“Only those who are asleep make no mistakes,” says Kamprad. “There are few people who have made so many fiascos in my life as I have.”
When Kamprad was a teenager, he became interested in a pro-Nazi group run by a Swedish fascist activist by the name of Per Engdahl. He not only attended group meetings, but he also raised funds and recruited members to the group between 1942 and 1945. It is unknown when Kamprad quit the group, but he remained friends with Engdahl well into the 1950s. This part of Kamprad’s past remained hidden until 1994, when Engdahl’s personal letters were made public after his death.
“This is part of my life I bitterly regret,” says Kamprad. “After a couple of meetings in pure Nazi style, I quit.” In a letter he wrote to employees titled “The Greatest Mistake of My Life,” Kamprad apologized to IKEA employees of Jewish heritage and asked for forgiveness. He also devoted two chapters to the incident in his 1998 book, “The History of IKEA.” Following its publication, Kamprad said in an interview, “Now I have told all I can. Can one ever get forgiveness for such stupidity?”
Kamprad had made a crucial mistake in sympathizing with Nazis in his teenage years. “That was the biggest blunder I’ve made in my entire life, and I regret it deeply,” he says. “I have said sorry, many times, but it has left an indelible mark on my conscience that continually haunts me and perhaps it’s best this way.” Joining the Nazi group would be a mistake that he would be paying for on a personal level for the rest of his life. However, professionally, Kamprad had been left relatively unscathed when the discovery was made. He was criticized and he was attacked in the media, but sales at IKEA continued to increase. Indeed, some speculate that his popularity actually rose following the incident because of the honesty with which he dealt with the aftermath.
Kamprad is also an admitted alcoholic, but he allows himself the luxury of making mistakes, “because I know that, if need be, there are those who correct my mistakes. If you only knew how many of them I’ve made, mistakes.”
Experience has taught Kamprad that not only could the business world be forgiving of his mistakes, but that it was those very mistakes that could end up moving mountains. Indeed, the success of IKEA can be traced back to a simple mistake made by a new employee of IKEA back in 1956. Working in Älmhult, Gillis Lundgren had been standing beside a car with a colleague, trying to figure out how to get a bulky wooden table into the back of it. Finally, against company policy, Lundgren said, “Oh God, then, let’s pull off the legs and put them underneath.” It was with that simple statement that IKEA would reorient itself towards the flat design production for which it has become famous today.
“IKEA is not completely perfect,” says Kamprad. “It irritates me to death to hear it said that IKEA is the best company in the world. We are going the right way to becoming it, for sure, but we are not there yet.”
Lesson #4: Mistakes are a Must on the Road to Success
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