BusinessWeek has a cover story in this week’s magazine about Wal-Mart’s slowing growth and "dimming prospects". Competitors are eating into WalMart’s business, and their various strategies for finding new momentum have apparently stalled. As auther Anthony Bianco puts it:

If Wal-Mart seems short of answers at the moment, it might well be because there aren’t any good ones. Increasingly, it appears that America’s largets corporation has steered itself into a slow-growth cul de sac from which there is no escape.

That sounds pretty severe. But maybe the problem is the expectation for continued aggressive growth, rather than optimization. Victor Cook has done an analysis of Wal-Mart’s challenge with the Enterprise Marketing Framework, and believes there is a solution–hacking off the Sam’s Club business and a whole lot of revenue. Could Wal-Mart actually maximize it’s potential by lopping off $41 Billion in revenue? It sounds crazy, until you do the numbers and the underlying market strategy becomes evident.

Victor is putting together a compelling set of case studies that demonstrate the value of viewing corporate strategy through the Enterprise Marketing lens. This one is well worth the read.