Seamless

Appendix 2: A letter from Lars-Olof

Since Anders started his engagement in the family business, a lot of things have happened. His enthusiasm gave inspiration and hope to the company, including staff and owners. All staff took part in ‘brainstorming' meetings and many good things came out of these strategy meetings. A strategy was created for the company and everyone was motivated and continued to come up with creative and useful ideas.

After this the ‘hard work' started, some of it very challenging. The strategy needed quite a lot of investments and early on I understood that many of the objectives would never come to reality. I may have been a boring person in this stage of the change process for the old family business, but I think it was necessary to be the ‘breaker of bad news'. One of the difficult things was that Anders wanted to work on the business, not in the business. He made this statement very early and clearly. I accepted it to start with and encouraged him to stay with his own successful business — Thinque. But sometimes I thought it would have been great if he had worked on the ‘business floor' to understand the limitations and opportunities in our family business.

Over the years there have been a lot of frictions, mainly between Anders and his mother. Sometimes the emerging problems have been easy to solve and sometimes more difficult. I have had a role of being the negotiator and many times I had difficulties. There have been a lot of emotions, based on the ...