Jan Stenbeck

"Many stories were told about Jan Stenbeck. One of them is called The Pie. It goes like this: Jan Friedman, Kinnevik’s media director during the early pioneer years, was looking for an editor-in-chief who would start the program magazine On tv. It was in the summer of 1988. The magazine Z was barely a year old, Tvz had been broadcasting for half a year, and it would be more than three years before the Swedish parliament and government decided to introduce commercial TV in our country. Friedman was set on two candidates, and they were flown to America to meet Stenbeck. It was Bosse Andersson, night manager at Expressen, and Anders Westgärd, who then was a television columnist at gt and later became the newspaper’s editor-in-chief. One candidate flew over in the morning, the other in the evening. On the day of departure, Friedman and Andersson met at Arlanda. Friedman was carrying a pie box in his hand. • - What’s that? Bosse Andersson asked. It was a toffee pie from Erik’s. The star chef Erik Laller-stedt’s restaurant was then located in the basements at the bottom of the Green House, the Kinnevik-owned property in the Old Town where Jan Stenbeck had his private Stockholm flat at the top and the middle floors are furnished as permanent guest apartments for the companies in the Group. At the other end of the same block is Kinnevik’s head office with its magnificent façade towards Skeppsbron."

"The prevailing image of Jan Stenbeck was shattered, distorted, as if this capitalist was made of such strange material that his mere presence in the Swedish machinery caused panic reactions. (It took a while before I learned that his father Hugo Stenbeck, Kinnevik’s founder, in his time caused partly similar reactions within social classes high enough to care.) Rejection mechanisms are interesting. What a society cannot bear tells a lot about that society."

"When Jan Stenbeck was a guest at a seminar at Dagens Nyheter in the early nineties, he gave a speech outlining how new business opportunities arise in a time of technological transformation, like ours. He did it with a small analysis, formed as a variant of the rules for the game rock-paper-scissors. A business renewal’s food chain, according to Jan Stenbeck: • 1. First we have a guy with an idea. • 2. Money beats idea. z. Politics beat money. 4. But - surprise! - technology beats politics."

"Jan Stenbeck inherited a traditional steel and forestry company and transformed it into a modern corporate group in media and telecommunications (Tele 2, ivz, Metro) during the last decades of the 20th century. This required great visions, a lot of creativity and real ruthlessness. Jan Stenbeck was a leader who inspired fiery devotion and admiration in some, and a deep antipathy in others."

"Jan Stenbeck strives to be at Step 4. Where new technology pulls the rug from under political regulations, and new markets open up for new business opportunities - there you should invest, said Stenbeck. For example, where telephony is wrested from the state monopolies’ grips through the commercialization of mobile telephony, or where television is torn from the state monopolies’ grips through falling satellite costs, international multi-channel TV, and cables."

"Jan Stenbeck’s most intense time in the Swedish public life lasted from about 1987 to the turn of the millennium in 2000. He took over the management of the family company Kinnevik as early as 1978, but was less noticed before Kinnevik got into the media industry. The period coincides with another, closely related world-historic upheaval. The time when the walls fell. When the clear division of the Cold War was replaced by the formless networks of globalization. When the few central powers were replaced by many small, competing ones."

"The shivering Bonnier director is onto a theme that recurs in separate director and editor stories about Jan Stenbeck. First you think: Damn, that rich bastard goes on as if he owned me. Then you realize that in some sense he does."

"I knew nothing about Jan Stenbeck’s extensive mobile phone business in the third world, a knowledge gap I shared with most Swedish journalists at the time. The financial journalists who should have had good chances to know about them, chose not to attach great emphasis to them - which only shows that when it came to Stenbeck, ordinary values did not apply. (Imagine if Ericsson or any company from the Wallenberg sphere had started and run mobile phone companies in twenty developing countries, including Vietnam and Cambodia, during the nineties. I believe we would have read many reports about it.)"

"I suspected more than knew that Jan Stenbeck had been at the center of the upheaval we went through from the late seventies to the late nineties, my adult life. The painful migration from woods and steel to mobile telephony and call centers, from the factory society to the staffing company. A transformation also in self-perception: in its own eyes, Sweden has gone from being a different and better country where the steel bites, the value of cars lasts, and the television serves the public utility and the truth, to a country like most others with advertising TV that shows porn after midnight and other fancy stuff that makes people watch."

"Jan Stenbeck is a way into this narrative, a line to follow on the road from the 1900s to the 2000s, from the “mill” to the nomadic camp, to borrow one of Stenbeck’s own images for his organisation. The fact that in Kinnevik’s case, the “mill” is not just a symbol but the very real Korsnäs Sawmill ab - and that the capital flow within Kinnevik directly links this mill company in Gävlebukten with mobile phones and communication industry in the borderless future - it testifies to the almost absurd expressiveness in Jan Stenbeck’s world, the dramatic fullness that makes everyone want to talk about him."

"But in the spring of 1997, I didn’t even have a real clear idea of what Korsnäs was. I hadn’t driven through the forests and felt the mesmerizing, stunning power of mile after mile of well-groomed company forest. I didn’t know that Korsnäs borders Sandvik, so the forest and steel Kinnevik, which Jan Stenbeck inherited from his father Hugo and gained control over in a fight with his sisters, was a real small kingdom, a principality, also geographically."

"MTG boss Pelle Törnberg says that Jan Stenbeck’s basic idea, an entrepreneurial effort on an industrial scale, has meant that Kinnevik under him has been driven in a way that is far from modern management thoughts."

"- It requires that you are on the verge of being crazy to drive such changes as Jan Stenbeck has driven, says a former Kinnevik director. Take a crazy billionaire in such a situation and let him compete against a civil servant-run company. The crazy billionaire will win."

"The questions I have followed and tried to answer during the work are: What has Jan Stenbeck done? Why was he so despised for it? And why in the end did it make him so successful?"

"That Jan Stenbeck was portrayed with skepticism is perhaps not so remarkable. His change projects have been risky, how the future would turn out was really unknown. He also says himself that it is normal for a guy like him to sooner or later go broke. But for a long time, there was a meeting of a dull, secure, unimaginative disinterest that, as a Swede, you can easily be tempted to characterize as typically Swedish, but probably better understood as an expression of a universal village mentality: the dangerous indifference of established truths and accepted beliefs to signals that do not fit into the pattern."