I was happy and relieved when the war finally came to an exhausted end, eager for life to return to normal in spite of the fact that the prewar state of things was less than a hazy memory, as I had been just four when Germany invaded Poland. I believe on some level I understood that things could never return to the way they had been before the war. The sense of unease I had always felt about my own country—which had its genesis in my early childhood listening to my parents talk about the war—never left me. From my childhood on I harbored a fear that there might be a fascist tendency in Sweden that was buried just below the politely neutral surface. And as a Jewish boy, I had seen just how barbaric that kind of fascism could be. It was little wonder my father had been so fearful for my mother. In the agonizing months after Germany’s surrender, one after another of my mother’s family was declared dead, slaughtered in concentration camps. I can recall hearing only of a single survivor—a cousin who had gone to France to work for Radio Free Europe.
Life went on in Sweden after the war, as it did in the rest of Europe. But I would never forget what I had seen and heard, nor did I ever shake the feeling that the cool and politic veneer of a civilized and humanistic Sweden was a flimsy camouflage at best. I had recognized what one could call the truth of my Swedish heritage from those early moments of my childhood. I understood that what was solid ground for me as a young person could change—that beneath the strata of security and permanence there would always be movement. Passive underground rumbling—the kind my parents sensed with Sweden’s accommodation of the Nazis—could in the future erupt without warning into a violent quake into fascism that could leave the national landscape and everything Sweden purported to be unrecognizable.
The nature of a solid place, of the ground of national identity, is tectonic. I think this is a difficult idea for many to accept—the inevitability of upheaval in one’s own back yard. It is an idea with which I imagine my ancestor Mans Andersson was much more comfortable. In those generations, war with Denmark came and went, over and over again. Catholicism, the Hanseatic League, and the Black Death dominated until they dwindled, and the Swedish Empire grew fat until the pendulum began to swing back, and it was starved to the bone. In the Sweden of Mans Andersson, the triumph of the stormaktstid and the tragedy of the Golden King’s death would have been celebrated and mourned with the resolute acceptance of people who were long accustomed to the historical cycles of gain and loss, people who did not always insert a sense of self into the concept of losing a thing or leaving a place.
Perhaps it is that ancient equanimity that is my strongest link to the earliest Gyllenhammars. Having absorbed and internalized my father’s fearfulness during wartime, I may have made my peace with the specter of change. In the decades that followed I developed a fine-tuned sensor for the shifting of plates beneath a solid surface, and a pragmatic attitude about upheaval and departure. It is accepted without saying that structural integrity is crucial to human well-being—and yet the laws of physics dictate that solid and firm structures degrade over time, and orderly systems such as corporations, democracies, and nations grow disorderly. So I learned at an early age that once I could no longer maintain my footing and stand upright in my workplace, or a partnership, or the organizations I helped run, or my nation itself, then I did not hesitate to leave. Whether it was a home, or a career, or even a country, I knew when the moment had arrived when things were beginning to shift and integrity had been lost. And when integrity was lost, it was time to move on to solid ground elsewhere, and I did so again and again without hesitation, or any compulsion to look back with regret.
CHAPTER THREE
Innovation
Innovation (n) mid-15c., “restoration, renewal,” from Late Latin innovationem (nominative innovatio), noun of action from past participle stem of innovare “to change; to renew” (see innovate). Meaning “a novel change, experimental variation, new thing introduced in an established arrangement”.
—Oxford English Dictionary
I am not a person who finds any value in looking at the past to ruminate over what should have been, or what might have been. Nonetheless, beginnings are important, as are all of the triumphs and travails that emanate from them. Aristotle famously said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and that is very true, but nonetheless, the sum of a life’s parts is a necessary calculation.
In reflecting on what has been formative my own life, I consider the consequential parts not to be things or titles, but people. When a company or an organization has been the most rewarding, it has always been due to the people that the company or organization brought into my sphere, people I had the privilege of getting to know. That is certainly true of my time at Volvo, and it is true of my time in Sweden itself.
I spent my first fifty-eight years living in Sweden full-time, much of it in Gothenburg. On graduating from the University of Lund in 1959, I married my college sweetheart Christina Engellau, who had also grown up in Gothenburg and was the daughter of Volvo chairman Gunnar Engellau. I got a job at the Amphion Insurance Company in Gothenburg and remained there for several years before my father asked me to join him at the Skandia Insurance Company in Stockholm. I ultimately succeeded him as CEO of the company.
My father’s request surprised me. He had never been of the belief that executives should promote the employment of their own family members—in fact he was very resistant to the idea. But the company chairman asked him directly about the prospect of bringing me on board, and he ultimately agreed and offered me a starting position as an assistant administrative manager. The job involved our family moving from Gothenburg to Stockholm, a prospect that Christina was enthusiastic about, since it would allow her to achieve a little distance from her family. I remember her father reacting to the news of my joining Skandia by saying, “I would never engage anyone at Volvo who is related to me.”
I was baffled, therefore, when just eighteen months later my father-in-law (by way of his then chairman of the board) approached me and asked to have a conversation about the possibility of my going to work at Volvo. I could not help but think that the job would be truly fascinating. What possible reason could I have for saying no? The only person who mattered to me with an objection was my wife. Christina loved living our independent life in Stockholm, and she was now facing the possibility that the man she had married was a de facto crown prince, positioned as her father’s successor, which meant moving back to Gothenburg. I knew it was not what Christina wanted, but she put on a brave face and agreed that I take the job at Volvo, and that we and our four children would leave Stockholm.
There were a few articles written at the time, making reference to my employment and family connections at Skandia and Volvo, and suggesting those connections as the reason for hiring me at Volvo, but as none were able to back up those insinuations with factual reports to demonstrate that my professional skills and competence were insufficient, that sort of chatter died away quickly. My new colleagues at Volvo also overcame their surprise, as I was considerably younger than the average top man at any company—and they easily adjusted to my new position. From the very first, I loved both the job and the company. I found it challenging and exciting in the best of ways. I was tough with management—and while I had no desire to do a symbolic house-clearing, I did replace those I felt inadequate for the job, and worked closely with those who had potential, trying to make them real partners in the company.
It could be said that I started my career at Volvo with a bang. More specifically, a car accident. One night, fairly soon after I joined the company, the heating system in the little house that Christina and I had just moved our family into would not turn on. I worked late into the night trying unsuccessfully to fix it and rose the next morning having gotten only two or three hours of sleep. I was scheduled to give a presentation