William Summers Anderson (March 29, 1919 – June 29, 2021) was a British businessman who served as President and Chairman of the National Cash Register Corp (NCR) from 1972 to 1984.
In 1937, Anderson and his recently widowed mother fled to Hong Kong where they made their new home and he took a job as an internal auditor at The Peninsula Hotel Group while studying accountancy in the evenings.
On Christmas Day 1941, exactly four years after he had escaped from the Japanese in China, he became a prisoner of war (POW) and lost his second home.
For the first two years, he was in a prison camp in Hong Kong before being moved to Nagoya, Japan as part of a group of 400, to work in a railway locomotive factory.
At that time NCR Hong Kong was a war-shattered, rag tag branch of about seven people scratching out a living in used business machines.
[3] When George Haynes was promoted to head office in Dayton Ohio, Anderson left Hong Kong to become Chairman of the Japanese company and vice president for the Far East region.
Anderson introduced a “vocational” approach to the Japanese sales organisation whereby a particular customer would have a single point of contact with NCR regardless of the type of product being sold.
NCR was the first company to force the UAW to agree to a two-tier wage system (GM management negotiated a similar contract some 30 years later).
Anderson briefly considered moving NCR headquarters away from Dayton, but came to the conclusion that it would be too costly and that an international organisation could be run from anywhere in the world.