SLT

"At the same time, he heard about the Malmö company AB Lito & Kartong, which had previously yielded good profits. Among other things, the company had managed to outcompete SLT in the fight for deliveries to the Tobacco Monopoly, which was the country’s largest packaging consumer. However, the company had now run into financial difficulties after the owner, Gustav Olsson, had been fined heavily for false declaration. Moreover, Lito & Kartong had quite immediately lost the contract with the Tobacco Monopoly, after it was revealed that Olsson had bribed his way to it. Since the Tobacco Monopoly was the company’s biggest customer, the financial loss was extremely noticeable."

"Ruben’s great effort during the deflation that followed the depression was that, with Carl Ramström’s good memory, he insisted that none of SLT’s companies were allowed to buy more paper and cardboard. Instead, they should report to him what they had in stock. When a company then needed more paper or cardboard, they had to turn to Ruben who could then inform them about where in the conglomerate the material was available. In this way, Ruben essentially emptied SLT’s various stocks without anyone being allowed to replenish as long as the deflation curve did not flatten out. This action saved the conglomerate a lot of money: when the crisis was over, paper prices had dropped by half. Through the successful procurement policy, Ruben began to gradually strengthen his influence within the conglomerate. But not only that; he was also about to marry his fiancée of several years."

"At the beginning of 1923, the small family moved to Gothenburg, where Ruben immediately immersed himself in his new work tasks. The managers of SLT’s Gothenburg company, Melin, Gothenburg Lithographic and Hugo Brusewitz AB, felt threatened and did what they could to oppose and ostracize the energetic young manager from Stockholm. Moreover, they found it quite humiliating to take orders from someone who was a couple of decades younger than themselves. But Ruben took their resistance calmly. He knew that he had Carl Ramström’s support, and he was aware that his ideas about Scientific Management were something for the future. He had decided to implement the necessary measures to bring order to the business at any cost."

"Rubens and Törnqvist’s thesis impressed the head of the Taylor Society, Professor Person, so much that he offered Ruben to continue as a PhD student with him. He would get 18 months of fully paid studies at the institute. Ruben took the offer and quickly decided to go home, sort out his business, and resign from SLT."

"It was anything but how he had envisioned his career when he chose to stay home instead of returning to the USA. The career that had previously been straightforward was now slowly going downhill. Becoming more and more despondent, he was forced to realise that knowledge and competence alone are not enough to build a career, but that it also requires the ability to handle the power play within a company. Ruben had spent nearly ten years at SLT, years that now felt wasted. He had no doubts that with the help of his network he could secure another top job, but his career had still been braked in an unpleasant way. In an interview at the end of the 1970s, Ruben described the period as “the toughest in my life.” The major bright spot was that the couple had another son, Sven, who was born in 1928. But the joy of Sven was short-lived; after a few years, it turned out that Sven was intellectually disabled. Ruben suffered a brief, yet serious, setback."

"Strengthened by successive salary increases and increasingly interesting tasks, Ruben remained in SLT. During the depression of 1920–1921, Ruben understood that in Carl Ramström he had a kin in terms of the effects of inflation on businesses. When inflation was at its worst during World War I - at times the inflation rate was up to 40 percent - Ramström decided that no goods in stock should be accounted for at higher values than they had when the war broke out. In this way, he had built up a fund “behind the inventory” that was not visible in the accounting. Carl Ramström made sure that the board never found out how the inventory values were reported. If the partners found out that there were assets that were not visible, they would demand the corresponding amount in dividends, he feared. Instead, he dampened the board’s dividend appetite by giving each member a brand new Cadillac as soon as the economic situation had stabilized. If Ramström’s measures had not succeeded, there would not have been any buffer when the depression struck in 1920. Ramström’s action probably saved SLT. When demand fell during the depression, the group could ride out the crisis thanks to the fund."

"The SLT conglomerate was formed in 1913 by merging a number of family-owned printing houses. It was not actually a true conglomerate but rather a price cartel among the involved companies. They acted independently and under their own names. The conglomerate management couldn’t do much if the owning families objected. So, the name SLT was merely a designation of the umbrella organization. Later calling this a conglomerate was just a way to mask its true purpose, which, of course, the competitors realized. Among them, SLT was known by the nickname “the Trust.”"