Leading by Design, the IKEA story [Hardcover]

The book claims to tell the IKEA story, but really focuses on writing a biography of Ingvar Kamprad, the company's founder. As a biography, the strength of the book is in describing the family and physical environment that were early influences on Kamprad. Past about the first 30 pages, the book doesn't add much. The most interesting parts of the biography come late in the book when Kamprad's early associations with a fascist group are detailed in the context of press reports exposed in the late 1990s. These should have been fully developed early in the book, rather than treated as a later discussion of how to handle bad publicity. Most good biographies teach you something that you need to know. When I was done with this one, I didn't feel like I had learned anything. There probably were lessons there to be drawn out, but the author did not succeed in helping me find them. That meant that I knocked the book down one star.

IKEA has been an interesting international success with an unusual formula. The book assumes a great personal knowledge of that formula. Yet there are very few of the IKEA stores in most countries, so many people who will read this book will lack the experience of knowing about what is being described. Originally written for the Swedish market, that lack of handling the perspective of what the store experience is like limits the book's ability to translate its lessons. I rated the book down one more star for insufficient background early in the book on the reasons why the business works and how it works today. These are dropped in occasionally, so many of them are there by the end. You would then have to read the book a second time to really understand the relevance of the points.

Next, the book attempts to describe the company's success. A lot of time is spent on this, but the author seems to lack the perspective to pick out what is important and what is not. Kamprod is a classic experimenter. If something works well, he does a lot more of it. After a while that pattern becomes something he will not vary from. Since he was not a systemmatic experimenter, it meant that many developments were delayed. On the other hand, he always made it a place where people liked to work so he had someplace to stand on for continuity as the experiments continued. Without the necessary perspective, this is a little like reading 30 annual reports. Unless you have lots of management background, you will have trouble seeing what the important management lessons are in this book.

Basically, Kamprod is an advocate of low-priced distribution of low-cost, mass-produced goods based on high quality designs. His personal values are those of family and treating people with hospitality (like an honored guest). Having started his business from the family farm in Sweden with family and neighbors having been the first customers and employees, you can see the influences quite easily. What is unusual is that his business model developed earlier than that of other furniture merchants. It was reasonably complete by 1960. Only in the last ten years have we seen a reasonably similar store experience in the Boston area.

The best part of the book is that it contains lots of first-person stories from Kamprad. As such, this book will be a valuable source for the first person to write a good book about IKEA as a management case history. I hope that book will soon be written. There must be important insights to be gained about how IKEA developed its business model so many years ahead of others, but I could not figure out what those insights were.

In the meantime, unless you have a compulsive interest in learning more about IKEA today, skip this book.

At first glanze this book is really boring. But if you give it time, let it melt in and try to see how it was in Sweden for 50 years ago: IF you can put the book in to context you really get a complete and a invaluable picture of THE IKEA WAY.

Without sounding to cooky I just wanna say that this book is right up there with the books about Nordstroms, Jack Welch and etc.

Really, buy this book if you wanna learn lean and mean business the IKEA way. The customers rule....this is the IKEA way...

So you think Jack Welch is better? Just wanna tell you that Ingvar Kamprad made the 50 riches people in the world list!!! THATS SOMETHING!!!