Chicago

"One of Erik Torudd’s tasks during his trips abroad was to keep an eye out for new materials and packaging systems that Åkerlund & Rausing could introduce in Sweden. During a trip to the USA in the spring of 1951, he decided to visit the world’s largest slaughterhouse, Swifts in Chicago. He was curious about how they packaged meat, an area Åkerlund & Rausing had not yet ventured into, but which could yield significant revenues if the right method was found."

"In 1977, the opportunity arises to acquire Galeries Anspach, a poorly controlled chain of stores whose activity is chronically unprofitable. Between 1971 and 1976, the world's leading distributor, the American group Sears Roebuck of Chicago, failed to improve its profitability."

"By this time, we could see that developing large-scale retail prop¬ erties was a numbers game, a question of population (and popula¬ tion growth), income, distances, and roads. We had experienced and profited from this growth in Michigan, but we could see that other parts of the country were growing more rapidly, like California. I began to think about building there. But I faced a huge amount of threshold resistance. The logical place to expand for a company like ours would have been an adjacent area, such as northern Indiana or Chicago. We didn’t have much in the way of experience, contacts, or reputation in California, but it seemed like a natural move for me."

"Inside my home’s entrance hall is another piece of art, this one called Cluster by Chicago artist Lincoln Schatz. It’s comprised of four adjacent TV monitors with a webcam that starts recording whenever there’s motion in the frame. A hard drive holds 25 years of video that plays back on a monitor, superimposing four different feeds—two recent and two from the past. You can simultaneously see something from 25 seconds ago, 25 weeks ago, 25 months ago, and 25 years ago. The background of each video clip is the same, but the content is ever-changing, interweaving people with time, space, and memory in relation to each other. The overall effect is an elegant, timeless montage of family members, friends, and colleagues waving, smiling, and dancing."

"It’s also good to pay attention to tech trends that have the potential to disrupt economic models but haven’t hit their stride yet. Two examples relate specifically to the supply chain industry, where I’ve spent the past 13 years. 3D printing (also called industrial additive manufacturing) will drive seismic change in supply chains in the long term. It’s had a slow start—in the ’80s and ’90s, there was a joke that 3D printing was endlessly ten years away from being viable. Now, it’s being adopted for all kinds of purposes, especially in medicine. Ten years ago, dentists were giving patients a temporary tooth for a couple of weeks while a crown was made from an impression of the tooth. The last time I went to the dentist, he took measurements and told me to hang out for an hour while the office printed my crown. Hearing aids are 3D printed now, too; so are a lot of prostheses. Sophisticated industrial products, including structurally critical parts for jets, are 3D printed out of metal. As the cost continues to go down, I expect that 3D printing will be a growing part of local autonomous manufacturing. That will change the transportation industry, the global supply chain, and the entire geopolitical balance. Currently, the global economy is still based on an outdated model of sourcing cheap labor overseas, especially from China, and then paying a high price to get it transported to the consumer. For example, the goods travel on a plane or ship from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and then the dray containers go by rail to Chicago, where they’re put on a truck and driven to a warehouse in Kansas City. Eventually, the product is trucked the “last mile” to…"

"The dominant mind-set in Detroit, Gibbs discovered, was completely orientated toward high-volume manufacturing and intense specialisation. If you weren’t making 100,000 units of something, nobody was interested. And it was impossible to find anyone who had designed a car, only people who had spent their entire careers designing door handles, fuel pumps, window wipers or other such small pieces of the jigsaw. When they tried to find someone to design the electrical harness — the vehicle’s wiring — the best they could manage in Detroit was a subcontractor who offered to put together a team of 10 people to do the job. That didn’t suit a small start-up company. Gibbs wanted one person who could take responsibility for design and manufacture. Jenkins had to travel to Chicago to find someone, and he came from the whiteware industry."