-CEO of Omni Talk Retail, wrote in a blog post last year that he had left the company after Cornell and the board shelved its innovation initiatives to instead invest in stores.

“I could not be inspired by a leader that didn’t believe in innovation, knowing deep down that, at some point, Cornell’s ability to kick the can down the road would come to roost,” Walton wrote. He attributes Target’s revenue declines over the past few years to Cornell’s failure to put growth strategies in place.

“Cornell and Target couldn’t help but to do well from 2020 to 2022 because people only had so many places to shop, and, when they actually did go out to shop, they wanted to spend as little time shopping as possible, so naturally they gravitated towards one-stop-shopping,” Walton wrote. “But luck isn’t a strategy.”