WILLIAM HEATH ROBINSON would have felt at home at one of Indutrade’s many factories. The English cartoonist, who drew outlandishly elaborate machines that performed simple tasks, could have made imaginative use of the endless variety of valves, hydraulic hoses, couplings and other parts churned out by the Swedish engineering group.
The illustrator—and indeed his American counterpart, Rube Goldberg—would also have admired how Indutrade structures itself. The parent firm, listed in Stockholm, sits atop 200 varied subsidiaries, so loosely bound together that little more than twine is involved. Disparate businesses have their own management, staffing policies and brands. Indutrade is no minnow, employing around 5,000 people, but it does so without a central personnel department, for example, trying as much as possible to leave its firms to set strategy and run operations. Its bosses have resisted the modern management fad for making their underlings collaborate incessantly (see Continue reading
Source: Business and finance http://ift.tt/1QoekO7
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