#130 Walter Chrysler

What I learned from reading Life of an American Workman by Walter Chrysler. ---- [0:56]The kitchen fire was the only heat we knew in the winter. Often I had to scamper barefoot across a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badly fitting windows. [1:56] We never spent money on things we could get without spending. [3:10] This book was written about a year before he had a stroke and about two years before he died. The book is full of memories of parents and friends long dead. [3:29] The memories he chose to highlight made me think of this quote on books by Carl Sagan: What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. [4:10] And I think that is what this book is. It is Walter Chrysler speaking directly to you and I over 80 years after he died. [5:18] On a few occasions his Dad would let him come to work with him [on the Union Pacific Railroad]. This is how Walt remembered that: The part of me that would be most tired would be my face. It was tired from grinning in my hours of ecstasy. [6:35] He learned from his parents the need to be self sufficient. They built their own house. They raised their own food. They created their own jobs. If they wanted plumbing they made it themselves. [7:00] He is very passionate about mechanics and understanding machines. He has to create his own tools because he is too poor to buy them. [7:35] I went to work at 6 in the morning and was through at 10:30 at night. [9:02] I was a cocky youngster and full of confidence. [9:34] He really valued work and learning and the sense of self confidence you get from doing something well. [10:01] A good workman was likely to mistrust any tool whose metal had not been tempered by himself. But I had an even better reason for making mine. I lacked the money with which to buy them. Years after I ceased to need them to earn a living, those tools I made were placed on display in a glass case on the observatory floor, 71 stories up in the tower of the Chrysler building. That is one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the entire book. Think about this: In one lifetime he goes from being so poor that he has to make his own tools—to having a skyscraper built for the company that he creates and that bears his name. [10:42] Jeff Bezos has a quote that says, "We don’t choose our passions, they choose us." [11:59] Walt couldn’t find the answers he needed in his small town so he wrote an abundance of letters to Scientific American: Whoever received the questions from subscribers must have thought that Walter P. Chrysler was a pen name for a dozen youths. At least half of whom were crazy. Yet many of my questions were answered. [12:13] A great story about Walt’s lifelong association with Mr. Neubert. [14:00] How Walt described himself at 22: I was cocky. I thought I was quite the kid. I had a sense of hurry. I had ambition and wanted to get ahead. [17:48] It seemed to me I could not make anyone understand. I was ambitious. I dared to tell her [his future wife] that I intended someday to be a master mechanic. I realized I had a lot of learn before I could really hope to have that dream fulfilled. That is why I wanted to go to a bigger place so I could get more experience. Most of the time—even in my own mind—I was pretty vague about what I was going to do. [20:08] Walt on his early 20s: I must confess I liked that sort of life. I liked the freedom, the sense of adventure, and the lack of responsibility. [22:29] He eventually becomes the highest paid person in the entire automobile industry. When he goes to work at GM he starts at $6,000 a year. A few years later he is making $600,000 a year. But that is not happening yet. Walt at 26 was making 30 cents an hour. [23:20] A great story about Old Man Hickey. There are a series of stories in this book where somebody took the time—usually someone a generation older—and took an interest in Walt and taught him a useful life lesson. [30:14] Don’t let a fine opportunity slide by just because you are comfortable in a job that you have mastered. Don’t be afraid of your future. [31:29] I was learning responsibility weighs more heavily than iron. [33:11] Another passion grabs him: I saw this car. $5000! I had $700 to my name. I never stopped to ask myself if I should, if I could afford to go in hock to buy that car. All I asked myself was where could I raise the money? [34:39] Walt understood the potential impact of the automobile industry before most other people: The automobile is transportation too. The railroads have made this a richer country. Ask yourself what this country will be like when every individual has their own private car. [36:29] He does something really smart. He goes from working for the railroads to working for the manufacturer of the trains. He discovers there's a lot more money and pleasure in manufacturing. [37:12] What was more important was the change in me. The fun I had experienced in making things as a boy was magnified a hundred fold when I began making things as a man. There is, in manufacturing, a creative joy that only poets are supposed to know. Someday, I'd like to show a poet how it feels to design and build a railroad locomotive. [39:42] Making the jump to Buick. He goes from making $12,000 a year to $6,000: This is not the first time in his life that he will accept less money for a better opportunity, nor is it the last time. [40:25] There is a great quote by Marc Andreessen: Best thing about startups is you only experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. [42:40] Henry Leland had great respect for Walter Chrysler. He said that when he explained something to Walt he got it a lot quicker than everybody else. [43:04] Walt compares and contrasts the mature locomotive industry to the new automobile industry. [44:21] The result of continuous improvement: They go from making a car in 4 days to making one in 15 minutes. [48:24] Walt is about to quit GM and go make his own car. This is what Billy Durant does to make sure that doesn’t happen: I’ll pay you $500,000 a year to stay on as President of Buick. [50:16] He thought Billy Durant was a genius and one of the most important people that helped the automobile industry thrive, but he had a hard time working with him: That’s the kind of fellow he was. We’d fight and then he’d want to raise my salary. The automobile industry owes more to Durant than it has yet acknowledged. In some ways he has been its greatest man. [53:36] Walt retires at 45. He is coaxed out of retirement with the high paying opportunity to turn around a failed automobile company: He says he will undertake the job for two years at $1 million a year. They say okay it is worth the risk of spending $2 million to see if this guy can get us back our $50 million. [56:20] I remember leaving a meeting saying I would not touch this with a 10 foot pole. What I was saying I would not touch was later on to be revealed to be the greatest opportunity of my whole life. [1:00:58] Walt’s great idea in response to not being allowed to showcase his car at the 1924 Automobile Show. [1:03:48] Walt said buying Dodge was his greatest accomplishment. Other people at the time said he was buying a lemon. This is how Walt responded: That was the opinion of some minds that contained little understanding of industry and especially of the automobile industry. Buying Dodge was one of the soundest acts of my life. [1:07:06] Every time we had a conversation, it seems to me, he shed tears yet always would start with them was thinking of the past when he was a poor young man. Sometimes, at first, I mistakenly supposed that he was feeling sorry for himself. Finally, I came to realize what it was that so deeply moved him when he contemplated his auspicious start, including those years of riding freight trains from town to town when he was hunting a chance to work and gain more experience. It was gratitude of course; gratitude to everything American that made possible his great success. He told his story in the hope it might inspire other lonely boys roving in the land to keep on trying. ---- Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work. Get access to Founders Notes here. ---- “I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — Gareth Be like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Senra?

  By the time I became conscious of my dependence on her, my mother's large, dark eyes were set in a big, powerful woman of the frontier. I was the third of four children she bore in Kansas railroad towns in the 1870s, before the Prairies had been tamed. She ate buffalo meat to nourish her sons. Sometimes now, I see her eyes looking at me, miraculously, out of the face of one of my grandchildren. Sometimes, in a mirror, I catch a fleeting trace of her in my own eyes. At such times, I hope afresh that they were right, those neighbors, who would cast a nod at me and say, "Walt takes after his ma." Work? Of course.

• 0:42David Senra?

  A boy had to work in a household where my mother was the ruler. She worked all the time herself and had prodigious energy. What awakened me every day was the clanging of iron lids on her cook stove before the sun was up. For years, kitchen fire was the only heat we knew in the winter. Often, I had to scamper barefoot across a floor where snow had drifted through the cracks of badly fitting windows. I shared a bed with my big brother Ed. Before breakfast, Ed had cows to milk, and I had other work to do. Sometimes I was sent early to get the soup meat. Until I was six or seven, the few hundred people who lived in Ellis almost never got beef. We all ate buffalo meat.

• 1:27David Senra?

  The rump was what my mother wanted. She would put a great hunk of this meat into a big, black pot in which she made her soup. I have never tasted any other soup quite so good. A certain soft scraping sound that I hear faintly sometimes in a barber shop is like an echo of a harsh and loud scrape that I used to hear in our kitchen when I was a boy. Our kitchen was the only barber shop my father knew. My mother was the one who always cut his hair and shaved him. We never spent money for anything that we could get without spending. You can bet my father's skin was tough. It had to be, to withstand that Kansas sun and wind and blizzard.

• 2:10David Senra?

  But if his skin was like bristly leather, his heart was gentle. We two boys, his sons, were a pair of fighting, chore dodging cubs, unruly and frequently in need of taming. Yet he never laid a hand on us in anger. He would reason with us and get obedience, but his mighty arms and calloused hands were never used against us. In many of the visions of him that recur to me, there is a paintbrush in his hand, or a hammer, or a saw. Always he was trying to make life better for his family. My father and mother were a great pair of people, hardworking partners devoted to the

• 2:54David Senra?

  job of bringing up a family. That was an excerpt from the autobiography of Walter Chrysler. The book is called Life of an American Workman. This is the book that I've been waiting for, for over two months, as part of this ongoing series on the early automobile industry pioneers. Those words were written about a year before he had a stroke and about two years before he died. And the book is full of memories of parents and family members long dead. And it's those memories, along with other things he chose to highlight and remember towards the end of his life, that made me think of this quote by Carl Sagan that I always think about. And Carl said, "What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on it, which are imprinted

• 3:38David Senra?

  lots of funny, dark squiggles. But one glance at it, and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." And I think that's what this book is. It's Walter Chrysler speaking directly to you and I over 80 years after he died. And he's telling us the most important parts of his life as he remembers it. So let's not waste any more time. Let's jump into it. We're going to talk, go right back to his

• 4:23David Senra?

  early life and his great admiration for his father, who was an engineer on the railroad and somebody that heavily influenced the path that Walter chose for himself. So he says, "Henry Chrysler was known from end to end of the Union Pacific." That's the railroad he worked on. "Certainly, he was the best locomotive engineer of the division." Obviously, he talks about, "I used to walk, as I was walking to school, he'd be walking to work in the morning." And so, he would go into, his father would go to work at 7:30 in the morning. He says, "I used to watch him then and still be thinking of him when I got to school at 8 o'clock. Often, when he left

• 5:03David Senra?

  the house, I walked beside him, lugging his dinner pail. What he carried rested on his hip, a great big six-shooter. He was no swashbuckler, just a railroad man who had been a soldier." So when his father was a young boy, he served as a drummer boy in the Civil War. On a few occasions, his dad would actually let him come to work with him and watch his father work, and he'd spend the whole day there. And this is how Walter remembered that. He says, "The part of me most tired would be my face, and it was tired from grinning in my hours of ecstasy." Now, this is Walt telling us a little bit more about the time and the place that he grew up in. It was a tough place to grow up in, and you had to be tough to survive. So he says, "Despite the taming influences of chores and money-making, I confess I raised my small

• 5:46David Senra?

  share of hell. Maybe there is as much fighting among boys today. I can only say that I do not think so. In the schoolyard, we had four or five fistfights in the 15 minutes of recess. A kid who had a yellow streak would lead a dog's life. If you could take your beatings, fighting back with all you had, you did not have to take so many beatings. We really had a tough environment." And so, he talks about the results of that. He says, "I certainly aimed, in those days, to grow up tough." There was no plumbing in Ellis. Ellis is the small city in Kansas that he grew up in. There was no plumbing in Ellis that anyone could brag about. And it was an event when my father bought a windmill so he could have running water.

• 6:30David Senra?

  The next thing was a bathtub for which he had built a special room against the kitchen. He made it himself. And so, one thing he learned from both his parents is the need to be self-sufficient. They built their own house. They raised their own food. They created their own jobs. If they wanted, for example, if they wanted plumbing, they created it themselves. And so, that's something that Walter carries on with his own work. At the time, he was too poor. He obviously wants to become, he's a machinist by trade. And that's something that he's very passionate about. He's very passionate about mechanics and understanding machines. And he'd have to create his own tools because he was so poor and couldn't afford to buy them. He talks later on that he thought that was the right way to do it because then you know

• 7:13David Senra?

  for sure, since you're the one that made it, that it's going to do the job you need it to do. So, I'm fast forwarding a little bit in his life. This time, he's a young teenager. I think he's about 14 years old. And this is some of his early jobs. And then, we start to see his personality. Walter is definitely a misfit, and we'll see that. "I offered myself as a delivery boy and was hired at $10 a month. I went to work at 6 o'clock in the morning and was through at 10:30 at night. I did not like those hours, and I was not satisfied with either my money or my prospects. I wanted to quit the grocery store and learn about machinery." So, his older brother is already an apprentice to be a machinist. And so, his brother's mad. And this is what he says, "Why don't you be a boiler maker?"

• 7:58David Senra?

  he would roar. "One machinist in the family's enough." "I don't want to be a boiler maker," I'd yell back at him. So, he wants to be a machinist. His brother doesn't want him to be a machinist. His parents don't want him to be a machinist. They want him to go to college. And he says, "I did not like the thought of college. I had a stubborn streak in me." So, his dad won't give him permission to become an apprentice. That's how you'd learn the trade back in those days. So, he's like, "Okay, I'll do the next best thing. I'll get a job as a janitor, and I'll sweep the floors." So, he does this for a long time. He says, "But I loved it. I loved to see the engines with their mysteries exposed. I envied the mechanics who understood their inner workings. I liked to handle tools. After six months, I went to the master mechanic himself and asked his help." So, this guy named Edgar Easterbrook.

• 8:42David Senra?

  And he's seeing if he could appeal to Edgar to talk to his father. You want to be an apprentice, eh? Yes, sir. Well Walt, if ever anybody had the right to ask for the chance, it's you. You've stuck to your job and you haven't belly ached. I'll speak to your father. I'll speak to your father. That is, if you are sure you want to be a machinist. Yes, sir, I do. I was a cocky youngster and full of confidence, but I was shivering in my eagerness. Mr. Esterbrook won my father over, so I began my four-year term as a machine shop apprentice. My pay at first was five cents an hour. Who could ask for a better chance? So, once he had his dad's permission, he had to take a test to become an apprentice, and he passes.

• 9:27David Senra?

  And he gets his first real sense of pride and accomplishment. And this is something that continues throughout his whole life, that he really valued work and learning, and the sense of self-confidence you get from doing something well. So he says, "A Union Pacific Shop apprentice. You can bet that I was proud. My opinion of myself had expanded tenfold when I became an apprentice. Everybody in Ellis knew that any apprentice had been required to pass an examination, a stiff one. Some boys failed to make the grade, but I had done so readily." This is where he gets into needing tools. So he says, "A good workman was likely to mistrust any tool whose metal had not been tempered by himself. But I had an even better reason for making mine.

• 10:10David Senra?

  I lack the money with which to buy them. Years after I ceased to need them to earn a living, those tools I made were placed on display in a glass case on the observatory floor 71 stories up in the tower of the Chrysler Building." And that is just one of the most remarkable paragraphs in the entire book, because think about this. In one lifetime, he goes from being so poor that he has to make his own tools, to having a skyscraper built for the company that he creates and that bears his name. So in this section, we see that he's definitely a maverick, definitely a misfit. And I think this, to me, this is an illustration of Jeff Bezos's quote, that you don't choose your passion, that your passions choose us.

• 10:52David Senra?

  And we also see that Walt's lifelong personality trait, that he's just hungry for knowledge. So it says, "Playing cards was frowned upon by the Methodists," so that's his religion at the time. "The use of whiskey, cigarettes, or cards were seen as evil." In that hideout, there's a part in the shop where they have, like, where the workmen go to gather and hang out. It says, "In the hideout, we played cards, we smoked cigarettes, and we had a little beer. Oh, how tough we felt ourselves to be. That was fun, but it was not half so thrilling as the work I did when we overhauled an engine. The things themselves were teaching me what I wished to know. Wished, that word is not strong enough to describe my passion to learn about machines

• 11:37David Senra?

  and the power that made them run. Concerning all the unfolding forms of magic, which were then beginning to transform the continent, I was mad with curiosity. As there were none in Ellis well-informed enough to answer all of my questions, I addressed myself in almost every mail to the Scientific American. In that editorial office, whoever received the questions from subscribers must have thought that Walter P. Chrysler was the pen name of a dozen youths, at least half of whom were crazy. Yet many of my questions were answered." And at this time, he's in his early twenties. There's this great story, him and another fellow workman, this guy named McGrath.

• 12:20David Senra?

  McGrath winds up, like, throwing, there's, like, dirty water everywhere, and they throw it on each other. It's like, kind of, this game. So McGrath dumps it on Walt, and then Walt tries to get him back. And he thinks it's McGrath that's gonna walk through this door, but, so this is the background of the story I'm about to tell you. "But it was not McGrath that I splattered in the face. It was Mr. Newbert. This is his boss." So he essentially dumps a bunch of greasy, dirty water all over his boss by accident. "He fired me before he had the stuff wiped off. For some days thereafter, I felt it as if I had been banished from the earth. I was sick. Nothing in the world was half so important as my apprenticeship."

• 13:00David Senra?

  Eventually, somebody intercedes on his behalf and he says, "Hey, go see Mr. Newbert." "I went to see Mr. Newbert. I begged his pardon while tears splashed on my chest. He beckoned me to follow him outside the shop where no others could hear him dress me down." So he's yelling at him for a half hour, telling him, "You know, what you did was wrong," everything else. And then at last, he says this, "This must be a lesson to you. If it ever happens again, I'll fire you for sure and you'll never come back." Now, here's the great story. "I went back to work. That fright did me a lot of good. From that time on, I really settled down to learn because I knew then just how much I love mechanics.

• 13:41David Senra?

  And now, in 1936, out in Kansas City, on our payroll," meaning the payroll of the Chrysler Corporation, "there is the name of a gentleman, a friend of mine, now quite old. The name is Newbert." So this is how Walt described the person he was at 22 and when he's going to make the big decision to get out of the small town that he's in. "Sure, I was cocky. I thought I was quite a kid. I had a sense of hurry. Settle down? Why, that was just a trouble. I never had a chance to put myself in a situation from which I could settle down. Besides, I just knew that any other town was better than Ellis. Anytime I met a stranger, no matter where he was from, he knew things that were

• 14:23David Senra?

  unknown in Ellis. To my parents, my defense was that I had ambition and wanted to get ahead. I had my mind made up." So he goes to his boss, this guy's, this is actually Mr. Esterbrook, the one that interceded on behalf of, to his father. He says, "You've been mighty nice to me. That I am a machinist," this is the end of his apprenticeship, "is something I owe to you. I'll never forget it either, but I'm going to quit." And so he goes, "Is there anything the matter, Walt?" "No, sir, not a thing. It's just I want to get more experience. I think I'm a good mechanic. Say, I know I am." I saw him grin. Because of my habitual willingness to appraise my qualities at their proper value. So this is something you had to know about Walt his entire life.

• 15:07David Senra?

  He's got an abundance of self-confidence. And it's not an abundance of self-confidence because he's arrogant or cocky. It's because he puts in so much work. He is determined to master his craft and he gets the reputation as being one of the best mechanics and best machinists in the country, which opens a bunch of doors for him later on, which we'll get to. So this is my habitual willingness to appraise my qualities at their proper value. I can do any job you ask me to, but I want to learn more things. I simply had to get away. I know that now. I had to give myself a chance to be a man away from home. So he starts traveling around and at this time, if you did this, you're called a round house mechanic and you just go from city to city, job to job. And he's looking for opportunity and looking for knowledge that does not exist in his

• 15:52David Senra?

  hometown. But what he realizes, there was also a benefit to having that structure around him. So at this point, he's homesick, unhappy, and he lacks self-discipline at this point of his life. The discipline that he received was discipline from other people, his parents, his bosses and everything else. We see an example of being young and dumb in this story. Even though, even through my homesick spell, I continued confidently. I was getting all the best jobs to do around the shop and I knew my skill in fixing locomotives was a cause of satisfaction to the bosses. I think an even bigger factor was that I had not then yet, I had not then replaced the discipline of home with self-discipline. Lacking that, any human being soon finds trouble. So what does it mean?

• 16:37David Senra?

  It's like this two-bit circus that's coming to town. And so he asks his boss and the other workers if they can go take some time off work and go see the circus or the parade or whatever. And they say no. And he gets so mad that other people are telling him what to do and him and a bunch of other workers decide, hey, we're going to do it anyways. And then they come back to the, they come back to the job and this is the reaction from their boss and the lesson he learns. He was exceedingly solemn and quiet. In my years of railroad experience, he began, nothing like this has ever happened to me. You ought to be fired. Every one of you ought to be fired here and now. You know that and I know that. And he winds up not doing that, right? He wants them to feel guilty, not just punish them. And this is what Walter realizes.

• 17:20David Senra?

  He says, I wish I had not been so foolish. And you see with that one statement that he's very disappointed in his behavior, in his decisions to abandon his job, something that's so important to his life. This next section, I would really summarize this. This is really the restlessness of unrealized ambition. He's still a young person. In this point in his life, he spent several years traveling from city to city, all over America, trying to develop skills and knowledge. And he says, "It seemed to me that I could not make anyone understand except Della Forker." That's his high school sweetheart, and winds up being his wife for his entire life. "I could tell her that I was ambitious, and I even dared to tell her that I intended someday to be a master mechanic.

• 18:04David Senra?

  Of course, I realized I had a lot to learn before I could really hope to have that dream fulfilled. And that was why I wanted to go to a bigger place, so I could get more experience. Most of the time, even in my own mind, I was pretty vague about what I was going to do." And this experience that he's going through is one of the most cherished memories that he has the rest of his life. And this is where he's just going from town to town to town. And he's talking about it now. And he says, "There is no order in my recollection of those times. I found jobs in many places, yet I never seemed to find the job I hunted. Often, I was broke, but if I went hungry, that was simply due to bad management. The important thing is that I never have forgotten how it feels to rove around this

• 18:47David Senra?

  country hunting work. In the shops, I was learning more and more. I learned something from every good mechanic with whom I worked. I learned the workings of a variety of engines. I learned shop practices. But most important, I learned a lot about men, and still more about Walter Chrysler. I lacked patience then. I wasn't willing to stick around a shop to prove that I was good. If they did not appreciate me, if any foreman dressed me down, I'd get my time, pack up my bag, and head to the next shop town. I was spending money as fast as I made it. Spending money was one easy way to get over an attack of blues, as I was often homesick.

• 19:32David Senra?

  Yet I must confess, I like this sort of life. I like the freedom, the sense of adventure, and the lack of responsibility." And I think that, especially for every young man, at least that was my experience, the early 20s, we've talked about this over and over again, we see it in a lot of these books, there's just a special time. We've now transitioned from... You're on your own in most cases. You're still rather young and dumb, but you don't know that. You definitely don't think that at the time. And I just think this feeling that he's experiencing, you know, this is in the 1800s, still occurs today. I must confess, I like that sort of life. I like the freedom, the sense of adventure and the lack of responsibility. It's a very, very special time in life.

• 20:15David Senra?

  And so he also talks about something I didn't know about this point in history was he'd run out of money, but you could go knock on people's doors for food. And this is something he knew because his mom fed thousands of people this way. He says, "In her life, my mother must have fed thousands this way. Anytime you knocked at a back door out west and explained that you were on the move looking for work, you got something to eat. Maybe just bread and butter, maybe a few slices of cold meat. No one ever felt a need to blush in those days of eating such a meal." And so after doing this for a few years, he's able to save a little bit of money. And when I mean a little bit of money, I mean a little bit of money. And he finally saves up enough money where he feels he can go back home and marry his

• 20:59David Senra?

  sweetheart, right? And this is Walter at 26 years old. Okay, I'm going to read this to you. And then in case you haven't listened to every other podcast I did on the, I talked about this in a few other podcasts, I'm not sure which ones. But, well, let me get to it first. He says, "We began our married life with $60. That was every cent I had. I was getting 30 cents an hour, $3 a day for 10-hour days. Whenever I could pile up some overtime, I figured I was lucky. I had more ambition than ever. I had been studying, carrying on a course in electrical engineering by mail through the International Correspondent School." So it's like, think about if you went to college, but you had to do it through the mail, right?

• 21:42David Senra?

  And this is something he talks about later in life where he would know. He would talk to other people, maybe their executives, maybe the people running railroads or automobile companies, and he was very envious of people that had the ability to go to college. So he winds up doing these courses, these courses through the mail, almost his entire life. For years, to the point where there's not one thing that somebody that was a classically-trained engineer, not a term they could bring up, anything they could say that he didn't already know. But the reason I bring this up, and it's so important to think about, like Walt at 26, he does not know at this point in his life, but he will want to, at one day, not too far, about 15 years in the future from now, he will be one of the highest-paid people in America.

• 22:27David Senra?

  I'm pretty sure he was the highest-paid, he eventually is the highest-paid person in the entire automobile industry. When he goes to work for GM after almost two decades of developing the skills as an expert machinist, he starts out at $6,000 a year, right? Three or four years later, I don't know the exact timeframe, very shortly thereafter, he is being paid $600,000 a year, which is an astronomical amount of money in the early 1900s. Okay, but right, that's not happening yet. Walt at 26 saved $60 so he could get married, and he's making 30 cents an hour. So I bring that up to you because there's several examples that I'm going to show you

• 23:10David Senra?

  today where things can improve in your life way faster than you think is possible. Okay, so this next part, we're going to fast-forward, he's 27. This is a lesson from old man Hickey. So there is a series of stories in this book where somebody took the time, somebody usually, you know, if a generation older, say, maybe even old enough to be his father, took the time to take an interest in Walt because they thought he had a lot of potential and a lot of talent, to teach him something that is youthful, he has a big temper, he's an emotional person, he talks about this, that he had to learn how to control, like, his emotions. They could have, you know, in many cases, like Newbert, they could have fired him, said, "Get out of here, kid." And they didn't.

• 23:55David Senra?

  They took the time to be like, "Listen, I was where you were once." Which is exactly what he's doing when you think about when he's writing his autobiography. When you think about, the way to think about this book and many other autobiographies is they're writing to a younger version of themselves because they know they're not unique. There is hundreds of thousands, millions of people just like Walter Chrysler throughout history and will be moving into the future. And so to me, the writing of this book is the same thing that these older people, in many cases, they were his bosses at the time, they're doing the same thing, like imparting wisdom that they accumulate through experience and they're pushing it down the generations, right? So we see this from old man Hickey now. He starts, he's being told what to do and he writes this a letter.

• 24:39David Senra?

  He doesn't, he doesn't like being chastised, right? He's got an anger problem. So he writes a mean letter to his boss. Not a smart thing to do, right? And so we see the result of that here. And I need to tell you also, Walt would clear, almost in every opera, every place he worked, if he stayed there long enough, he would rise up the ranks very fast. So in this case, he's, this Hickey gave him, made him a boss for the first time, right? He's a foreman or superintendent. He's got, he's managing a bunch of other people. Okay? So let's go right to what Walt says. "You do not need to drown to have much of your past life reel through your mind in just a single second. Jobs were scarce, and the sudden fear that you're about to lose your job may do that to you if you were young. I was 27. My own little office meant much to me.

• 25:24David Senra?

  I had authority. I was the boss of scores of men, fellows like myself who understood metal and machines. However, Mr. Hickey's office was much finer. He was the boss of thousands." So he's the boss of an entire railroad, right? And Walt is working on the, and he's the one responsible for making sure that the trains do not break down, that they're, that they're functioning so they can always arrive on time, okay? So he says, "His office was much finer than mine. He was the boss of thousands." "I was a forceful, snappy young fellow, quick-tempered. That was the trouble. A few days before, I had opened and read a letter from the general master mechanic.

• 26:06David Senra?

  I have forgotten now what active oversight of mine had caused him to write me this rebuke, but I remember how quickly I got mad." A sassy letter from the boss, hey? Well, I could write a sassy letter too. "My trouble was youthful sensitiveness. Mr. Hickey had both caused to rebuke me and caused to feel outrage for my lack of respect." So he comes, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. He gets into the office and he's nervous, very nervous. He thinks he's gonna lose his job here. But he starts off, Mr. Hickey starts off being very calm. He's like, "Hey Walt, nice to see you. Sit down." "Mr. Hickey had caught me off guard. Walt, you're a good boy. You're a hard worker. I don't know a better mechanic. And you've got courage, too."

• 26:50David Senra?

  So this goes on for a few minutes. And then he continues. So he starts off with kind and gentle words. And this is the lesson that he's learning from Mr. Hickey. "Walt, I know you pretty well. Right after you went to work, I fixed my eye on you. Remember when we bought those four new cross-compound engines? I was so worried about their valves. Where would we get a man to set them? Then Baldwin, this is another worker, then Baldwin assured me it would be no problem. He said we had a kid in the roundhouse who knew as much about engines as he did." So he's talking about himself. "That floored me." Right, so he's starting off this rebuke with building him up, building up his confidence. Right, and then this is what Walt says, which is, this shows how smart Hickey is.

• 27:34David Senra?

  This is the most important sentence of this entire section. "Certainly, he knew plenty about human beings. There isn't one of us who won't listen carefully to a sermon that begins with praise of our work or something else that we take pride in. You can bet I listened that day. You know Walt, you've got a future. I don't want to see you throw it away because your feelings get hurt now and then. Let me tell you this. Now and then, I get a letter that makes me boil with rage. You know what I do? Mr. Hickey reached deep into his desk from a small drawer beneath. He pulled out a sheet of paper. I saw that it was the letter that I had written. Walt, this is where I put letters that make me mad.

• 28:18David Senra?

  I leave them there for three or four days until I've calmed down. When I'm sure, Mr. Hickey smiled on me then, I take them out and read them over. If you had put my letter in a drawer until you cooled off, Walt, you'd have dealt with it much more soundly. You would have been fair to me and fair to yourself. Don't you see? Now, you remember what I've told you."

• 28:42David Senra?

  And this is Walt now talking. Since that, so he doesn't obviously get fired. He gets a lesson. "Since that day, I've never answered any letter while in a passion. Oh, I've gotten mad and pounded my fist on a table when talking face to face, but I've never lost my temper on paper. God knows, I have received letters that seem to tear my heart out, but those letters I have always filed in the bottom drawer. Just the act of pulling it open brings a thought of Old Man Hickey and cools me down. He was the old man simply because he was the boss, the one whose words of praise, of sympathetic understanding, gave more lasting satisfaction than my paychecks. Now, looking backward over the course I have traveled,

• 29:27David Senra?

  I recall him as one of my best teachers, a trainer who showed me how to curb some traits of temper that well might have sidetracked me or even caused derailment." So shortly after this happened, Walt, he gets a letter offering him a job. It's a better position, right? Higher up and more money. And so what does he do? He goes and asks advice for Old Man Hickey. And Old Man Hickey, this again, shows his wisdom. He does not want to lose Walt. He's like, listen, I don't, you can have the job that you have, Walt, as long as you, as long as I'm here, right? I love your work. I don't want to lose you, but you've got to take this job.

• 30:12David Senra?

  And this is what he says. "Don't let a fine," this is the advice that Hickey gives Walt. Let me be clear here. "Don't let a fine opportunity slide by just because you are comfortable in a job that you have mastered. Don't be afraid of your future." So because of that bit of advice, Walt takes this job. He goes to an opportunity where he's like, okay, I've gone as far as I can here. I've mastered my job, so I can stay here. I'm comfortable, but I won't be learning. I need to focus on accelerating my learning. And this is extremely brilliant by Walt because this constant, every time he got comfortable and he figured out everything, he'd go for a next harder opportunity. And that's why he gets, he winds up becoming one of the most... The highest paid people in America. And this is the result of that.

• 30:56David Senra?

  He says, "I was out of my overalls. I meant to stay out." Now, he's in an executive position. He doesn't, he goes back to overalls later, but I'll get there later. Because he's going to switch from the locomotive business, which is a more mature, advanced, higher paying business, and switch to the early automobile business. "So I was out of overalls and I meant to stay out. What I would wear to work was my oldest suit I had. It was worn and spotted, but it was good enough to distinguish me as one who worked entirely with his head." And so, there's this great quote that he's learning on his next job. I'll just dedicate one sentence to it. "Responsibility," I was learning, "is something that weighs more heavily than iron." So during, even when he was younger than this, and later in his life too, he always

• 31:40David Senra?

  had this resolute self-belief in his abilities. He didn't know how he was going to accomplish the ambitions he had, but he knew he could do it. And one thing I think is really important, not only to have self-belief, self-belief is obviously really important, but he also had support. And his wife, specifically, he had someone that believed in him. It doesn't matter if it's a spouse, it could be a family member, a friend, an older, an older person, it doesn't matter. But I do think this is really important and kind of gives us more like fuel to keep going. So it says, "Nothing in my life has given me more cause for pride and satisfaction than the way my wife had faith in me from the very first, from the very first through all

• 32:23David Senra?

  the years, when I was a grease-stained, roundhouse mechanic." So he's talking about, it's like, "Even when I knew I could be better than my current situation, and I had that belief, other people around me might have doubted it, but she never did." So he describes this continuing rise through the locomotive industry, and he says, "Everything in those shops was to be my charge." So he keeps getting promotions, right? "I did not worry for a second. It was a bigger job, but thanks to an abundance of self-confidence, I knew I could run it." Now, what's very fascinating is almost at the peak of his powers in this industry now, he's been working in for, what, two decades? He has, the title of the chapter is "A Chance Meeting in Chicago."

• 33:06David Senra?

  And he doesn't know it yet. He wasn't expecting it, but this is where another passion is gonna grab him, okay? It says, "I went to Chicago to see the automobile show." That is where it happened. "I saw this locomobile touring car." That's the name of the car. Now, here's the problem.

• 33:24David Senra?

  $5,000 cash, he wants to buy the car, right? "I had $700," to his name. That's all he has to his name. "I must confess that I never stopped to ask myself if I should, if I could afford to go and hawk to buy that car. All I asked myself was, where could I raise the money?" So, this is a story that I've referenced. It's in several other books, because almost everybody in the automotive industry also admires Walter Chrysler. And what was fascinating, they talked about, one of the best memories of him is that the fact that he raised the money to buy a car. And it was, you know, like the luxury car of the day. It's $5,000, right? And he would take it apart. I think it's several months. I think it takes three months of him taking it apart, putting it back together, taking it apart, putting it back together,

• 34:07David Senra?

  to make sure he understood how it worked before he would even drive it. That's a very unusual decision, right? But I need to talk to you about how he raises the money, because I think this is interesting. Let me read it to you, and then let me tell you my interpretation of it. He's got an acquaintance that has a lot of money. He's a banker, and so he goes to him for a loan. And the guy's name is Van, and Van's like, "Listen, what are you doing? This is so stupid. You have $700. Why are you doing this?" And he says, "Van, you know a lot about the transportation business. You do business with the railroads here in Chicago every day. Well, the automobile is the transportation business too. The railroads have made this a richer country, haven't they?" "Sure," was the response.

• 34:50David Senra?

  "Well, then, just ask yourself what this country will be like when every individual has his own private car and is able to travel anywhere." And so his response is, "Walt, be sensible. You get $350 a month, that's a salary, and you want to spend $5,000 on an automobile." So, I want to pause there. What I realized in reading this section was, now in hindsight, we realized Walt was being sensible. He just understood before most other people.

• 35:19David Senra?

  So he continues, "That car had a fascination for me that seemed to be, to others, the equivalent of madness." So he winds up getting, Van says, "Okay, listen, I'll give you the money. You have to get a cosigner." So he gets a cosigner, gets the money, gets the car, okay? This section, though, is really signs that you have found a passion. Remember, he's got a full-time job still in the railroad industry. So it says, "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 catalogs, I studied sketches, and still made sketches of my own. There was no single function that I did not study over and over. I proved to myself that I knew and understood it."

• 36:04David Senra?

  So, once he proved to himself he understood it, he finally takes it for a drive. This is his reaction after driving it. "I discovered I was so tired that I trembled. There was not a dry stitch of clothing on me. That sweat came from nervousness and excitement." So, up until this part, he is working in the, for the railroads, right? Making sure that the trains are running, engineering them, improving them. Now, he does something really smart. He goes from working from, for the railroads, to working for the manufacturer of the trains. And he discovers there's a lot more money and pleasure in manufacturing, okay? This is the job he's gonna have.

• 36:43David Senra?

  He eventually gets promoted to $12,000 a year, when he's recruited by Charles Nash to take over and run Buick, the manufacturing of Buick. But we're not there yet. So now, he's gotta go from being an executive to back into overalls, but he's happy about it. He says, "Downhearted, not me. I had all the confidence in the world. The next morning, I put on my overalls and plunged into my work." Now, this is such a great feeling to have.

• 37:13David Senra?

  What was more important was the change in me. The fun I had experienced in making things as a boy was magnified a hundredfold when I began making things as a man. There is, in manufacturing, a creative joy that only poets are supposed to know. Someday, I'd like to show a poet how it feels to design and build a railroad locomotive. So he winds up turning around this locomotive manufacturer. His reputation gets spread around, and that's where he starts to get recruited. This is the part of his life story where he gets recruited to run production for Buick. Now, keep in mind, I didn't bury the lead.

• 37:55David Senra?

  He's going to start at $6,000 a year, and when he leaves, he's the highest-paid person in the industry at $600,000 a year. So he meets with Nash. Nash says, "Hey, just think it over. Go to the Buick factory and tell me what you see. Is there room for improvement? Is this a job that you would actually want to do?" Instead, "What I saw astonished me. Of course, I was a machinist, and I was looking at workmen trained to handle wood. The bodies were being made of wood in a big carpenter shop. With wood, they were admirably skillful, but for most of them had been carriage builders. But whenever they were handling metal, it seemed to me there was an opportunity for big improvement. I saw a hundred such opportunities, so that I became excitedly eager, saying to myself,

• 38:40David Senra?

  'What a job I could do here if I were the boss.'" So the next day, he goes meets with Charlie Nash, who is running Buick at the time. He says, "Mr. Nash, I'd like to come here. I think I could be a useful man in this plant. I'm anxious to get into this business and with this company." "Well, you formed your opinion very quickly." Now, the response from Chrysler. "I saw enough to be able to make up my mind." Finally, he said, "What salary do you want, Mr. Chrysler?" "I just had a raise, Mr. Nash. They raised me from $8,000 to $12,000 a year." I could see immediately that Charlie Nash was getting ready to focus his attention on something else. His interest in me was gone.

• 39:23David Senra?

  He just seemed to collapse the way a tire does when its air is let out. "In this business, we don't pay such high salaries," he said. "There was a reason for that. $12,000 really was a big figure in Flint in 1911. He did not know me. I was an outsider, but I was not prepared to let this chance get away from me." This is not the first time in his life that he'll accept less money for a better opportunity, nor it's the last time he does the same thing. "Mr. Nash, what will you pay?" He thought a while and pursed his lips. He scratched his head. "Mr. Chrysler, we cannot afford to pay over $6,000. I accept it, Mr. Nash." He looked bewildered. "Before I had been with him three months, we were the best and the warmest kind of friends.

• 40:06David Senra?

  We became friends, in fact, for life. Charlie is a grand man." So now, this is Walt reflecting on how difficult, even though he's excited to do this, it was still like a bittersweet decision. And it's probably a good indication that you're probably doing something like you have a mixture of fear and excitement. There's a great quote by Marc Andreessen, it says why he loves working in startups so much, that in startups, you only experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I think this is a little bit of what Chrysler is experiencing, because he's, again, he's going from a mature, developed industry that's making a ton of money into a new frontier, one that he's not, you know, doesn't know how it's going to turn out.

• 40:47David Senra?

  So he says, "When I was not excited by my prospects, I was sad. After all, until then, I had devoted my entire life to locomotives. I love them. Whenever I realized that the decision to go with the Buick company would part me, forever probably, from association with railroad engines and railroad men as my companions, I was afflicted by regrets. Aside from these feelings, I had to stop and think that I was taking my wife and children away from the comfort and dignity of the best situation I had ever achieved into a young and somewhat raw industry." And as we've seen over and over again, as we go through this series, it was definitely a raw industry at the beginning, like every industry is, that they're crazy times, they're fascinating times to read about. But the chance, but the new chance was exciting.

• 41:32David Senra?

  Exciting. Oh, this is also interesting. He's gonna talk about other people I've just read books on. Certainly, my entrance into the field of automobile manufacturing was happily timed. In that year, Charles Keetering put the first self-starter on a Cadillac and shipped it to Henry Leland. So of course, I've done podcasts on both those people. If you haven't gone back, make sure you go listen to that. But I want to bring up something too, because in that book I did a few books ago called Master of Precision, talks about Henry Leland loved, he was the grandfather of the automobile industry. He's a generation older than almost every other entrepreneur at this time.

• 42:11David Senra?

  And so he had an entire career as a machinist before the automobile industry even existed, right? And so he would spend a lot of his time teaching and he had a great respect for other machinists. So Henry Leland was machinist. He trained Horace Dodge, another machinist. Funny enough, Chrysler is eventually gonna buy Dodge after the Dodge Brothers die, right? And he says it was the greatest thing he ever did in his entire career. That's very interesting. So I'll get to that part in a little bit. But Henry Leland had great respect for Chrysler because he says he would be able to explain things to him. And because he had a similar background and a love of understanding and a skill to handling machines, he got it a lot quicker than everybody else. Okay?

• 42:55David Senra?

  So he's referencing two people there. Right after entering the Buick plants as a work manager, I asked for the piecework schedule. Okay, so this is vastly different. So now he's gonna compare in contrast, how Buick was making their cars to how he was manufacturing trains, right? Right after entering the Buick plants as a work manager, remember, he's running this whole thing. "I asked for the piecework schedule. The clerk I asked looked at me blankly." "The piecework schedule. These men out in the plant are being paid on a piecework basis. Where's the schedule?" "There was no such record in the office that could be found." So then he says, back when he was working for American Locomotive, "We had to know to a penny what it was costing us to drill a hole and what it costs to make an obscure little casing. All of our locomotive work had been scheduled.

• 43:40David Senra?

  We had to know precisely how many days it would take to cast a cylinder when the boiler makers, the tank makers, the molders, the machinists, and other workmen, group by group, would be ready to pass along what they had made. In that way, thanks to a painstaking study of every detail of all of our operations, we could promise to complete a locomotive on a certain day and keep our promise." So essentially, what he learned in manufacturing locomotives, he then starts to apply to this new industry. And that is why he becomes the highest-paid person in the industry, because he's the most skilled. He reduces their costs. I think, actually, not only does he reduce their costs, look about how fast he gets them to manufacture the cars. They go, this is the result of this continuous improvement, which I'm obviously summarizing.

• 44:24David Senra?

  The book goes on in great detail on this, right? "The result of continuous improvement. They go from making a car in four days to making one in 15 minutes." Nowadays, when you go into an automobile factory, you see a lot of parts almost effortlessly put together and so smoothly that in about 15 minutes, what was once a naked frame, when you began to watch, has become an automobile full of gas and oil being driven off under its own power. Compare that with the four days that it used to take. "Every new thing was an invention. As soon as one problem was revealed and straightened out, 20 other problems had arisen." Now, remember, he took a large pay cut. He went from making $12,000 a year down to $6,000.

• 45:09David Senra?

  He puts up with that because he thought the opportunity was good, right? But there's two things that are happening in this section. One, Walt knows his value, and he's determined to get paid for it, which he does. And two, things can improve a lot faster than you think. "I had served for three years as the works manager at Buick. One day, I walked into Nash's office and rested my knuckles on his table. Charlie, I want $25,000 a year." Walter! It was pretty nearly a scream, the way he uttered my name. Now Charlie, we've gotten along fine. We're making good. Here in Buick, we've got, we got the one company that has been making money. Remember, there's only two profitable, besides Ford, under the GM brand. I don't even know why I brought up Ford. Ford's profitable, but it's not under GM.

• 45:54David Senra?

  GM only has two profitable divisions, Buick and Cadillac. Okay? So Nash tries to interrupt him. He says, "Just a minute until I've finished. I've waited a long time before saying this. When I came here, I was getting $12,000. I took this job for $6,000 and you haven't given me a raise. I want $25,000 a year or I'm going to leave." And so he winds up, Nash says, "You're gonna get your $25,000." Okay, so that's a smart move, right? But predictable, they're gonna, of course, he's really talented. Let's give him the $25,000. That's not why I'm telling you this. Because Walt's next sentence was really surprising. "Yes? Oh, well, thank you. And by the way, next year, I want $50,000." I was 40 years old.

• 46:36David Senra?

  When I got home, I really started to enjoy that raise. I told my wife. And then this is where, you know, he talks over and over again in the book. You know, years of sacrifice and support that his wife gave him. In fact, there's, I don't, there's not a lot of detail around this, but his wife passes away at 58 years old and shortly after he has a stroke. He just couldn't, some people believe he couldn't bear to be without her. So he says, and then this is her response. "I knew you would do it." And then this is his response. "This is why it's so important to really have people around you that believe in you." Those words contained everything I wanted to hear. Okay, so at this point, Billy Durant is gonna come into the story. He takes back over GM.

• 47:18David Senra?

  Nash is out, and so GM's the man, or Billy Durant's the man at GM, rather. And he says, flat out, even though they didn't get along, they have different personalities. Billy Durant, straight up genius. He says, "I cannot hope to find words to express the charm of a man. He had the most winning personality of anyone I've ever known. He could coax a bird right out of a tree." And this is when, remember, he went from $6,000 to $25,000 real fast and the $50,000. Now the things are gonna go bananas under Durant. And then the note I left myself on this page was, wow, that was fast. Durant seated, he was about to leave, so let me give you some background, actually. Nash leaves, you know, was one of Chrysler's best friends. They're gonna organize their own company, making their own cars, but it's not in Michigan. I think it's in Wisconsin.

• 48:03David Senra?

  And so Chrysler's thinking about quitting Buick and going to work for them, but he's hesitant because he doesn't want to move his family. He's made the move, you know, multiple times to chase, to chase opportunities, and now they're finally settled down. So he says, he's telling Durant, you know, "I'm out of here." Durant seated himself on the opposite side of the table. "I was going to ask him for a raise." He didn't even get a chance to ask him. This is Billy Durant. How crazy is this sentence? "I'll pay you $500,000 a year to stay on here as president of Buick." So now he's gonna give him 500 grand, 10x his salary, but now he's gonna, now he's like, "You're running the whole show. You're not just rolling, running production." I have to say, this is Chrysler's response. "He just sprang it on me that way. He did not bat an eye.

• 48:47David Senra?

  I couldn't think for a few seconds." And so he didn't say anything, and so this is Durant, just keeps talking. "Now Walter, you just put aside for the time being all your plans and getting into business for yourself. I don't blame you for that ambition, but I ask you to give me three years." And so Walter also, he recovers, but you also see, this guy's, you know, he's very confident, as he said over, himself, over and over again. And so now he's like, "Okay, you're gonna give me this money, but you're also gonna make sure that I have one boss and you're not, you're gonna let me run this thing the way I want to run it." Remember, he wants control. "I can accept only if I'm gonna have full authority. I don't want interference. I don't want any other boss but you. If you feel any, if you feel that anything is going wrong, if you don't like some action of mine, you come to me.

• 49:32David Senra?

  Don't go to anyone else and don't try to split up my authority. Just have one channel between Flint and Detroit, from me to you. Full authority is what I want." He was then beaming at me. "It's a deal," he said. So moving ahead, even though he admired Billy, he had a hard time working with him. And this exchange they're having in Durant's office, it's part of the reason why. "Billy, for the love of God, please now, just say what your policies are for General Motors." So he's saying, "I'll enact your policies, but I have to know what they are." Billy laughed at me. "Walt, I believe in changing the policies just as often as my office door opens and closes." I wagged my head and said, "You and I could never get along."

• 50:16David Senra?

  That's the kind of fellow he was, though. We'd fight, and then he'd want to raise my salary. "The automobile industry owes more to Durant than it has yet acknowledged." It's also why I did a three-part series on him. "In some ways, he has been its greatest man." Before he leaves GM, though, he recruits Ket. And this section's about recruiting Ket and knowing what motivates a person. Again, he talked about how Hickey, old man Hickey knew human beings. We're seeing that Walt's a quick study. He's figuring it out, too. "I was eager to get Ket to leave the management of Delco to someone else and come up to Detroit." Remember, everybody thinks Ket's a genius. And after reading his biography, I certainly do, too. "Most of my associates said I would never be able to induce Ket to leave Dayton,

• 51:00David Senra?

  to leave his pet business, his friends, his home, his farm, and move to Detroit. I knew you could never tempt him with much money." Remember that section when his partner tells him, "Hey, we sold Delco to GM for $9 million." Ket's working on something, lifts his head up, says, "Oh, that's a lot of money," goes right back to work. So what Walter's picking up on here is he's very steeled in realizing, he's like, "You know, GM has a lot of money this time, but he's not motivated by money. He already has as much money as he needs, so I need to figure out what's really motivating him." And he figures it out. "I knew you could never tempt him with much money. Charlie really does not care a hang about money. But I sold him with an offer for an exciting job. 'You're the man to steer the whole engineering intelligence

• 51:44David Senra?

  of General Motors,' I said. What we were offering him was a chance to solve mechanical and scientific problems endlessly, and I could see his eyes glitter with desire." He took the job and thereafter General Motors began to get the full use of the most important thing acquired with Delco. In Ket, the company had a bargain. So essentially he's saying the most important thing was not Delco. It was the mind, the genius of Ket that we wanted. And that was worth a lot more than $9 million. So he leaves, Walt's gonna leave GM right around this time. He goes into some detail about what he felt the problems were. I covered this in the podcast, so I'm not gonna rehash too much. But he's saying, hey, listen, Buick was making about half the money of the company, but

• 52:28David Senra?

  the corporation was spending it much faster than we could earn. So I quit, this time for keeps. Billy didn't want to accept it, so Alfred Sloan, he sent Alfred Sloan to talk him out of it. He says, Alfred Sloan and one other came to see me. This is still, so Alfred's not president of GM yet. He's running, he became the president of the subsidiary company, which included Delco. Okay. So he says, they tried to talk me into staying. Walt's response, no, I'm washed up. I just can't stand the way this thing is being run. All I'm anxious now is about to sell my stock. He winds up selling his stock for $10 million to DuPont, Alfred, to DuPont and to Durant. And he says, I was going to retire. I was 45.

• 53:13David Senra?

  I had no plans of any kind. I had given myself completely to my job for years. So he stays retired for about a half a year and, you know, he's got more money than he can ever spend. And he winds up taking an opportunity. He wasn't sure. So the guy that winds up lending him the money to buy that car, you know, was maybe 10, 15 years in the past at this point in the story, he still has association with Walt. And he, him and a bunch of other bankers got $50 million tied up in another automobile company that's not doing well. Okay. So this is a series of events that happens to happen before Walt could start Chrysler. And he didn't want to come out of retirement, so he makes them an offer he didn't think

• 53:58David Senra?

  they'd accept. He's like, "Listen, I will come." They're worried about losing all this money. He's like, "I will come turn this company around." He winds up not being able to turn it around. It was too far gone. But he says, "I'll undertake the job for two years at a million dollars a year." And they accept. He had such a great reputation of what he was able to accomplish at Buick, that they said, "Okay, it's worth. Let's take the risk of spending $2 million to see if this guy can get us back our $50 million." So those bankers also have money tied up in this other company. Let me stop here for a second. The company he was hired for the million dollars a year for two years is called Willis Overland. And what he realizes is like, "Yeah, they have costs out of control, that people that are running the company don't know what they're doing." And he could fix those things, but he's like, "Your product sucks, and I can't fix that." So they also

• 54:41David Senra?

  had money in this other company called Maxwell. And that is the precursor. They went to buying it, or taking it over out of receivership. And this is really Chrysler. This is the company that becomes Chrysler. And so, we finally got to the point in the story where we have the beginning of his ideas. Like, "Hey, I want to make my own car." And what he realized, because he realized, just to say at Willis Overland, that if you don't have a great product, if you don't have a great car, you don't have a great car company. All right? So he says, "What was my future going to be? I had determined that I was going to make, somewhere, somehow, a kind of automobile that I was beginning to feel pretty strongly was unlikely to be made in the Willis plants. In the meantime, my banker

• 55:24David Senra?

  friends had asked me to help them in another troublesome situation. This time, it was the Maxwell Motors Company that was in distress." And it's pretty crazy when you think about these numbers. We're talking, we're in the, what, early 1920s? You know, the bankers had put $50 million into one company, didn't go well. They put another $26 million, as we're about to see, in Maxwell. So it says, "Bankers had continued to extend credit to the Maxwell Motor Company until the total of its debt was $26 million."

• 55:52David Senra?

  This was during a boom in the early 1920s. It says, "Then what had appeared to be a flourishing boom after the end of World War I, ended in a depression, the post-war collapse." And so the bankers come to him, they're like, "You gotta help us out with this situation." And he starts taking meetings and he's like, "Hell, no, I'm not doing this." But this is a really interesting paragraph, especially the last sentence. He says, "There was such an entanglement of inter-company disputes that I began to believe it would be a mistake to associate myself for long with Maxwell. Once I remember leaving a meeting and saying, 'I would not touch it with a 10-foot pole,' this is the most important sentence of this section, 'what I was saying I would not touch was later on revealed to be the greatest opportunity of my whole life.'" So he agrees to take it over.

• 56:37David Senra?

  He does a lot of smart things here, including having the gumption to ask for another 15 million from them. After they dumped 26 million, he explained why. He's like, "Listen, I'm gonna settle the rest of the debt for 5 million. I'm gonna liquidate their inventory and we're gonna build a great car." And that's exactly what he winds up doing. But in the middle of this, he's talking about all the things. Remember, we're towards the end of the book, right? This is a very short book. It's like 130 pages. And you wouldn't think that with all the highlights I have from it and how long I've been talking to you about it. But in the middle of all this, he's going back and forth and reflecting on all the different things he learned in his career and how he applied it to the opportunities later in life. You know, he's only got another, what, 13, 14 years of life left at this point.

• 57:20David Senra?

  But this is advice that he gave to young people on how to find opportunity. So I'm gonna take a small tangent off of the beginning of Chrysler and read this whole section to you because I think it's extremely, extremely important, okay? So he says, "I find myself advising the sons of some old friends. Lately, such a boy wanted me to help him get a job with an airplane company." This is now Walt speaking. You've come to me for advice? Yes, sir. Alright, son. You're gonna get some. Aviation, as you say, is a developing industry. But from what I can hear, there are scores of youngsters after every job it has to offer. So this is gonna echo, if you listen to the podcast I did last week on Felix Dennis.

• 58:04David Senra?

  He says the same exact thing. That so many people want to get involved in glamorous industries. And he's like, one of the richest self-made people I know. Lives in an unglamorous job. He gets rid of human waste. And he makes like 20 to 30 million dollars a year and he owns the entire company. So he says, "Why don't you get yourself in a field that gives you a chance to discover all kinds of chances in or out of aviation?" Because he's like, "Listen, you're going after, yeah, you like that job, but so does everybody else. How are you gonna figure your way in? That doesn't make sense." So he says, "Why don't you get yourself in a field that gives you a chance to discover all kinds of chances in or outside of aviation? You know this country is filled with developing industries and there are a lot of chances.

• 58:47David Senra?

  You simply want to make yourself smart enough to recognize them before the other fellow does. If I were you, I'd qualify myself for accountancy. I'd become an accountant." Young accountant, not to stay an accountant. That's not what he's saying. This is really smart what he says. "Young accountants are sent around by their firms to audit the books of companies everywhere. They have a skill that makes them mightily valuable in business. They're indispensable." They often get, this is the most important part. "They often get chances to go to work for the companies whose books they have audited. And not only that, they have access to information no one else does. You can see where the greatest opportunities are usually before other people do." And then his final bit of wisdom to this young person.

• 59:29David Senra?

  "If you miss one chance, that is no reason to brood. There will be another if you keep alert and qualify yourself for opportunities." That last four words is a good description of the path that Walt took. He qualified himself for opportunities. He did not know, there was no such thing as, when he started wanting to learn to be a master mechanic and machinist, there was no such thing as the automobile industry. That's where he made all his wealth. But he, all he knew is like, I have a passion. I'm going to get as good as I can. I'm going to qualify myself as much as I can for the opportunities that are so far in the future, I don't even know what they are yet. That's brilliant. So when he reorganizes Maxwell, it's out of receivership. This is the benefits of starting fresh.

• 1:00:14David Senra?

  And we start to see Walt is fired up. He is fired up. What flexibility we had exclamation point. That is by contrast with any other car that rolled upon the highway back in 1923. What he means is like that we're not trying to improve a car that we've had for five or eight or 10 years. We're starting with a, we're a fresh piece of paper. Like what should a car be based on what we know now? The Chrysler car? Nobody had heard about a Chrysler car, but we had dreamed about it until, as if we had been its lover, it was work to think of anything else. He's fired up. Let's go. I was in this enterprise with all of my heart and soul. So they, they work on it for a long time. They finally have some prototypes, right?

• 1:00:58David Senra?

  And they're going to like, okay, it's time to unveil. We're going to unveil the prototypes. We haven't manufactured any cars yet, but we're going to get people excited. We're going to get our first customers because we're going to show off our prototype at the Giant Auto Show, which is in New York City, right? This is in 1924. They don't get to do that, right? But this is a great, great idea to solve the problem. So it says, "The rules of the show forbade allotment of space to models of a car which had not been produced and sold." Our Chrysler models were barred from the show. We had counted heavily upon creating a sensation with our new car. They also have to raise some money, so they need people to get excited about it, right? "We could not sell Chrysler cars unless we had made them, but we could not hope to proceed

• 1:01:41David Senra?

  with the making until our feeble credit was made strong with money from the bankers." He's got like a chicken egg problem there, right? "It seemed to us that we were pretty close to ruin before we had made a start. Of course, none of my associates knew the meaning of the word quit." So like, okay, you won't listen to the show. Is there a way to attack this from a different vector? Grand Central Palace, where the New York Automobile Show is held, is where the public pays admission to see the year's new cars. That's where they're borrowed from, right? But he says, "But the men of the automobile industry always swarm in some nearby hotel." That year, their rendezvous point was the Hotel Commodore. So he sends one of his coworkers, Joe, over there.

• 1:02:26David Senra?

  And he's like, "Go get the lobby." When he came back, he flooded a sheet of hotel stationery with some writing on it. "Boss, we own the lobby." It's like, "Okay, you won't let me on the show, that's fine. I'm gonna put my cars in the lobby of the hotel. That way, every single person in the industry is gonna see this." He says, "Although we were not in the show, we stole it. From morning until late at night, a crowd was densely packed around us. Even before the end of that first eventful day, we knew that our models were attracting more attention than was being excited by anything on display in the Grand Central Palace." So he's successful, they get a lot of excitement. Then they have a bunch of investors that wanna... Now they're like, "Oh, wow, everybody's paying attention to this car. Okay, I'll loan you money."

• 1:03:11David Senra?

  They wind up getting the deal done really rapidly. And fast forwarding, and this is just another reminder that a lot can happen in a year. "There was no question about space for the Chrysler's when the allotments were made for the automobile show of 1925. In one year, we had sold 32,000 of them. The results of that year, which we began by creating a debt of $5 million, was a net profit of $4.1 million. It was a good time to straighten out our corporation's structure. And so in 1925, the Maxwell Motor Corporation became the Chrysler Corporation." So for a few years, they're doing really, really, really well. And they realize, "Hey, we can accelerate how fast we grow if we can buy Dodge." So it says, "The Dodge brothers had passed away,

• 1:03:55David Senra?

  but they had left a splendid name in the industry. They had been manufacturers for whom I had great respect." It says, "In 1928, the consensus was Chrysler bought a lemon." So he winds up purchasing Dodge, right? This is an important paragraph because he's getting a lot of flak, right? They paid like 160 million, something like that for it. And people were laughing at him, like, "Look at this idiot, what is he doing?" So it says, "You guys bought a lemon. That was the opinion of some minds that contained little understanding of industry, and especially of the automobile industry. Buying the Dodge was one of the soundest acts of my life." And so now he's reflecting, let's see, we're nine years into the future when he's writing these words, right?

• 1:04:39David Senra?

  So he says, "Yesterday," this is May 1937, "we built 6,294 cars. The day before, we built 6,500," and so it goes, "in what some people still suppose is a depression. Yet had we lacked Dodge, there was no telling what our situation would be. The Chrysler Corporation of 1937 has no debt. Getting rid of burdensome interest charges was just one phase of the course we pursued to come through the Depression so as to emerge stronger than when it began." So now I want to tell you about a little bit about the Chrysler Building. Anybody that's been to New York knows what this building looks like, and more importantly,

• 1:05:22David Senra?

  why he wanted to build it, and a lesson that he has for his son, which I think is very valuable. "I came to the conclusion that what my boys ought to have was something to be responsible for. They had grown up in New York and probably would want to live there. They wanted to work, and so the idea of putting up a building was born. Something that I had seen in Paris recurred to me. I said to the architect, 'Make this building higher than the Eiffel Tower.'" That was the beginning of the 77-story Chrysler Building.

• 1:05:53David Senra?

  So it goes in a little detail about how much fun it was to work with the architects and build a building, but then this is the important part now, fast forwarding, and his son's taking control. So he says, "But such matters now are problems for my son, Walter. He is running the building. He is the president and he knows his job. When he was ready to go to work, I said, 'You better learn something about the building. It's yours, not mine. Where do you think I ought to begin, Dad?'" And now you're gonna see the advice he gives his son is exactly the advice that he followed through his own career. And I think it's something he did and something he's telling his son, it might be beneficial to you and I. "Get down in the basement and learn what the other fellows got to do. Go and scrub a few floors, clean some offices.

• 1:06:35David Senra?

  That way you can begin to see through the glasses of other people as well as your own." He did it too, and then proceeded through various jobs until he was well able to run the building. So it appears to me that he was still writing this book when he unexpectedly experienced a stroke. He became an invalid. He survived for like another 18 months, but he was never the same, and he passed away. There is a postscript at the back of this book by the person that was helping him put together this book, and this is where I'll close. "Every time we had a conversation, it seems to me, he shed tears. Yet always what started him was thinking of the past, when he was a poor young man.

• 1:07:16David Senra?

  Sometimes at first, I mistakenly supposed that he was feeling sorry for himself. Finally, I came to realize what it was that so deeply moved him when he contemplated his inauspicious start, including those years of riding freight trains from town to town when he was hunting a chance to work and gain more experience. It was gratitude, of course. Gratitude to everything American that made possible his great success. He told his story in the hope it might inspire other lonely boys roving in the land to keep on trying." That is 130 books done, 1,000 to go.

• 1:08:01David Senra?

  If you want the full story, if you buy the book using the link that's in the show notes, you'll be supporting the podcast at the same time, and I'll talk to you again soon.