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Putting Sweden on the Map At Home
Global
“after i left ...
Gyllenhammar on Path to Becoming a Canadian For 23 years, Pehr G. Gyllenhammar was the face of Volvo, serving as its CEO and/or chairman from 1971 to 1993, at a time when the company was synonymous with Sweden. Now Gyllenhammar, voted Sweden’s most admired man for nine consecutive years, is becoming a Canadian.
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By Kajsa Norman
ehr G. Gyllenhammar was always an unconventional business leader. He earned his degree in law but was bored by its practice. In 1965 he was recruited to the Swedish insurance company Skandia where he eventually succeeded his father Pehr Gyllenhammar Sr as CEO. Shortly thereafter, his then father-in-law Gunnar Engellau, CEO of Volvo, offered him a position on the company’s top management team. At merely 36 years of age, Gyllenhammar succeeded Engellau as CEO of Volvo. One of Gyllenhammar’s first decisions was to discontinue the Volvo P1800 sports car and focus on building Volvo’s brand around safety. Gyllenhammar also championed initiatives to promote worker participation and dialogue. Today, safety, as well as informal, non-
Swedish Press | July-Sept 2021 | 16
Pehr G. Gyllenhammar. Photo: Dan Hansson/TT
hierarchical workplaces, are some of the things that many associate with Sweden and the country's brand. And there is no doubt that Volvo and Gyllenhammar’s leadership influenced that development. Gyllenhammar quickly earned a reputation of being a controversial leader, making enemies among middle management while gaining the trust and admiration of the workers. As he visited the factories, Gyllenhammar found many of the workers’ tasks soulless and uninteresting, and decided to move the company away from the assembly line. “I organized the company by product instead of by function; cars, trucks, etc.; that made the motivation much higher in the group,” he says. “The assembly line
is very impersonal. I changed the production lines so that instead of having 90 seconds per task, like Charlie Chaplin, the workers could see what they were making. This improved both quality and loyalty of the workforce.” Satisfaction among the workers rose to 90 percent and Gyllenhammar became popular among Swedes across the nation. For nine years in a row, he was voted Sweden’s most admired man. “I was surprised to start with, and then even more surprised, when it continued year after year,” says Gyllenhammar. When asked about the reason for this widespread admiration, Gyllenhammar linked it to being transparent about his missteps. “I made my mistakes and accepted them, and people seem to like that,” he says. While his achievements are numerous, it is his failures that haunt the national psyche of the Swedes. In the 1970s, Norway was not yet the oil rich nation that it is today. Exploratory drilling was underway, but it was still uncertain how much black gold would be found under the sea. Gyllenhammar negotiated a trade with Norway that would see 40 percent of Volvo become Norwegian in return for access to the Norwegian oil fields.
