#370

Ingvar Kamprad and the Founding of IKEA

• The book "Leading by Design: The Ikea Story" is about Ingvar Kamprad, a man who grew up in a harsh environment in Sweden and went on to build a vast empire with thousands of employees and millions of customers worldwide (23s).
• Ingvar Kamprad's upbringing in a barren part of Sweden had a profound impact on his life and philosophy, which he used to build his business empire (14s).
• The idea for Ikea first began to take shape on a farm in Sweden, where Ingvar Kamprad grew up with a dream of building a successful business (48s).
• Ingvar Kamprad is described as a man with a heart tormented by inadequacy and self-pity, but also with a stubborn and inquisitive nature, and a strange mixture of being a social animal and an eccentric (1m35s).
• The book is not just about Ingvar Kamprad's personal story, but also about the business he built and how he lived out his circumstances through it (1m44s).
• Ingvar Kamprad is described as an outstanding and natural genius, an incorrigible capitalist who was obsessed with the lore of profit and power (1m49s).
• The book "Leading by Design: The Ikea Story" was written by Berit Torell with close association with Ingvar Kamprad himself, and features large chunks of the book in Ingvar's own words (2m13s).
• Ingvar Kamprad founded Ikea 81 years ago and worked on it for 74 years, and about 20 years before he passed away, he agreed to work on the book with the author (2m37s).
• Ingvar Kamprad agreed to work on the book because the author suggested that it could be used as study material for future entrepreneurs, which was the only reason he was willing to do it (3m24s).
• Ingvar Kamprad wrote a document called "The Testament of a Furniture Dealer" in 1976, which is considered the Ikea Bible and can be read for free online (3m35s).

The IKEA Testament and Its Principles

• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, would give a yearly sermon to top executives and new employees based on the principles and ideas in a document, which he repeated for 43 straight years, emphasizing the company's goal to create a better everyday life for the many people by offering well-designed, functional home furnishing products at low prices (3m51s).
• The best founders and leaders know their job is to get their entire organization's commitment to a common goal, which for IKEA is to side with the many, a principle that cannot be changed (4m37s).
• Ingvar Kamprad believed that most nations and societies spend a disproportionate amount of resources on satisfying a minority of the population, and IKEA's objective is to be different by catering to the many (5m17s).
• Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, is mentioned as someone who had a similar idea of making cars for the everyman, and like Ingvar Kamprad, was obsessed with eliminating waste, cost control, and rethinking the manufacturing process for maximum efficiency (5m51s).
• Ingvar Kamprad's opening declaration in the document emphasizes that IKEA has achieved good results but has great ambitions, and he believes that the company will be able to make a valuable contribution outside of Sweden in the future (6m37s).
• The company's approach is characterized by doing things a different way, which involves breaking free from convention and creating a better everyday life for the many people (7m7s).
• IKEA's goal is to expand and achieve its goals through a different approach, which involves larger production runs, new advantages, and spreading risks over more markets (7m4s).
• The company's objective is to create a better everyday life for the many people, and this involves offering products at prices that are so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them (4m22s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, had innovative ideas that were ahead of his time and are now widespread throughout the entire industry, with the goal of breaking free from convention and finding new and better ways to do things (7m26s).
• Kamprad emphasized the importance of demanding much from oneself and having a framework of ideas that made IKEA a unique company, with a list of nine principles that the company is built on (8m10s).
• One of the key principles is having low prices, making enormous demands on all co-workers, including product developers, designers, buyers, office and warehouse staff, salespeople, and other cost bearers (8m14s).
• Kamprad believed that cost control is an obsession for entrepreneurs and that controlling costs is crucial to having low prices, with no compromise on this principle (8m56s).
• The IKEA spirit, or company culture, is built on principles such as readiness to give each other a helping hand, cost consciousness, humbleness, undying enthusiasm, and a sense of community (9m30s).
• Kamprad recognized that it was easier to keep the company spirit alive in the early days when there were fewer employees, but he emphasized the importance of repeating these principles over time to maintain the company's soul (9m32s).
• Not everyone in a large group can feel the same sense of responsibility and enthusiasm, but the true IKEA spirit is built on enthusiasm, constant striving for renewal, cost consciousness, readiness to take responsibility, and humbleness (10m40s).
• Approaching tasks with simplicity is crucial, and those who cannot or will not join in are to be given a different job, as a job must never be just a livelihood, and a third of one's life goes to waste if they're not enthusiastic about their job (10m53s).
• For those with leadership responsibilities, it's crucial to motivate and develop coworkers, making decisions after consulting the team, with no time for arguments afterwards (11m9s).

Profit, Resources, and Growth

• The third principle is that profit gives resources, as seen in Ikea's financial performance, which was believed to be the most valuable privately held business owned by a single person in the world at one point in time (11m25s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, Ikea's founder, never took out a loan while building the company, and the only real loan he got was from a bank for $63 to buy fountain pens, which he then sold for a large profit (11m44s).
• One of the iron laws of Ikea is that all expansion is to be self-financed, and to do that, the company must make a profit, which gives resources for a better everyday life for many people (12m4s).
• The aim of building financial resources is to reach a good result in the long term by offering the lowest prices combined with good quality, forcing the company to develop products more economically and be constantly stubborn in cost savings (12m28s).

Efficiency and Cost Control

• The fourth principle is reaching good results with small means, similar to Henry Ford's approach, by eliminating waste and increasing efficiency, and wasting resources is considered a mortal sin at Ikea (12m52s).
• Reaching set targets is not difficult if one doesn't have to count the cost, but only highly skilled designers can create functional products at a low cost, and expensive solutions are usually the work of mediocrity (13m7s).
• Waste of resources is considered one of the greatest diseases of mankind, and wasting time is also a mortal sin at Ikea, with examples including filling out unnecessary papers and postponing decisions (13m41s).

Simplicity and Innovation

• The fifth principle is that simplicity is a virtue, and indecisiveness generates more statistics, studies, committees, and bureaucracy, which complicates and paralyzes planning (14m13s).
• Ingvar Kamprad emphasizes the importance of simplicity and common sense in planning, stating that exaggerated planning can lead to corporate death and that simplicity is a virtue (14m41s).
• Kamprad also stresses the value of doing things differently and not being afraid to challenge established patterns, citing the example of IKEA's success in the small Swedish town of Älvdalen (also known as Älvdalen or Alur) despite initial doubts from experts (15m3s).
• He encourages a culture of experimentation and innovation, hoping that IKEA will never have two identical stores, and believes that this approach will lead to progress and improvement (16m12s).
• Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinkos, who was also dyslexic, used a similar approach by visiting different stores and sharing ideas through a company-wide voicemail system, allowing individual stores to act as "miniature laboratories" for innovation and experimentation (16m47s).
• Orfalea's approach was to not mandate a single "best way" of doing things, but rather to allow individual stores to discover and trial new ideas, echoing Kamprad's sentiment that restricting innovation can stifle progress (17m28s).
• Dynamism and the desire to experiment are essential for progress and must continually lead us forward (17m48s).

Focus, Responsibility, and Continuous Improvement

• Concentration is crucial for success, as dividing resources can lead to defeat, and it is necessary to focus on specific goals to achieve maximum impact (17m53s).
• Concentration implies strength and should be applied in daily work to achieve results (18m22s).
• Taking responsibility is a privilege, and people who make their own decisions are more likely to be successful, whereas those who hide behind others' decisions can lead to bureaucracy (18m29s).
• Making mistakes is a privilege of the active, and constant practice in making decisions can help overcome the fear of making mistakes (18m57s).
• The fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development, and it is often the mediocre people who are negative and spend their time proving they were not wrong (19m12s).
• Most things still remain to be done, and a glorious future awaits, as the feeling of having finished something can be an effective sleeping pill, leading to stagnation and loss of vitality (19m25s).
• Happiness is not reaching a goal, but being on the way, and it is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning (19m48s).
• The positive joy of discovery must be our inspiration in the future, and the word "impossible" has been deleted from our dictionary (20m10s).
• Experience should be handled carefully, as it can be a brake on development, and many people use it as an excuse for not trying anything new (20m18s).
• Time is our most important resource, and every minute counts, as it is a piece of ourselves that can never be gotten back (20m26s).
• Most of the job remains to be done, and we should continue to be a group of positive fanatics who refuse to accept the impossible (20m44s).
• What we want to do, we can do and will do together, and we should strive for a glorious future (20m56s).

Kamprad's Family and Early Life

• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, had an extreme internal drive that stemmed from his early life, which was marked by a desire for revenge, as evident from his notes and interviews (21m15s).
• Ingvar's father was forced to work on the farm by his mother, Ingvar's grandmother, who was the matriarch and a dominant figure in the family (21m50s).
• Ingvar's father and uncle were not allowed to pursue their own interests and were instead forced to stay on the farm, with Ingvar's uncle eventually taking his own life in 1935 (22m17s).
• Ingvar's family were German immigrants to Sweden who struggled financially, and his grandfather had taken his own life, leaving his grandmother to care for their children (22m37s).
• Ingvar's mother was loved by everyone and was an amazing person who discovered the poor state of her husband's business affairs and took action by starting a guest house (23m4s).
• Ingvar's mother contracted cancer and died at the age of 53, which had a profound impact on Ingvar, who later started a foundation for cancer research in her name (24m10s).
• Ingvar's early life was marked by poverty and limited resources, with his father being bad at business and not having a lot of money (23m20s).
• Ingvar's story illustrates the principle that a person's life can be understood by the story of their father, and Ingvar's experiences were shaped by his family's history and dynamics (23m34s).
• A foundation for cancer research could be set up in memory of the speaker's mother, whose death still brings him to tears even at the age of 72 (24m37s).
• The speaker was a born entrepreneur, starting business deals at a young age, with the help of his aunt, who assisted him in buying his first 100 boxes of matches in Stockholm for 88 cents, which he then sold at a profit (24m50s).
• At the age of 5, the speaker was already selling things and remembers the feeling of making a profit, and by the time he was 11, he was selling garden seeds, with selling becoming an obsession for him (25m8s).
• The speaker's desire to earn money was driven by his father's lack of financial resources to carry out his plans, and he remembers thinking at the age of 10 that if he could get some money, he could help his father (25m50s).
• The speaker's obsession with selling things was rooted in his childhood realization that having means was necessary to carry out plans, and he took it upon himself to help his family financially (26m0s).
• A manager of a bank lent the speaker $3, which he considered a fortune at the time, to purchase 500 fountain pens from Paris, essentially the only real loan he has taken out in his life (26m26s).
• The speaker's paternal grandfather shot himself, while his maternal grandfather ran a little country store where the speaker spent entire days as a child, and his grandfather became his best playmate (26m44s).
• The speaker's grandfather's country store no longer exists as a business, but by chance, Ikea took it over, and the speaker bought the whole property, with a furniture store now standing on the foundation of the country store, which he considers a form of revenge (27m9s).
• The speaker's paternal grandmother treated him differently, giving him a lot of confidence, and she was his first customer when he started buying and selling things at the age of 5 (27m52s).

Kamprad's Grandmother and Nazi Sympathizer

• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, had a grandmother who was a fan of Hitler and sympathetic to the Nazi movement, which had unexpected consequences in his life long after his childhood and teens (28m21s).
• Kamprad's grandmother was from a German state called Sudetenland, which became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I, but she identified as German and not Czech (28m40s).
• She told her grandson that the happiest day of her life was when Nazi Germany annexed Czechoslovakia in 1938, and Kamprad was indoctrinated into this ideology through his grandmother, but was too young to think independently at the time (28m54s).
• In 1994, the media reported that Kamprad was a Nazi, and he cooperated with the media, explaining everything and eventually the issue blew over (29m17s).
• A few years later, another media organization claimed that Kamprad still believed in the ideology in his 30s, but he was able to disprove this (29m30s).
• Kamprad was furious that the media suggested he borrowed seed money from the Nazis to start IKEA, and he denied this allegation (29m50s).

The Birth of IKEA and Early Business

• At the age of 17, Kamprad founded IKEA as a trading firm, buying and selling various items, and the company's name is an acronym of his name, the farm he grew up on, and his hometown (30m26s).
• Kamprad had an early obsession with distribution and was puzzled by the large price difference between wholesale and retail prices, which became an idea that dominated his mind (30m44s).
• Even before starting his own business, Kamprad would observe the inefficient distribution methods used by other businesses and think about how to improve them (31m9s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of Ikea, started the company as a mail-order business when he was a young man, initially selling items such as Christmas cards, seeds, fountain pens, and wallets, before eventually deciding to sell furniture (31m29s).
• Kamprad got the idea to sell furniture from a competitor, a mail-order firm called Gunners, and he began by advertising an armless nursing chair called Ruth, which was a huge success (31m50s).
• Due to his dyslexia, Kamprad couldn't remember order numbers, so he started giving his products names instead, a practice that continues to this day (32m5s).
• The response to his advertisements was overwhelmingly positive, leading Kamprad to expand his product line to include sofas and chandeliers, and eventually, he decided to focus solely on furniture (32m12s).
• As the business grew, Kamprad appointed his first employee in 1948, and by 1950, the staff had grown to seven or eight people (32m46s).
• Kamprad describes the turning point of his life as the moment he entered the furniture trade, which he initially did to imitate his competitors, but eventually, he realized that quality was lacking and decided to take a different approach (32m54s).

From Mail-Order to Stores

• The business was struggling around seven or eight years in, with intense competition and mail-order becoming almost unendurable, leading Kamprad to consider combining a mail-order catalog with an actual furniture store (33m30s).
• The main issue with mail-order was that customers couldn't touch the goods and had to rely on descriptions, leading to a buildup of complaints and a risk to Ikea's reputation (34m23s).
• Kamprad was faced with the decision to either let Ikea die or find a new way to maintain customer trust and make money, ultimately leading to a significant change in the company's business model (34m30s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, had conversations with early employees about breaking the cycle of lowering prices and worsening quality, which led to the idea of creating a permanent display or exhibition of their furniture (34m36s).
• In 1952, Kamprad bought a rundown department store for $1600 and invested $75,000 to renovate it, which became the first IKEA store and the basis for the modern IKEA concept (35m4s).
• The concept involved using a catalog to tempt people to come to the exhibition, which is still applied today, and Kamprad was the first to combine mail-order and furniture store business ideas (35m21s).
• IKEA sent out over 100 million catalogs by the late 1990s, and the first store opening was a huge success, with at least a thousand people waiting in line (35m55s).
• The success of IKEA was unexpected, and Kamprad was worried that the floor would collapse due to the large number of visitors (36m8s).

Growth and Expansion

• The idea of people traveling vast distances to save money is a principle seen in the founding stories of Walmart, Home Depot, and IKEA (36m50s).
• Ingvar Kamprad emphasized the importance of principles such as helpfulness, thrift, and a strong sense of responsibility in building his business (37m17s).
• Kamprad also stressed the importance of watching costs and translating everything into a clear price, which is still a practice at IKEA today (37m30s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, set up the company with the goal of providing affordable furniture to customers, and "cost awareness" became the company's anthem (37m40s).
• Initially, experts thought that a giant furniture store couldn't be supported by a small town like Älmhult, but Kamprad proved them wrong, and the town eventually grew to accommodate the store's needs (37m56s).
• To cater to the large number of customers traveling from afar, IKEA introduced childcare services, restaurants, and even a hotel on site, which were born out of necessity (38m7s).
• As the company grew rapidly, the Kamprad family turned their farm into the IKEA headquarters, with everyone in the family helping out in the business (38m52s).
• Ingvar Kamprad's family recognized his unusual talent and supported him, but he often neglected his own family for the sake of the business, which became one of his greatest sorrows (39m25s).
• Kamprad has expressed regret for neglecting his three sons during their childhood, which he acknowledges cannot be reconquered (39m34s).
• The founder also regretted the loss of closeness and intimacy as the company grew from a small family business to a large corporation (40m19s).
• Despite his success, with a reported net worth of around $50 billion, Kamprad has expressed nostalgia for the early days of IKEA when it was a small, close-knit company (40m47s).

Kamprad's Personality and Reflections

• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, has an unusual personality compared to many successful entrepreneurs, marked by high levels of insecurity, sentimentality, and self-doubt, despite his company's success (41m8s).
• Kamprad openly discusses his weaknesses and failures, including severe losses and fiascos, in order to provide a service to future generations of entrepreneurs (41m22s).
• He shares a list of failed ideas and investments that cost IKEA millions of dollars, including a failed attempt to sell TVs, a Swedish sawmill venture in Russia, and a factory investment in Thailand (41m51s).
• Kamprad's philosophy is that making mistakes is a privilege of the active, and that the fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development (42m44s).
• His employees reported that Kamprad preferred them to make mistakes rather than be idle, and that he encouraged a culture of experimentation and learning from failures (42m57s).
• Being in a great growing market and getting in early can help overcome mistakes, a concept referred to as "surfing" by Charlie Munger, where entrepreneurs ride a wave of opportunity to achieve success (43m6s).
• Ingvar Kamprad rode the wave of Sweden's countryside depopulation and urbanization in the 1950s, which created a huge demand for affordable furniture, allowing IKEA to grow rapidly (43m38s).
• The post-war building program in Sweden, which saw 1 million new apartments built in 20 years, also contributed to IKEA's success, as the company was well-positioned to meet the growing demand for furniture (44m1s).

Craftiness and Overcoming Challenges

• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, emphasized the importance of virtues such as craftiness in building the company, which is defined as the ability to be content with the resources one has and to find ways out of tight spots (44m39s).
• When IKEA moved away from being a strictly mail-order business and opened stores, they saved on shipping costs, increased efficiency, and lowered prices, making it difficult for competitors to match (44m57s).
• The National Association of Furniture Dealers, a trade association, attempted to push IKEA out of business by banning them from selling at trade fairs, and later, from advertising their prices (45m41s).
• Despite these bans, Ingvar Kamprad found ways to get around them, such as attending trade fairs and displaying prices, and eventually, he started his own trade fairs (45m51s).
• The National Association of Furniture Dealers also organized a boycott, telling suppliers that they would no longer buy from them if they sold to IKEA, but Ingvar Kamprad countered this by treating his suppliers better than others, paying them quickly, which encouraged them to continue supplying IKEA (47m3s).
• This approach allowed IKEA to maintain its supply chain and continue to grow, despite the efforts of the trade association to hinder its progress (47m18s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, was interviewed in a book where he discussed the difference between IKEA and other furniture dealers, highlighting that IKEA paid its suppliers within 10 days, while others took 3-4 months, which is one of Kamprad's principles that he still imparts to his staff (47m24s).
• Some suppliers were pressured by IKEA's competitors and adversaries to boycott the company, but others remained loyal and found ways to secretly deliver products to IKEA, such as removing logos from delivery vans and making deliveries at night (47m42s).
• The boycott was a blessing in disguise for IKEA, as it led to the company finding alternative suppliers and designing its own products, which resulted in a differentiated product that competitors couldn't match (48m4s).
• IKEA started sourcing materials from Poland, which marked a turning point in the company's history and allowed it to find new solutions to problems (48m37s).
• The boycott reinforced IKEA's unity and led to the company designing its own furniture, which provided it with a unique style and design (48m50s).

The Innovation of Flat Packing

• The necessity to secure its own deliveries led to the development of flat packing and self-assembled furniture, which drastically reduced costs and further differentiated IKEA from its competitors (49m24s).
• The idea for flat packing and self-assembled furniture came from an employee who suggested removing the legs of a table to save space, which changed the trajectory of IKEA forever (50m9s).
• IKEA created its first self-assembled table, called Max, which was a result of the company's innovative approach to problem-solving (50m22s).
• The introduction of flat packing revolutionized the furniture industry, reducing damage during transport and lowering freight costs, which was the logic behind Ingvar Kamprad's innovation (50m28s).
• With flat packing, customers could take home furniture the same day, unlike mail-order furniture that could take months to arrive (51m4s).
• An unexpected benefit of flat packing was the discovery of the "Ikea effect," a cognitive bias where customers value products more highly because they played a role in assembling them (51m22s).
• The Ikea effect was discovered after the fact and was not the initial reason for introducing flat packing (51m21s).
• Ingvar Kamprad realized that flat packing allowed for more efficient manufacturing and design processes, resulting in cheaper production costs (51m49s).
• The innovation of self-assembly enabled Ikea to save money in factories and transport, keeping prices low for customers (52m4s).
• Ingvar Kamprad's obsession with distribution and reducing costs stemmed from his childhood experiences visiting stores and wondering why products were cheap to buy but expensive to sell (52m11s).
• Flat parcels saved enormously on storage and freight, and were a prerequisite for customers taking home large furniture parcels themselves (52m33s).
• Ikea was not the first to introduce flat-packed furniture, but Ingvar Kamprad was able to develop the idea commercially and systematically (52m48s).

IKEA's Eternal Life and Corporate Structure

• Ingvar Kamprad's vision for Ikea was to give the company "eternal life" by keeping it private, allowing for growth at any pace and avoiding the pressures of being a public company (53m20s).
• Ikea's strategy has long been to take half of their resources to improve what already exists and the other half to improve what's in the future, which allows them to move at a somewhat slower pace than if they had access to unlimited money (54m11s).
• The company has four iron laws that have been present since its birth: a good cash reserve must always be insured, all property must be owned, all expansion is to be self-financed, and there shall be no boasting (54m35s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, Ikea's founder, wanted to give the business eternal life, so it wouldn't rely on one person or one country, and to achieve this, he started thinking about how to keep the future of Ikea without inheritance taxes bleeding the company to death (55m6s).
• To solve this problem, Ingvar hired an army of lawyers and spent almost a decade creating a complex corporate ownership structure, which includes a holding company, a tax-exempt nonprofit, a foundation called Inter Ikea, and a trust that owns a Dutch holding company (55m27s).
• The foundation, Inter Ikea, is now the fourth-largest technically in the world and has accomplished Ingvar's goal of creating a company that can never be dismantled (56m19s).
• Ingvar believed that Ikea is a concept company, and if they stick to the concept, they will never die; the company calls the concept of Ikea the "sacred concept" and has distributed the "Ikea Testament" to over 100,000 employees worldwide (56m43s).

Kamprad's Leadership Style and Values

• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, is described as a charismatic leader who is emotional, with his emotions often at the surface, and is known for his ability to connect with people through storytelling and humor (57m3s).
• Kamprad's leadership style is characterized as the "noble art of hugging management," and he is said to have hugged thousands of IKEA employees (57m22s).
• He emphasizes the importance of repetition in his speeches, often repeating the same themes and ideas, such as cost awareness and the need for humbleness (57m27s).
• Kamprad believes in owning properties rather than renting, as it provides security and allows the company to wait out difficulties (57m59s).
• He values gathering unfiltered intelligence from the front lines and is known to make unexpected visits to stores, often early in the morning, to talk to employees and gather information (58m11s).
• Kamprad's greatest anxiety is that IKEA won't survive, and he is constantly focused on the future and the next day (58m35s).
• He is driven by a sense of mission to democratize access to beautiful and affordable furniture, and believes that his work is part of a larger project to make good design available to everyone (58m54s).
• Kamprad's motivations are rooted in a desire to make a positive impact and to be of use as an entrepreneur, and he is driven by a sense of curiosity and a desire to challenge the status quo (59m4s).

Defining Kamprad and His Legacy

• The author of the book about Kamprad's life struggles to define him, describing him as a manufacturer, innovator, and entrepreneur, but ultimately concluding that he is a complex and multifaceted individual (59m27s).
• Kamprad's relationship with IKEA is deeply personal, and he is described as being obsessed with expanding and improving the company, while also being trapped by his own success (59m45s).
• Ingvar Kamprad, the founder of IKEA, has a complex personality with a mix of self-searching and a bitter undertone, despite being a successful multinational tycoon, he still identifies as a country boy and an underdog (1h0m27s).
• He recognizes himself as an outsider and has experienced feelings of not being good enough, which is a common sentiment shared by many people (1h0m42s).
• Ingvar has a strong sense of justice and feels rage against injustices, and he also has a peasant's trust in a favorable destiny that keeps him grounded (1h0m51s).
• He has expressed regrets about not spending enough time with his children when they were young and has talked openly about his personal defects, including lack of self-confidence and difficulty making decisions (1h1m3s).
• Despite his personal struggles, Ingvar has been successful in business due to his nose for business and peasant common sense (1h1m20s).
• Ingvar's vision for IKEA was to demonstrate that functional and good products do not have to be expensive, a principle that still guides the company today (1h1m40s).
• He believes that IKEA still has a long way to go and is just at the beginning of a glorious future (1h1m54s).