Читать книгу Character is Destiny - Pehr Gyllenhammar - Страница 12

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 early in the morning. Groggy and running late, I was driving much faster than I should have been, and overshooting a turn I ran straight into a lamppost. The impact was so severe that the engine of the car came through the dashboard. The car was obviously totaled, which in that moment was only distressing to me because I was now late for the meeting and still a short distance from the Volvo headquarters. So I walked the rest of the way to the office building and up to the conference room where the meeting was already underway. I opened the door and strode in, and every person in the room turned to stare at me. At that point, I realized that I had blood all over my shirt. I’m sure I made for a fascinating sight, but no one asked me any questions at all. And I offered no explanation. It was very bizarre. I simply launched into the beginning of my presentation, and about an hour into it, I was interrupted by a knock on the door. Someone opened it, and there was a policeman, scrutinizing all of the executives that were seated around the table.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Gyllenhammar,” the policeman said. “Is he here?”

I could hardly say that no, he was not.

“I am Mr. Gyllenhammar,” I said, from where I was still standing at the front of the conference room, bloody shirt and all. Ultimately, I was prosecuted for leaving the scene of an accident and had to make a court appearance. They asked me to describe the accident and explain why I left, which I did, with the only qualifying detail being my determination to get to my meeting and give my presentation. I was given a rather large fine to pay, and that was that. But what is most memorable to me still is that when I walked into the courtroom, there was a class of local schoolchildren there, sitting in on some proceedings in order to learn how the justice system worked in action. When I walked through the door, one of the children said, “There he is, there is Mr. Gyllenhammar.” And all of the little faces turned to stare at me. It was certainly an unforgettable experience for me, and not quite the first impression I wished to make with my Volvo colleagues or the youth of Gothenburg. Whether the children found it equally memorable is debatable.

I vividly remember going down to the Volvo plant for the first time to visit and talk to the workers. It was only very rarely that the workers saw a CEO or top management walking the factory floor, and in those occurrences the executive would be more ingratiating than businesslike, dressed down in something deemed sufficiently casual for the workers’ sensibilities. I arrived on the factory floor still in my suit and tie and addressed them directly, with questions to which I genuinely wanted to know the answers—I was asking them to share knowledge and expertise that I knew only they had. My approach seemed to resonate with the workers, because they welcomed me with surprise and genuine warmth. Over the years, my visits to the factory floor were among the parts of my job I most looked forward to.

By some accounts the genesis of Sweden’s automotive future was conceived in 1924 over a large dish of red crayfish at a popular Stockholm restaurant. It was there that Assar Gabrielsson—sales manager for the SFK industrial company—and SFK engineer Gustaf Larson—happened to run into one another. They jointly tucked into the crustaceans—which had been boiled in beer and seasoned with fresh dill—eating them cold from the shell. During the course of that meal the conversation turned to cars, namely the 15,000 vehicles being imported into Sweden annually. Was it not possible to produce cars locally, they wondered? As Gabrielsson would later write, “Swedish steel was good, but Swedish roads were bad.” The two began discussing the possibility of designing and building a quintessentially Swedish automobile, designed to safely withstand the rigors of northern European winters and Swedish roads, and constructed to the highest standards of quality and safety. Three years later, in April of 1927, the first Volvo car rolled out of the Lundby factory gates—the ÖV 4, nicknamed Jakob. The ÖV 4 (short for Öppen Vagn 4 cylindrar) was an open four-seater with a four-cylinder engine, with leather upholstery, and a deep blue chassis with black fenders atop twenty-inch wheels with wooden spokes.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Jakob’s arrival on the scene, we published a Volvo Jubilee historical booklet that celebrated the history of what Volvo had accomplished in the last half century. It opened with a brief essay on the ÖV 4 that began, “It’s 1927, a year of superlatives. Lindbergh flies the Atlantic…movies talk… Babe Ruth hits 60 home runs. A year of automobiles, too. Ford is phasing out the Model T… names like Packard, Willys-Overland, Reo, Pierce-Arrow, Stutz, Auburn are all strong in the American market. There’s a worldwide fascination with automobiles. In Sweden, a new name enters the field…Volvo. A 4-cylinder open touring car called Jakob, begins what is to become the outstanding example of constant progress through evolution in the automotive industry.”

The war years were difficult for Volvo, but the company rebounded, and by the 1960s was boasting healthy car sales and exports, and producing trucks and buses, as well as jet turbines for the Swedish Air Force. When I arrived, I found the company to be in very good shape. It was 1970, a year before the recession, and four years before the oil crisis that would impact the auto industry all over the world. The company’s financials were more than sound, and in all respects Volvo had prospered in over two decades under the guidance of my father-in-law, Gunnar Engellau, who came to that position having been the engineer heading Volvo’s aviation subsidiary.

Gustaf Larson wrote “Cars are driven by people. The guiding principle behind everything we make, therefore, is and must remain safety.” When my father-in-law succeeded Assar Gabrielsson as Volvo’s CEO, he elevated the concept of safety as a brand asset—something that differentiated it from every other automobile maker. I have great respect for my predecessors, particularly my father-in-law, who was a great supporter of mine. I made many mistakes, but he never once told me he regretted picking me to succeed him, and I’m always touched when I think about that. But in order to keep Volvo evolving, I knew there must always be change, even when the current status quo was profitable. I believed we could take the brand asset of safety farther—by, among other things, extending the reflection of our consumer’s values to our factory workers, by placing an emphasis on worker safety and well-being as well as on environmental issues. And I had some very specific ideas about the product development of cars, as well.

These ideas became the genesis of the Volvo 240 series, successor of the 140 and of the wildly popular Amazon model. The Volvo 240 would not be substantially changed in shape, but in technology it was totally different. Beginning from the base of a concept car known as VESC, the Volvo Experimental Safety Car, the 240 was distinguished from its predecessor with the addition of the newest B21 engine, specially designed struts and rack and pinion steering, large front and rear crumple zones, and oversize aluminum bumpers. The solidity and resilience of its chassis was extraordinary, and the 240 became the most robust passenger car on the market. Of course, safety remained the single top priority in every design decision, and it was evident that the 240 was the pinnacle of what could be achieved when the US used it to establish required safety standards for all American-made cars. I was able to say with full confidence at a ceremony celebrating the 240 that we had “…the world’s safest car, one of the most worthwhile cars to buy, and a car that is already living legend and will be even more of one in the years to come.”

Another avenue of change that I pursued was the relationship of our industry to the environment. In the early 1970s, the awareness of environmentalism was only beginning to rise, and in 1972, the very first global environmental convocation—the United Nations Environmental Conference—was organized to take place in Stockholm. I gave a keynote speech at that conference, and Volvo’s website today still bears a line from it: “We are part of the problem—but we are also a part of the solution.” It was a very deliberate choice of words on my part. These were very early days for environmentalism—it was just a few years after the formation of the Club of Rome—and it was not a popular subject in industry. I felt it was very important to avoid any ambivalent statements that could be construed as a denial that Volvo was a contributor to pollution and processes that were unfriendly to the environment. I wasn’t going to claim that we were different, that we were the good ones. Instead, I admitted that we were bad too, and that needed to change. Why should it be so unheard of to admit the undeniable and take accountability for it?

Another new direction for Volvo was our participation in the development and production of space flight technology. In 1975, the European Space Agency was formed, a cooperative venture of twenty-two member-states. Volvo produced a component of the first Ariane rocket, a series of launchable spacecraft that were a collaborative project of Western Europe. I was not in attendance at the liftoff, as I was at a meeting with President Mitterrand and Chancellor Schmidt to present the project and its development to journalists in Paris. But I vividly remember seeing the liftoff on television, and watching the rocket rise from the launchpad into the sky. It was a very exciting moment.

One of the primary arenas for making the socially and humanistic oriented changes I prioritized was Volvo’s assembly plants, beginning with the Kalmar factory, established in 1974, and later with the Uddevalla plant. The goal was to design plants around the supposition that employees should be able to find meaning and satisfaction in their work, and to work in a healthful and pleasing environment while neglecting neither efficiency nor economic results. As Åke Sandberg put it in Enriching Production, the project was “innovative, productive, and humane…with various concepts of group work.” In developing the design and concepts, I worked with Volvo management and engineers and with the local and national unions to have an unfiltered source of information about what would truly benefit the workers.

In the Kalmar plant, we created a work-batch system to move away from the single-repetitive task assembly line system. Groups of workers were formed into teams, and each team was responsible for the collective assembly of one of the car’s systems. In a 1987 article in the New York Times, Steve Lohr cited the positive effect of the Kalmar plant on Volvo’s rising productivity and quality, and of the benefits of a work-batch team approach over an assembly line approach, writing, “Because each worker typically performs a series of tasks, the ‘cycle times’—or the period the worker has to complete his assignment—are often several minutes instead of the several seconds common on the assembly line. In addition, the workers in a team are taught to do several jobs, not only to escape monotony but also to fill in for sick or vacationing workers.”

Kalmar was the breakthrough I had hoped it would be. It became a workplace in which human-centered designs and concepts created improved jobs, which led to improved worker well-being and productivity. In conceiving the next plant, Uddevalla, the basic Kalmar concept remained, but was refined to be a bit more radical and sophisticated. The assembly line production system was dispensed with altogether at Uddevalla in favor of a fixed-site car assembly system in which multiple teams of skilled laborers worked in cooperation to collectively assemble entire vehicles. Åke Sandberg described a visit to Uddevalla in which he observed “the human orientation of the work being done…a group of nine workers assembled a car from beginning to end. They conferred with each other while working, resulting in the completion of the entire car before the morning coffee break. This team like all others in the plant had no supervisor. And the first level manager of this and the seven other teams in the product workshop was on vacation; the groups could clearly manage their own work.”

My work along these lines of reinventing the labor model drew interest from others in the automotive industry, and many came to visit the factories. In 1973 and 1974, we hosted visits from Henry Ford II and Leonard Woodcock, the latter then president of the United Auto Workers union. I came to know and like both of these men enormously. Ford loved the Kalmar plant, and told me, “Pehr, this is a revolution!” Leonard Woodcock was also impressed with Kalmar’s humanization of the labor system. It was an issue that had long been of concern to him. Ten years prior to his visit to Kalmar, a 1964 New York Times article reported the UAW’s refusal to drop demands for better conditions in return for an improved financial package. The article stated, “Leonard Woodcock, UAW vice president and director of the General Motors Department, said at a news conference today that he had no illusions that the workers ‘can be bought off this time’ on working conditions. ‘Our purpose this year is to humanize conditions in the General Motors plants,’ he said.”

Woodcock himself was truly a great humanist. He loved people. And I found him to be an extraordinary person in many ways. His visit to the Kalmar plant was the first time I had the occasion to meet him, and I thought he was very different from most of the union bosses I had encountered. He was very much admired in many circles and had an excellent reputation with the union members. At that time, he ranked ninth on the infamous “Nixon Enemies List,” which to me is a fact that in and of itself made for a solid endorsement of his character and integrity.

Leonard and I started a dialogue after his Kalmar visit. He later came to visit me at my country home in the Swedish archipelago, and we became close friends. I found Leonard to be a human being with almost no prejudice, which I found unusual for a union leader. The scope of his social commitment and his professional aptitude was uniquely wide. He was a champion of civil rights who had marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and as Jimmy Carter’s personal representative in Beijing, he successfully negotiated reestablishing US-China ties after a lapse of thirty years. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called him a “distinguished leader and a trusted advisor to American presidents from Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton,” and said that “with patience, skill and a low-key style born of long, late-night sessions negotiating on behalf of America’s working men and women, he helped guide the American and Chinese governments toward the establishment of ties that have well served the interests of our two peoples.”