It can be tough for a global company to maintain a local feel and stay relevant in today’s market. Roger Cude, senior vice president of global talent management at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., deals with that task daily. He said ensuring all of the company’s talent is globally influenced yet locally focused is one of Wal-Mart’s greatest challenges.

“It’s an interesting blend of ‘Don’t lose who you are, but you’d better be changing all the time,’” Cude said. “One of Sam Walton’s key principles was ‘stay out ahead of change.’”

TM: What is Wal-Mart’s approach to talent management?

Cude: Our approach to talent management is probably fairly consistent with other large companies. We are being very relevant locally because at the end of the day retailing is a very local business. We want to make sure the leadership in our markets is predominantly local yet have the ability to build global leaders. We move talent around the world to give them global experience, but we don’t have nearly the global assignments or expats, if you will, that some other companies do because we really have a bias toward local leadership.

Our approach to talent management is one where we do a lot of executive assessments and develop knowledge around our talent. We do a lot of executive development relative to the leadership competencies we think are going to be needed in the next three to five years relative to our business. The leaders make the ultimate decision, but we help facilitate the process of creating experience for our executives.

TM: How do you keep your talent approach simple, yet beat out the competition?

Cude: We’re pretty hard on ourselves. We’re constantly looking for ways to get better. We try to execute on those few things we think are going to matter. Our business leaders really challenge us to that. That retail model is a fairly simple business model, but it’s really hard to execute day in and day out. That’s [why] we try to drive greater simplicity of our work but have more impact, certainly greater speed of execution, and better clarity of the guiding principles on why we’re doing what we’re doing. I guess what differentiates us is we do very few things, but we try to do them well with more impact and speed.