my great-uncle’s country home, owing to the expected German bombardment of Gothenburg. Like the much larger Pied Piper operation in London, children in geographically vulnerable cities like Gothenburg were relocated to rural areas in Sweden, as were some 70,000 Finnish children. My days in my great-uncle Oskar’s home were happy ones, and I grew deeply fond of him. Oskar Gyllenhammar was a lovely man and a very successful and interesting person.
Born in 1866 on the Gotland Island in the Baltic Sea, some sixty miles from Sweden’s southeastern coastline, Oskar Leopold Gyllenhammar began his career as a bookkeeper and office manager of the Ystad Sugar Refinery and was later a member of the Board of the Nordic Trade Bank 1917–1925. His biography in a Swedish collection of historical business profiles also lists him as founder of the Scandinavian letter pigeon union. But he is best known for his invention of a rapid-cooking porridge that made him the effective founder of the Swedish instant oatmeal industry as we know it. I was too young to be impressed by my great-uncle’s business success or prosperity—though I do recall feeling the silver tea he always drank was a notable beverage, I think what drew me to him at the outset was his capacity for listening. When I talked to him, he gave me his full attention, as one would with an adult, rather than listening as a kind of patient concession to a child. Even after we returned home to Gothenburg, I continued to visit him each week and always looked forward to spending a pleasant hour in conversation as he sipped his silver tea.
My father did not quite share my high esteem of Oskar. He thought Oskar was vain—and perhaps he was, though I do not recall him that way. My father was an enormously modest man, one who shied away from publicity and accolades, and as such he had no tolerance for vanity in others. He was also a person of enormous integrity, independent of thought, well read and well spoken. I admired him, but also differed from him in many ways. Even in my childhood I was determinedly independent as to how I wanted things done, a trait that often resulted in his disapproval. But we had some common ground as well. I inherited his great love for the sea, and like him, my affinity for sailing and racing boats began early in childhood. My father could not afford to buy a sailboat of his own until after the war, and even then, it was not a particularly flashy vessel, but it was sound, reliable, and unobtrusively seaworthy, not prone to accidents or liable to stray off course—rather like my father himself.
My parents had a true love match, which was perhaps more the exception than the rule in those days. I remember their frequent hushed-voice discussions during the war, and of being acutely aware as the war broke out of my father’s fear for my Jewish mother and her family. I’m sure that in part his fear was due to the fact that in spite of its official neutrality, Sweden was in reality accommodating the Nazis by allowing German military transports to travel through Sweden (often by use of their railroad system) and by continuing to export its iron ore to Germany—a crucial element in the manufacturing of German weaponry. Sweden’s willingness to indulge in this level of cooperation with the Nazis gave rise to the reasonable fear that the degree of difference between accommodating the enemy and colluding with the enemy was small. Sweden could well have been a few simple steps from espousing that fascism. My father thought—both then and later in life—that it was scandalous that Sweden had not only stayed out of the war rather than assisting the Allied powers, but also allowed those Nazi convoys through the southern Scandinavian peninsula to German-occupied Norway.
I was happy and relieved when the war finally came to an exhausted end, eager for life to return to normal in spite of the fact that the prewar state of things was less than a hazy memory, as I had been just four when Germany invaded Poland. I believe on some level I understood that things could never return to the way they had been before the war. The sense of unease I had always felt about my own country—which had its genesis in my early childhood listening to my parents talk about the war—never left me. From my childhood on I harbored a fear that there might be a fascist tendency in Sweden that was buried just below the politely neutral surface. And as a Jewish boy, I had seen just how barbaric that kind of fascism could be. It was little wonder my father had been so fearful for my mother. In the agonizing months after Germany’s surrender, one after another of my mother’s family was declared dead, slaughtered in concentration camps. I can recall hearing only of a single survivor—a cousin who had gone to France to work for Radio Free Europe.
Life went on in Sweden after the war, as it did in the rest of Europe. But I would never forget what I had seen and heard, nor did I ever shake the feeling that the cool and politic veneer of a civilized and humanistic Sweden was a flimsy camouflage at best. I had recognized what one could call the truth of my Swedish heritage from those early moments of my childhood. I understood that what was solid ground for me as a young person could change—that beneath the strata of security and permanence there would always be movement. Passive underground rumbling—the kind my parents sensed with Sweden’s accommodation of the Nazis—could in the future erupt without warning into a violent quake into fascism that could leave the national landscape and everything Sweden purported to be unrecognizable.
The nature of a solid place, of the ground of national identity, is tectonic. I think this is a difficult idea for many to accept—the inevitability of upheaval in one’s own back yard. It is an idea with which I imagine my ancestor Mans Andersson was much more comfortable. In those generations, war with Denmark came and went, over and over again. Catholicism, the Hanseatic League, and the Black Death dominated until they dwindled, and the Swedish Empire grew fat until the pendulum began to swing back, and it was starved to the bone. In the Sweden of Mans Andersson, the triumph of the stormaktstid and the tragedy of the Golden King’s death would have been celebrated and mourned with the resolute acceptance of people who were long accustomed to the historical cycles of gain and loss, people who did not always insert a sense of self into the concept of losing a thing or leaving a place.
Perhaps it is that ancient equanimity that is my strongest link to the earliest Gyllenhammars. Having absorbed and internalized my father’s fearfulness during wartime, I may have made my peace with the specter of change. In the decades that followed I developed a fine-tuned sensor for the shifting of plates beneath a solid surface, and a pragmatic attitude about upheaval and departure. It is accepted without saying that structural integrity is crucial to human well-being—and yet the laws of physics dictate that solid and firm structures degrade over time, and orderly systems such as corporations, democracies, and nations grow disorderly. So I learned at an early age that once I could no longer maintain my footing and stand upright in my workplace, or a partnership, or the organizations I helped run, or my nation itself, then I did not hesitate to leave. Whether it was a home, or a career, or even a country, I knew when the moment had arrived when things were beginning to shift and integrity had been lost. And when integrity was lost, it was time to move on to solid ground elsewhere, and I did so again and again without hesitation, or any compulsion to look back with regret.
CHAPTER THREE
Innovation
Innovation (n) mid-15c., “restoration, renewal,” from Late Latin innovationem (nominative innovatio), noun of action from past participle stem of innovare “to change; to renew” (see innovate). Meaning “a novel change, experimental variation, new thing introduced in an established arrangement”.
—Oxford English Dictionary
I am not a person who finds any value in looking at the past to ruminate over what should have been, or what might have been. Nonetheless, beginnings are important, as are all of the triumphs and travails that emanate from them. Aristotle famously said, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” and that is very true, but nonetheless, the sum of a life’s parts is a necessary calculation.
In reflecting on what has been formative my own life, I consider the consequential parts not to be things or titles, but people. When a company or an organization has been the most rewarding, it has always been due to the people that the company or organization brought into my sphere, people I had the privilege of getting to know. That is certainly true of my time
