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28 Business Thinkers Who Changed the World
Kamprad said that one of the reasons he’d chosen not to float the company was that he didn’t want to feel responsible to outsiders. He wasn’t kidding. There are other far more personal skeletons in his closet too. In 1994 a Swedish paper revealed that between the ages of 16 and 25 Kamprad had been involved in a Swedish far-right group and was friends with the movement’s leader, Per Engdahl, a Nazi sympathizer – to the point of inviting him to his first wedding. Kamprad wrote to every employee explaining that he had made a youthful mistake, and the IKEA family forgave him. He has said, ‘There are few people who have made so many fiascos in my life as I have.’ Some have suggested that his economical man-of-the-people image may not be all it’s cracked up to be either. He owns a vineyard and a mansion in Switzerland where he lives as a tax exile; indeed, for all the talk of Scandinavian thrift, IKEA long ago ceased to be a Swedish company. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this unusual man, though, is that he is a self-confessed alcoholic, albeit one who stops regularly to rest his liver and kidneys and claims to have his problem under control. He says: ‘I dry out three times a year. My problem began when we visited Poland in the Sixties to buy materials. It was almost compulsory to take vodka with contacts.’ He says he has no plans to give up drinking because ‘it is one of life’s treats’. Still, compared to many of the cookie-cutter corporate brass of today, there is no doubt that Kamprad is fascinating – and there is also no doubt that most of his staff have a great deal of affection for him and the extraordinary company that he has built up. Quite what will happen when the man whose personality makes IKEA what it is dies remains to be seen. He’s said that one of the reasons behind the complex ownership structure is to prevent family feuds: ‘I’ve paid an awful lot of money to protect what I’ve built. I can only hope the money was well spent’ (Independent, 23 July 2000).