Leading By Design: The Ikea Story

By Ingvar Kamprad & Bertil Torekull

Below are my notes and key hi-lighted passages from Leading By Design: The Ikea Story by Ingvar Kamprad & Bertil Torekull. (Italics = quotes from the book. Bold = my personal notes)

• “In other respects, I suppose I was slightly peculiar in that I started tremendously early doing business deals. My aunt helped me buy the first hundred boxes of matches from a store in Stockholm. I sold the boxes are two or three ore each, sometimes even five ore, so I was able to earn an ore or two in between. Talk about profit margins, but I still remember the lovely feeling. I couldn’t have been more than five years old at the time.”

• The business tycoon and founder of Ikea began selling matches at five years old. He didn’t become a success by way of matches, but he demonstrates how learning how to earn a profit at a young age helped him as a business owner later in life.

• “From that time, selling things became something of an obsession. It is not easy to know what might drive a boy more than the desire to earn money, the surprise that you could buy anything so cheaply and sell it for a little more.”

• “At that moment, the basis of the modern IKEA concept was created, and in principle it still appliesL first and foremost, use a catalog to tempt people to come to an exhibition, which today is our store. Second, we provided a large building in which, catalog in hand, customers could walk around and see simple interiors for themselves, touch the furniture they wanted to buy, and then write out an order, which would be put into effect by mail via the factories.”

• “Few well-known businessmen communicate so directly, so intimately with their employees.”

• On Kamprad: “The family became his firm, so its strange that in the future he always regarded the firm as his family. With this philosophy, he also created the outstanding metaphor for his leadership, the one that includes mutual helpfulness, loyalty, solidarity, simplicity in a way of life, and principles such as “clean up after yourself” and “never take more than you can eat”. The first employees were drawn into this intimacy as a matter of course.”

• Kamprad was not just a great entrepreneur - he was a master at developing the company family culture.

• “When I talk about the IKEA family, it is life in the country - the time when Ikea had not yet become IKEA - that guides me. My ideas on fellowship were born there, on our dependence on each other, and we lived our own message there in a survivable microword.”

• “Today the spirit of the IKEA family still lives in the business concept taught in the training program called the IKEA Way. It is practiced, according to the promise participants make at the end of the seminar, in everyday life as well; wherever Ikeans go in the world, they will be looked after.”

• On hard days - “There were strange nighttime drives, as though transporting illegal spirits in the days of Prohibition, only it was sofas being transported. The atmosphere became increasingly rancorous, and Ingvar Kamprad had “many tearful nights” as he lay awake wondering how he could solve the problem.”

• The cost of pursuing dreams will cost “many tearful nights.” It’s much easier to just play it safe, but it’s much less fulfilling too.

• “In IKEA’s business philosophy, the whole matter should be inscribed as a golden rule: regard every problem as a possibility. New Problems created a dizzying chance.”

• “Without Poland, IKEA could not have gone further in Europe with such great sureness of touch. It went well for other reasons too:

  “Because young people were given responsibility, because employees were permitted to use both imagination and common sense, because the company maintained its humble attitude: If we don’t improve soon else will, so we must make the effort.”

• “The story of IKEA is a businessman’s manual. It teaches that few events in the inception and growth of a company can be brushed aside as unimportant. Both fiascos and successes build an entrepreneur.”

• BOTH FIASCOS and SUCCESSES build an entrepreneur. Failures and successes are both needed for growth.

• “Ikea’s route to progress resembles most of all a process in which every new stage seems to have happened naturally, though perhaps not logically.”

• Kamprad on Leadership: “What is fundamental in leadership? he asked. I said love, and he turned quite quiet, but that was just what I meant."

  “You could translate it into “friendliness costs nothing. In the next step, as a businessman, you say that without winning people’s sympathy you can’t sell anything to them either.”

• Kamprad on taking IKEA on stock exchange: “Ingvar Kamprad resisted such suggestions. He thought the board was keeping only one eye on the core issue. This was partly because IKEA had in principle always been self-financed, and partly because companies in his eyes, were not just a matter of capital. They were also people, ideas, culture, and history.”

• People, Ideas, Culture, and History

• “You don’t just plant culture, the soul, and the family spirit in any old potato patch.”

• Great organizations fight for culture and preservation of their people and history. It’s not just dollars and cents.

• On store expansion process - a team would arrive and help the store open and move on. “The commando gang set the operation going, and after four to six months’ intensive work, day and night, all was ready. The system was charged with enthusiasm and entrepreneurship, but it was misused. Too often the team disappeared to the next scene of action immediately after opening, leaving the manager of the store on his own. The abandoned store often fell into malaise.”

• Ikea 9 commandments in the IKEA Way

  1.) The product range is our identity

  2.) The Ikea spirit is a strong and living reality

  3.) Profit gives us resources

  4.) Reaching good results with small means

  5.) Simplicity is a virtue

  6.) Doing it a different way

  7.) Concentration is important to our success

  8.) Taking responsibility is a privilege

  9.) Most things still remain to be done - a glorious future!

• “In IKEA a good cost-effective leader does not distinguish between weekdays and weekend. Time is “gained” by getting started on Sunday evening.”

• Time management is a hallmark quality of a successful leader. A great leader structures time to take care of tasks so that other time can be spent on visionary efforts. Time is managed well.

• “When he speaks of IKEA, the phrases TOGETHER, FAMILY, BELONG TO EACH OTHER, FELLOWSHIP, arise again and again. They are never missing. IKEA is first and foremost a family with an increasing number of relatives all over the world.

• Kamprad was not just able to create a product to sell. He created a powerful connected culture. He created an organization people wanted to be a part of.

• “Only those who are asleep make no mistakes, he repeats like an invocation. Problems make possibilities, he could have added, faithful to his preaching habits. The truth, nothing but the truth.”

• “Studies show that people who work for IKEA believe that they really are working for a better society and that they therefore like working for IKEA. They believe their daily lives are contributing to a better world.”

• Vision - Culture.