Kinnevik

"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."

"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."

"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."

"To the question of why he himself had not moved on, Pelle Törnberg answered that he was still having a “fantastic journey” at Kinnevik. The concept of “journey” is central to Kinnevik’s self-understanding, both shareholders and directors talk about the fantastic journey they have made: a shift from the old world to the new."

"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."