my father

"what you decide happens. If you decide, for example, to get a contract, how you get it may not’be the most logical or elegant method, as long as you get it. And if you decide to be successful, as my father did—you can criticize the way he did it but you can’t question the fact that he did.”"

"Maybe he was too naive or simply too focused on mechanics, and not enough on finances. Throughout his career, my father was considered an extremely good problem-solving engineer, but the people who were controlling the business, whether his employer or his partners, focused on the money side. This left him with a lingering belief that he had been taken advantage of, and that, in turn, left him feeling less than competent. I vowed to avoid ending up like that, with no control, no sense of the business-finance side, and no partner I could trust."

"My father felt an existential unrest and tension most of his life, but he had been truly happy and content the last twenty years, first with my mother and then, after she died, with her best friend. He was a good, decent, and honest man, and I wish we could have really known each other. The formality of my relationship to both my parents still astounds me. Was it me or was it them? That they never, all my life, ever, asked me a personal question seems unbelievable, but is true. It’s equally true that I never asked for advice or ever shared anything about my inner life with them. They set the initial rules, but I never pierced through them, and to this day, it’s still so difficult for me to be open and emotionally available. It’s both a continuing mystery and a sad testament that I’m still mostly incapable of easily sharing my inner life."

"Even though my family has a long history, it has never developed into a dynasty or ownership aristocracy. Ownership has always been linked to land and farms to be responsible for and pass on within the family. This has been done with great feeling, but also with the unimaginative traditionalism that sometimes characterizes the land-owning nobility. For me, the land heritage has been a cornerstone and a driving force for my wealth building. Preserving, caring for, and developing what was given to us was a duty from the very beginning for Elisabeth and me, which I also want to talk about. The chain breaks at its weakest link, something I heard my father speak of in somber moments, and it is a knowledge that has been kept alive and can disturb sleep and deeply worry the soul."

"Ingimar, who had been the original venture’s chairman, was no longer with the company, but when he saw that the new company was making money he wanted to continue this three-way fight, which dragged on for a long time. He went to court saying that the registration of the share transfer between my father and him was done incorrectly. Then he sued, saying that he had never signed the documents. And in a third case he argued that although he had signed the documents, he had not had power of attorney. He threw in one technicality after another, often bizarrely contradicting each other.…"