Inspirational Quotes by Robert Anderson
“I’ve been in the kitchens of a lot of restaurants and drive-ins selling Multimixers around the country,” I told them, “and I have never seen anything to equal the potential of this place of yours. Why don’t you open a series of units like this? It would be a gold mine for you and for me, too, because every one would boost my Multimixer sales. What d’you say?” Silence.”
“I have often been asked to explain the methods I use in choosing executives, because much of the success of my organization has been a result of the kind of people I have picked for key positions. My answers aren’t very satisfying; they don’t sound much different than the rules that students of business administration find in their basic textbooks. It’s hard to come up with real answers because the weight of the judgment is not in the rule but in the application. As a result, I have sometimes been accused of being arbitrary.”
“People have marveled at the fact that I didn’t start McDonald’s until I was fifty-two years old, and then I became a success overnight. But I was just like a lot of show business personalities who work away quietly at their craft for years, and then, suddenly, they get the right break and make it big. I was an overnight success all right, but thirty years is a long, long night.”
“I took care not to be ostentatious (I detest snobs), but my style kind of dazzled my staff at the office. They were eager to follow my examples. I stressed the importance of making a good appearance, wearing a nicely pressed suit, well-polished shoes, hair combed, and nails cleaned. “Look sharp and act sharp,” I told them. “The first thing you have to sell is yourself. When you do that, it will be easy to sell paper cups.”
“Supplying buns to McDonald’s was the break of a lifetime for many of these men. Mary Ann Bakery, for example, was a small organization when it started dealing with us. Now it has a plant with a quarter-mile-long conveyor belt for cooling buns after they’re baked. The firm uses more than a million pounds of flour a month to make buns for us. Mary Ann also has a trucking company that services McDonald’s.”
“I had to twist Harold Freund’s arm repeatedly to get him to build a bakery just to service our California stores. Freund now has the largest, most automated bun plant in the world. It produces eight thousand buns an hour for McDonald’s. It also has a plant in St. Petersburg serving all of Florida, and another serving all of Hawaii. Fred”
“See that big white house with the wide front porch?” he asked. “That’s our home and we love it. We sit out on the porch in the evenings and watch the sunset and look down on our place here. It’s peaceful. We don’t need any more problems. We are in a position to enjoy life now, and that’s just what we intend to do.” His”
“Our stores were selling only nine items, and they were buying only thirty-five or forty items with which to make the nine. So although a McDonald’s restaurant’s purchasing power was no greater in total than that of any other restaurant in a given area, it was concentrated. A McDonald’s bought more buns, more catsup, more mustard, and so forth, and this gave it a terrific position in the marketplace for those items. We enhanced that position by figuring out ways a supplier could lower his costs, which meant, of course, that he could afford to sell to a McDonald’s for less. Bulk packaging was one way; another was making it possible for him to deliver more items per stop. A”
“It’ll be a lot of trouble,” Dick McDonald objected. “Who could we get to open them for us?” I sat there feeling a sense of certitude begin to envelope me. Then I leaned forward and said, “Well, what about me?”
“If anyone stood to gain by our success and suffer if we failed, it was our suppliers. They knew McDonald’s restaurants possessed the potential of becoming super customers, and they knew we played straight.”
“When I flew back to Chicago that fateful day in 1954, I had a freshly signed contract with the McDonald brothers in my briefcase. I was a battle-scarred veteran of the business wars, but I was still eager to go into action. I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns. But I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.”
“if you believe in something, you've got to be in it to the ends of your toes. Taking reasonable risks in part of the challenge. It;s the fun.”
“You must perfect every fundamental of your business if you expect it to perform well. We demonstrated this emphasis on details, and saw it pay off, in our approach to hamburger patties.”
“Children were to be seen but not heard in adult company in those days, but I never felt left out. For example, my father belonged to a singing group that often met in our house. My brother and I had to stay upstairs and amuse ourselves while my mother played the piano and the men sang. As soon as the music stopped below, Bob and I would drop whatever game we were playing and rush back to the sewing room, which was right above the kitchen. I would pull the warm-air grate out of the floor (that was before we had central heating, and floor registers were used to let heated air rise to the upper rooms). My mother would put a dish of whatever refreshments she was serving on a tray that my father had affixed to an old broom handle, then she would hoist it up to us. It was a delightful feeling of adventure, because my mother pretended to be sneaking the food away without letting the other adults know. I”
“One time a McDonald’s operator came to me with the idea he’d dreamed up to cut costs by producing a doughnut-shaped patty. His notion was to plug the hole with condiments, and cover it with a pickle so the customer wouldn’t notice the hole. I told him we wanted to feed our customers, not fleece them, but I couldn’t suppress a chuckle at the outrageous con artistry of the idea; a real Chicago fast one. We”
“I liked action. But I spent a lot of time thinking about things. I’d imagine all kinds of situations and how I would handle them. “What are you doing Raymond?” my mother would ask. “Nothing. Just thinking.” “Daydreaming you mean,” she’d say. “Danny Dreamer is at it again.” They called me Danny Dreamer a lot, even later when I was in high school and would come home all excited about some scheme I’d thought up. I never considered my dreams wasted energy; they were invariably linked to some form of action.”
“Though the gospel amnesty which grace proclaims makes no exceptions, for Divine grace has no limits, there are limits to the time within which the amnesty avails. And if sinners despise grace there is nothing for them but judgment, stern and inexorable.”
“Here is something to set both critics and Christians thinking. A decree of a Persian king was deemed to be divine, and any attempt to thwart it was usually met by prompt and drastic punishment; and yet the decree directing the rebuilding of the Temple, issued by King Cyrus in the zenith of his power, was thwarted for seventeen years by petty local governors. How was this? The explanation is that until the very last day of the seventy years of “the Desolations” had expired, God would not permit one stone to be laid upon another on Mount Moriah.”
― Robert Anderson ,
from The Coming Prince
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Sir Robert Anderson was born in Dublin, Ireland and was of Scottish descent. His father was an elder in the Irish Presbyterian Church and he was raised in a religious home. Anderson's conversion took place after listening to a sermon delivered by John Hall.
Sir Robert Anderson graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1862 and was called to the Irish Bar in 1863. He later became Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. When he retired in 1901, he was made Knight Commander of the the Order of the Bath. W. H. Smith, on the floor of the House of Commons, said Sir Robert "had discharged his duties with great ability and perfect faithfulness to the public."
Sir Robert Anderson was the chief inspector for Scotland Yard. He was greatly respected for his skill as an investigator. When Anderson wasn't writing on subjects related to crime, he wrote books on Christian prophecy. He helped establish the fact that 69 of Daniel's 70 weeks have now transpired, and that the tribulation will be the 70th week. Sir Robert Anderson's book, The Coming Prince, has become a foundational resource for all dispensationalists.