Book Description Condition: New. Seller Inventory Q Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory think Book Description Hardcover. Brand New!. Seller Inventory VIB Ingvar Kamprad ; Bertil Torekull. Publisher: Collins , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title Tells the story of the founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, tracing his humble roots, and offering insight on the visionary concepts, and cutting-edge managment strategies that turned a small, Swedish mail-order company into a worldwide commercial giant "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Even the food that I am eating now Swedish meatballs was purchased at the end of my most recent excursion to the Swedish furniture giant. All of these items were had at astoundingly low prices — so low, in fact, that one can find some of them being resold on eBay for double the cost.
How is that even possible? Many of the answers can be traced back to founder Ingvar Kamprad and his upbringing in the Swedish countryside. Now ninety-one years old, Kamprad remains vital to the company culture of thrift, democratic design, and rock-bottom prices. Fascinated by the intricacies of the supply chain, the founder constantly sought to cut waste and find new and cheaper ways of producing goods, transforming the furniture industry in the process.
Minimalist Swedish design, with its clean lines and lack of flair, also helped bring prices down. So focused is the chain on cost control that it pioneered a method to build furniture out of waste wood. The ubiquitous particle board is so cheap that it is literally not worth the expense of shipping the furniture from one home to the next, hence the enormous number of IKEA products thrown away annually.
If anything, Kamprad is capitalism personified. Here too the author has to pay tribute to IKEA's emergence at a time of prolonged economic growth — perhaps the happiest time in European history — the post war period down to the end s when a social democratic consensus saw improving living standards for the broad mass of the population across Europe.
IKEA's competitive advantage is not just in low cost production, but also in tax avoidance view spoiler [ intellectually I appreciate the brilliance of this, it is simply the rest of my body that is in revolt against it and so despite my fondness for birch veneer furniture, half litre bottles of Aquavit, and the overall concept, I maintain my boycott of the store hide spoiler ].
In common, I suppose with all of us, Kamprad and IKEA have some interesting blind spots that come out during the book. One is around women in senior management positions and the other around child labour. Kamprad has had no problem realising that if he wants to provide cheap, high quality goods that he needs to manage the company to achieve those goals, but the idea that if you want a particular outcome that you have to deliberately work towards it doesn't occur to him when it comes to his wish to have a woman running the company.
Equally Kamprad and IKEA are keen to engage with companies that use child labour, but are blind to the idea that child labour is a reasonable market response to a large international manufacturer's desire for cheaper and cheaper products, particularly since IKEA is geared to meeting demand amongst those whose needs, in Kamprad's view, are greatest - ie those with the least means.
Not that all IKEA products are made by children in the far east, while elderly Scandinavian wipe a tear from their eyes remembering how as children they clambered around the farm yard gathering eggs assuming some cosy equivalence between a family and an industrial mode of production, many goods are made in factories in which IKEA has invested heavily over the long term to create a highly mechanised manufacturing facilities which are still competitive in the world market, even when located in high cost countries like Sweden itself.
Certainly it is clear from the narrative that he benefited from his family network. Torekull's poetic take on IKEA and Kamprad rising out of the moraine — thriftiness as an adaptation to a hard landscape - is an interesting one and in this the IKEA story reminds me of the Walmart story — a company found in rural Missouri during the depression of s, hard places can make for resourceful people. On the other hand don't look to that as part of the recipe for success.
Many companies and people come from similarly testing backgrounds and they never get out of it. Reading this book I had a revelation. Not perhaps the most exciting one, but finding out that Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA, had run a mail order business I suddenly understood that an IKEA store is simply a physical mail order catalogue that you walk though, order sheet in hand, with the feet doing what the fingers did.
And that alone gave me my book based happiness! View all 27 comments. Mar 01, Fab rated it really liked it Shelves: business-biography. I picked up this book up while shopping at IKEA one day because I wanted to know the story of how the store came to be such a successful globally recognised brand. You can also find the mani I picked up this book up while shopping at IKEA one day because I wanted to know the story of how the store came to be such a successful globally recognised brand.
You can also find the manifesto on the web if you'd rather skip the story and get down to their philosophy as a business. From reading this you get the sense that it is the ongoing passion of the founder that has propelled the business to such heights: at age 88 he's still there as a senior advisor with no intent to retire. Nov 20, Mikhail Konstantinov rated it really liked it. The story and book itself is quite useful - I hope I learned a thing or two from it. From the other side, the more author tried to whiten the protagonist, the more I disliked both of them.
It is a sort of a small window into their world and the world is worth glancing at. Aug 06, Roman Chepurnyi rated it it was ok. I found it too boring. It took me some effort to finish the book. Mar 18, Trung Nguyen Dang rated it it was ok. Very disappointing book. Part of it may be attributed to the translation, the majority of it is the content. Despite having access to the founder in fact requested by the founder to write this book and other key people in the firms, the book still lack lots of insights and thoughts, compared to other books of the genre.
The writing is not that nice, perhaps due to the translation. The author is a Swedish journalist and this is his only book.
Don't waste your time with this book. Jul 02, Juliette rated it liked it. This book has been hard to get through -- despite my love for all things IKEA. It feels like part of the issue is the translation from Swedish. I wanted to get deeper feelings and insight into how things happened because as organic as it seems, I think there was more substance and strategy. This one felt a bit I bought this book second hand out of curiosity. And their system - marketing, manufacturing, distribution, point of sale, pricing - invites curiosity.
The story is remarkable - a kid selling pens becomes a 50 billion international magnate. It all feels to me a little like the first audience this is written to and for is Kamprad and IKEA, not the reader.
But at about the halfway point I felt the most potentially interesting bits were done. I dipped in and out from there. It all started to feel a tad corporate to me, even thought a fair amount of the book is Kamprad speaking in first person. But it all comes out a bit benign, a bit like a giant annual report. Jun 10, Earl Grey Tea rated it it was ok Shelves: biography , business , history. After purchasing our first house, my wife and I ended up going to IKEA multiple times to purchase furniture that was both to our liking and within our budget.
After a couple of times, I noticed this book for sale and decided to pick it up to learn more about this company that we have developed a mild sense of loyalty to. The first third of the book started off quite strong as the author went through the After purchasing our first house, my wife and I ended up going to IKEA multiple times to purchase furniture that was both to our liking and within our budget.
The first third of the book started off quite strong as the author went through the early stages of Ingvar Kamprad 's life, the founder of IKEA. It was interesting to see how Ingvar's upbringing led to the transformation of an adolescent buying and selling simple everyday items to the founder of a regional business. Throughout the rest of the book, there was still a lot to learn about this international corporation.
0コメント