THE BOLT THAT HOLDS THE IKEA EMPIRE TOGETHER
From the Financial Times
Ingvar Kamprad is no ordinary multi-billionaire. The founder of the Ikea furniture empire travels economy class, drives a 10-year-old Volvo and buys his fruit and vegetables in the afternoons, when prices are often cheaper. Ask him about the luxuries in his life and he says: ‘From time to time, I like to buy a nice shirt and cravat and eat Swedish caviar’.
Mr. Kamprad is one of Europe’s greatest post-war entrepreneurs. What began as a mail-order business in 1943 has grown into an international retailing phenomenon across 31 countries, with 70,000 employees.
Sales have risen every single year. The Ikea catalogue is the world’s biggest annual print run – an incredible 110m copies a year. And Mr. Kamprad has grown extraordinarily rich. He is worth $13.4bn and is the 17th richest person in the world, according to Forbes, the US magazine.
The concept behind Ikea’s amazing success is unbelievably simple: make affordable, well-designed furniture available to the masses. And then there is Mr. Kamprad himself – charismatic, humble, private. It is his ideas and values that are at the core of Ikea’s philosophy.
Best known for his extremely modest lifestyle, he washes plastic cups to recycle them. He has just left his long-standing Swedish barber because he found one in Switzerland, where he lives, who charges only SFr14 for a cut. ‘That’s a reasonable amount,’ he chuckles.
All Ikea executives are aware of the value of cost-consciousness. They are strongly discouraged from traveling first or business class. ‘There is no better form of leadership than setting a good example. I could never accept that I should travel first class while my colleagues sit in tourist class,’ Mr. Kamprad says.
As he walks around the group’s stores, he expresses the feeling of ‘togetherness’ physically, clasping and hugging his employees. This is very uncharacteristic of Sweden. ‘Call me Ingvar,’ he says to staff. The informality and lack of hierarchy are emphasized by his dress style, with an open-necked shirt preferred to a tie.
Mr. Kamprad has had both personal and business battles. He has fought against dyslexia and illness.
One of Mr. Kamprad’s characteristics is his obsessive attention to detail. When he visits his stores, he talks not only to the managers but also to floor staff and customers. A recent visit to six of the group’s Swedish stores has produced ‘100 details to discuss’, he says.
By his own reckoning, his greatest strength is choosing the right people to run his business.
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He is determined that the group will not go public, because short-term shareholder demands conflict with long-term planning. ‘I hate short-termist decisions. If you want to take long-lasting decisions, it’s very difficult to be on the stock exchange. When entering the Russian market, we had to decide to lose money for 10 years.’
Mr Kamprad has been slowly withdrawing from the business since 1986, when he stepped down as group president. He maintains that he is still ‘too much involved and in too many details’, although he admits to a distinct reluctance to withdraw altogether.
The question is: can there be an eternal Ikea without Mr. Kamprad? Does the group depend too much on its founder? Will the empire continue, as control of Ikea gradually moves to Mr. Kamprad’s three sons?
U.S. STUDENTS KNOW WHAT, BUT NOT WHY
by Cathy Tran on 19 June 2012
The first-ever use of interactive computer tasks on a national science assessment suggests that most U.S. students struggle with the reasoning skills needed to investigate multiple variables, make strategic decisions, and explain experimental results.
Paper-and-pencil exams measure how well students can critique and analyze studies. But interactive tasks also require students to design investigations and test assumptions by conducting an experiment, analyzing results, and making tweaks for a new experiment. Those real-world skills were measured for the first time on the science component of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) that was given in 2009 to a representative sample of students in grades four, eight, and 12.
"Before this, we've never been able to know if students really could do this or not," says Alan Friedman, a member of National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. The overall scores on the 2009 science test were released in January 2011, and today's announcement focuses on the results from the portion of the test involving interactive computer tasks.
What the vast majority of students can do, the data show, is make straightforward analyses. More than three-quarters of fourth grade students, for example, could determine which plants were sun-loving and which preferred the shade when using a simulated greenhouse to determine the ideal amount of sunlight for the growth of mystery plants. When asked about the ideal fertilizer levels for plant growth, however, only one-third of the students were able to perform the required experiment, which featured nine possible fertilizer levels and only six trays. Fewer than half the students were able to use supporting evidence to write an accurate explanation of the results. Similar patterns emerged for students in grades 8 and 12.
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"We've got our work cut out for us," says Friedman, who is also a consultant in museum development and science communication.
The computer simulations offer NAEP a much better way to measure skills used by real scientists than do multiple-choice questions, says Chris Dede, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. "Scientists don't see the right answer. They see confusing situations and use methods like inquiry to get meaning from complexity. Science is a domain where paper and pencil is a poor match."
The more the test matches the domain, Dede adds, the less problematic teaching to the test becomes. Interactive computer tasks also allow examiners to speed up processes and eliminate safety concerns raised by having students perform actual hands-on tasks.
Computer simulations will continue to evolve at NAEP, which likes to call itself the nation's report card. Friedman says that so-called embedded assessments—which can provide the ability to track when students make a mistake and what they do to correct it—would be "dynamite information" to have. Keystroke data, for instance, have the potential to provide insight about the reasoning skills that students use to solve problems.
"It may give us a way to reward students who don't necessarily jump to the answer right away but show a deliberate process to get to the answer," says Friedman. It could also identify those students who have learned material without really understanding it. "There is no way to memorize for this test," says Friedman. "You really have to think on your feet."
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