DAY 211 - WALDENBURG TO BASEL: 21.7 MILES (43,400 STEPS)

19 November, 2011

21.7 miles (Total: 2084.7 miles) –43,400 steps (Total: 4,480,401 steps)

It was a long journey back from Mulhouse in France to Waldenburg in Switzerland where I had ended the previous day’s walk. Having had what is euphemistically called ‘a good dinner’ the previous evening in Mulhouse, I wasn’t in a peak state of fitness to take on this tough stretch into Basel from the Jura mountains. The company of Tom and Stephen kept my spirits up as they were shuttling back and forth along Route 12, occasionally searching out shorter routes and always on the look-out for good places to eat.

When I am walking on my own I know that the timing of the first break will dictate the pace and progress of the day. If I can keep going for 3-4 hours then when I stop I will be over half-way and will probably be able to keep going to my destination. If I need to stop after 2-3 hours, then it is probably going to be a 3-4 stop day and at this time of year that almost certainly means walking the final couple of hours in the dark.  Somewhere around Bubendorf after two and a half hours I found that I couldn’t manage to walk much further without a break and co-incidentally that coincided with another great restaurant.

The news that Tom and Stephen brought however, was of even better fare ahead in the form of IKEA! That would be a couple of hours away, so we decided to just have a drink and a chat. I settled down in the warm, cosy lounge with my drink and didn’t want to move despite encouragement from Stephen in particular. Eventually I did heed the encouragement and got going again, but it wasn’t flowing, it was a struggle. The reward however was to make it to Prattein on the outskirts of Basel and to IKEA. I loaded up on meatballs, chips, a chocolate donut and a small bottle of red wine. It doesn’t take much to keep me happy….

I make no apologies for liking IKEA. I like the company. I like the atmosphere and I love the food. Why? When I was at business school in the nineties we did a case study on IKEA and I found it so impressive. IKEA has a complex corporate structure, but essentially it is a not-for profit charitable foundation, which at USD $ 36 billion, is actually larger than the Bill & Miranda Gates Foundation. As a result of it being a not for profit, as opposed to my business which was a ‘not intentionally not for profit, it pays no tax. The downside of the foundation route is that you can’t easily sell it for some mega sum to a private equity house who haven’t the first clue how to run it.

The IKEA company was founded and is still run by Ingvar Kamprad, from which the first two letters of IKEA come. He founded the company at the age of 17 and patiently built it up over fifty years to its current size of 260 stores. He has an aversion to borrowing and believes in controlling costs, despite having a declared current net worth of $6 billion (analysts note that if he chose to change the not for profit foundation into a for profit business, then he would be the richest man in the world with wealth approaching $100 billion).  He lives modestly, works hard even now into his eighties, drives a fifteen year old Volvo, flies only economy and encourages all staff to use both sides of a sheet of paper. He sums up his business approach as “It is not only for cost reasons that we avoid the luxury hotels. We don’t need flashy cars, impressive titles, uniforms or other status symbols. We rely on our strength and our will!”

If the current malaise in capitalist economies need a vaccine to cure it of its excesses, which are on the verge of killing it stone dead, then the vaccine would be IKEA. Control your costs. Avoid waste. Borrow from yourself. Be tough on yourself so you can be generous with your customers. Put something back into the ground from where you took it for future generations. Motivate your staff by values rather than productivity. Be patient and build over a lifetime. Be content with less. And most importantly stay away from bankers and things you, and they, don’t understand.

The company ethos isn’t all that I love about IKEA, there are two other things: First, it is the sense of excitement of seeing young couples and families wandering round the store looking to make a pleasant home without racking up massive debts by buying goods they don’t need with money they don’t have—in this sense the values of the founder flow through the corporation and into the customer, creating a ‘social good’. Secondly, that IKEA reminds me of our very happy early family life when we would visit the store at the Metro Centre in Gateshead with similar aspirations to current customers.

A final thought on the current trend of the ‘Occupy movement’, who are currently making their presence felt around the world as they protest against the bankers and corporate greed which have robbed the new generation of the chance of work. I understand where they are coming from, but wouldn’t it be great if instead of camping out in city squares, a few seventeen year olds decided that they were going to follow the IKEA model of corporation to provide a counter-balance to the consumer culture, the debt culture, and at the same time in the future, provide a job and an income for 127,000 people. The need of the hour is not for more wannabe Chez Guevara’s, but for a new generation of Ingvar Kamprad’s.