Walter Chrysler Quotes

102 Walter Chrysler Quotes

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Next we estimate our inventory turnover per year and our turnover of sight drafts from shipping the cars, so that we can see the rapidity of cash returns. They average about fifteen days. Cash requirements for credits and operating expenses are also carefully figured. Retail sales are followed closely, and production is increased or decreased in proportion to sales.
Walter Chrysler

We pay the strictest attention to each individual territory by counties, even analyzing our situation to the extent of determining what the dealer and we ourselves lose in profit on a territory when it fails to sell its quota. We estimate this both for ourselves and for the dealer, to see what each one of us has lost and, when necessary, we send out men to help the dealers check their records.
Walter Chrysler

Our agents all carry less than thirty days’ stock, except where shipments might be delayed in reaching them, as for example on the Pacific Coast. We do not feel that it is fair to our dealers to let them tie up their money in large stocks, but we do expect them to merchandise up to our quota standards. We look after them closely and try to help them make the quick turnover we feel to be one of the big points of our business.
Walter Chrysler

All territories are operated on a quota basis, the quotas being set at the home office. We base the establishment of the quota on the actual volume of automobile sales of all makes in the past in that territory, and then figure our percentage to the total sales. Quotas are often unfair, for they are not set on actual conditions. Past sales are a reality and you are not unfair to a man when you ask him to sell a share of what is being sold. We feel this system is just, because if general business in a given territory falls off we are not expecting unreasonable things of our representatives. Often an injustice is very apparent to the men, whereas the organization is perfectly ignorant that it is expecting any more of them than it should. Where sales fall off in a given territory we send our sales expert there immediately and he gives the dealer the benefit of his expert advice.
Walter Chrysler

[On getting a large invoice for genealogical research] If you pay enough money, they can relate you to Jesus Christ!
Walter Chrysler

I am a machinist. Trained from my boyhood to penetrate the workings of machines. I find myself now excited by the thought of exploring my own mechanism, for it is in keeping with my character that I should seek to discover what makes me, this man I am, tick and go. I always want to know how things work. Had I been Aladdin, I am certain that after just one wish or two, I’d have taken that old lamp apart to see if I could make another, better lamp.
Walter Chrysler

Being a machinist, I have always wanted to know how things work.
Walter Chrysler

All my training, instincts and aptitudes have combined to make me want to penetrate the workings of any machines I see.
Walter Chrysler

You had to be a tough kid. Out there where I grew up, if you were soft, all the other kids would beat the daylights out of you.
Walter Chrysler

[On his father] You can bet my father's skin was tough! It had to be to withstand that kind of homemade soap, along with Kansas sun and wind and blizzards. But if his skin was like bristly leather, his heart was gentle… Always he was trying to make life better for his family.
Walter Chrysler



[On the town he grew up in] There was no plumbing in Ellis that anyone could brag about, and it was an event when my father, a progressive citizen, bought a windmill so we could have running water.
Walter Chrysler

I worked ten hours a day, and for that the railroad paid me one dollar.
Walter Chrysler

A sculptor trying to release in marble some shape of beauty that is captive in his mind can give no more loving care and craftsmanship to what he does than was done by me as I created that locomotive model.
Walter Chrysler

Sure I was cocky! I thought I was quite a kid.
Walter Chrysler

I was a good worker. I always tried to please the man I worked for; even though I was a good mechanic, if I was asked to sweep the floor, I'd sweep it. However, I had my mind made up. I went to see the master mechanic…
Walter Chrysler

[On buying his first car] Hopelessly infatuated with the car I twisted logic and mustered feeble facts to buttress my case…
Walter Chrysler

Just ask yourself what this country will be like when every individual has his private car and is able to travel anywhere. Some day…
Walter Chrysler

[On the reason for buying his first car] I did not simply want a car to ride in; I wanted the machine so I could learn all about it.
Walter Chrysler

[On telling his wife he had purchased his first car for $5,000.00] ‘Della, I've bought an automobile.’… I had spent our cash reserve and gone in hock for more money than I would make in a year. She did not scold me, but it did seem to me that when she closed the kitchen door, it made a little more noise than usual; maybe she slammed it.
Walter Chrysler

I put the car in the barn, and it stayed in there so long that she despaired of ever getting a ride. Sometimes she sat in it when I cranked up and let the engine run. Night after night, I worked in the barn until it was time to go to bed, and some nights I did not leave the automobile until it was long past my bedtime. Saturday afternoons and all day on Sundays I worked on that car. I read automobile catalogues, I studied sketches and made still other sketches of my own. Most of the time, the innards were spread upon newspapers on the barn floor. There was no single function I did not study over and over. Finally, I proved to myself that I knew and understood it, because I had put it all together, had the engine tuned so that it was running like a watch…
Walter Chrysler



[On his wife wanting to go for a ride in the first car he purchased - ‘What is the use of having an automobile if we're never going to ride?’] ‘Now, don't be impatient, Della.’ [‘Impatient! You've had the car three months and it's never been out of the barn.’]
Walter Chrysler

[On driving his first car for the first time] A few hundred yards ahead, I saw a cow emerging from behind an osage hedge that bordered a lane. She was headed for the road. I bulbed the horn until it had made its gooselike cry four or five times, but the cow, a poor rack of bones draped with yellow hide, kept right on her course and never changed her pace; nor did I change the pace of the automobile. I could not; all that I could do was to grip the wheel and steer, biting on my cigar until my teeth met inside of it. Well, I missed the cow, though I was close enough to touch her…
Walter Chrysler

[On his salary being increased to $12,000/year] One thousand dollars every month! My wife and I were entranced at the bare thought of getting a raise that amounted almost to as much as my best railroad salary…
Walter Chrysler

Most automobiles were costing too much money. I soon began to find out why; the industry had grown up in a series of booms. Money was being spent recklessly by some; it was being wasted by others simply because they did not know how to curb waste. The great pressure on almost everyone in the business was time. If a company wanted a new plant of any kind, someone with authority was pretty sure to ask that the plant be produced quickly.
Walter Chrysler

[In the Buick Motor Company plant] This is all wrong. We've got to get each chassis out of here in two days instead of four. We can build a lot more cars if we do that…
Walter Chrysler

[On changing the mentality of running the factory as one to produce carriages for horses to producing cars for people] Every minute of my time we were figuring out further ways to adapt carriage-craft operations to automobile building. With just those changes in operation we succeeded in improving production from forty-five cars a day to seventy-five, practically in the same space and with a most impressive saving. We knew we could do better, though, if we just kept on hunting out all kinds of waste.
Walter Chrysler

We went on and on with one improvement after another until, in that same room, instead of merely forty-five cars we were making 200 cars each day.
Walter Chrysler

Henry Ford, after we developed our line, went to work and figured out a chain conveyor. His was the first. Thereafter we all used them. Instead of pushing the cars along the line by hand, they rode on an endless-chain conveyor operated by a motor.
Walter Chrysler

We kept on reaching out for better ways, for better things, until evolutionary changes were occurring in the steel industry, in the machine-tool trade, in the cotton fields down South, everywhere raw materials came from. We were insistent—imperiously sometimes.
Walter Chrysler

[On him getting his pay increased from $6,000 to $25,000. (He was getting $12,000 but had taken a cut to $6,000 for three years because he wanted this great opportunity)] If our feet remained on the ground - and I know they did - my wife should get seventy per cent of the credit.
Walter Chrysler



[On William C Durant] I cannot hope to find words to express the charm of the man. He has the most winning personality of anyone I've ever known. He could coax a bird right down out of a tree, I think.
Walter Chrysler

[On William C Durant giving him a pay increase instead of working for himself] ‘I'll pay you $500,000 a year to stay on here as president of Buick.’ He just sprang it on me that way; he did not bat an eye. I couldn't think for a few seconds.
Walter Chrysler

In the development of the great modern business corporations as servants of mankind, men have devised a creative force that transcends themselves.
Walter Chrysler

[To William C Durant on spending $6 million on a new plant he considered not carefully enough thought out.] I'm roaring as a stockholder, if you really want to know. Everything I have in the world is in this company. I don't want to lose it.
Walter Chrysler

[On quitting General Motors in 1919] I believed we were expanding too fast by far… Buick was making about half the money, but the corporation was spending much faster than we could earn. So I quit - this time for keeps…
Walter Chrysler

[In 1919] I was retired. I had nothing more to do, and wasn't that just fine and dandy!… [His wife on his ‘retirement’ at home] ‘I wish you would go to work.’ Because of her tone, I was relieved when she said ‘work.’ She added: ‘This isn't a home any more. It's just a place crowded with men. A sort of railroad station.’… I grinned widely. She had said it first… ‘Do you know what?’ I said to her. ‘I will go back to work.’
Walter Chrysler

It was precisely because I had made a success at Buick, because of the reputation that I had earned there, that these fellows were asking me to try to save their money for them. Suppose I failed? What would such a failure do to my reputation? I did not have to go to work again. Why should I?… I told them then that I would make a proposition: I'd undertake the job for two years at a million dollars a year, net.
Walter Chrysler

[On getting a wage of $1 million dollars a year] The bankers, figuring that their money was gone unless a miracle happened, directed John to accept my terms.
Walter Chrysler

Bad management sometimes means a lot of things I would not wish to discuss.
Walter Chrysler

I knew three things about him: He was honest; he was loyal; he had ability. That is all I ask from any man. I don't care how raw the ability is; that can be developed through experience. But unless a man is loyal and honest, I don't want him associated with me.
Walter Chrysler



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