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552 : APPLYING CREATIVITY TO THE IDEA DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Managers were routinely rotated across functions in order to gain an
holistic view of the business, although purchasing, distribution and
design experts tended to remain in their specialist function. The
company ran ‘anti-bureaucrat weeks’ which required all managers to
work for a given period every year in the warehouses and showrooms,
so that they knew the business from ‘the sharp end’. The company
tended to recruit on potential rather than on past performance,
favouring the freshness, adaptability and absence of prior ‘corporate
brain-washing’ over the fixed mindset associated with conventional
business training.

Through personal visits, a tight cadre of like-minded managers, the
creation of internal IKEA ambassadors and such formal communication
tools as the IKEA value statement, Kamprad’s philosophy and values
dominated the company.

Kamprad promoted the transformation of problems into opportunities
and continually sought to demonstrate that it was not dangerous to be
different. Revered as a visionary within IKEA, he is alleged to have
mapped out IKEA’s entry strategy into Russia and East Europe during the
1980s on a table napkin, dubbed by company insiders as Kamprad’s
‘Picasso’. This eastern expansion did not take place until the late 1990s
and even then only because Kamprad’s persistent awareness of the
market opportunity overcame internal concerns about the economic and
political obstacles which the venture faced.

Kamprad continually favoured simplicity over complexity, informality over
hierarchy. His statement of values contends that ‘bureaucracy complicates
and paralyses. Exaggerated planning can be fatal’. As he went on to write:
‘Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. The fear of making mistakes
is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of all evolution.’

Kamprad’s visionary skills were matched by a legendary attention to
detail, including detailed manufacturing and sales knowledge for
each of the company’s major product lines. He was renowned for
discussing purchasing and design intricacies with managers five or
more levels below him. One company catch-phrase held that ‘retail is
detail’.

Employing over 65,000 workers across a global retail network of over
200 stores in more than 30 countries, IKEA is now recognised as the
world’s largest home furnishings retailer.