Upon First Looking Into Gårdlund’s “Atlas Copco 1873–1973”
This is a story about… air compressors. Hey wait a minute, where are you going?
All right, maybe not everyone shares my interest. YOUR LOSS!
Because this 400-page tome recounting the history of Swedish company Altas Copco from 1873–1973 is a page turner. It is a tale of bankruptcies and deceit, bad-ass miners who could wield a pneumatic drill like a fountain pen, genius engineers and risk-taking executives, and marketing that actually had something unique to talk about, the so-called “Swedish Method.”
I came across this book randomly and, perhaps, cosmically. I was scanning the shelves of a “lending library” in the den of a large hotel, where typically the books consist of dusty bestsellers from long-ago that serve more as decoration than something you might pick up and read. And there, as if illuminated by the sun’s rays, was a book spine that was, for me, spine-tingling.
As a business-to-business advertising copywriter working in Sweden for several years, I had come to admire the outsized success Swedish companies had in exporting their products. With a population of just 10 million people, the country has long punched above its weight. Today top Swedish companies include Tetra Pak, Ericsson, Spotify, H&M, Volvo, IKEA and coming in at #2, Atlas Copco. Yep, it’s more valuable than IKEA.
The universe had meant me to find this book. Published in 1974, how long had it been sitting on that shelf, unread and unloved? It’s not exactly a Colleen Hoover novel. Or even a dusty old copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
That’s not to say any expense was spared in its making. It’s as lavishly created as a book can be, one that’s not a coffee table book, anyway. It’s full of photos of the company’s key employees and innovative advertising through the years, with smartly rendered technical illustrations that tell the story of how the products have evolved. The research and writing that went into it are nothing short of scholarly.
The introduction is written by Marcus Wallenberg, part of the third generation of the family that controls many of Sweden’s largest companies. His grandfather, A.O. Wallenberg, founded Stockholms Enskilda Bank in 1856 and was one of the three founders of Atlas in 1873. Atlas was created to produce railway equipment, for which there turned out to be little need. So in 1890 it was reorganized in part by Marcus’ father, Judge Marcus Wallenberg. The new company built diesel motors and had a smaller sideline of compressors and compressed air equipment.
Diesel motors, long unprofitable, were discontinued in 1948. So it turned out that the company that started out manufacturing railway equipment and then diesel motors was really a company of another kind, one that made pneumatic products. Adapt or die. They adapted. And the decision brought massive global success. Today Atlas Copco has a market cap of US$57 Billion.
The state of the world after the war helped. Swedish industry escaped destruction and its mining industry had learned much about drilling in hard rock, as the country had built underground facilities to protect people and operations from the possibility of air warfare.
In doing so, it helped perfect the “Swedish Method,” using lightweight rock drills with bits of tungsten carbide, together with “pusher legs” that made the company’s gear much easier for operators to use.
The Swedish Method was so effective that customers could not believe that the practical demos performed by drilling masters in mines and tunnels were for real. The book mentions a case in Belgium in which three successive skeptical layers of management appeared, to see it with their own eyes.
American companies, their primary competition, were slow to react and had a heavier, less effective product. And got their lunch eaten.
Atlas Copco also created “engineering reports” of the drilling tests between the U.S. and Swedish approaches and sent them to the mine’s top management, clearly laying out Atlas Copco’s economic advantages. And, in a lovely touch, they were written by the mine’s own engineers.
Maybe I’m wrong about how many people this book would appeal to. For all I know, it is as popular in certain Swedish circles as A Man Called Ove. Maybe it’s passed from engineer to engineer in the air compressor community. After all, it’s kinda of “How We Did It” book. How we took on the world and won.
Perhaps preserving its past helps a company navigate the present, both by communicating lessons learned and how its company culture came to be and why it matters. And the present for Atlas Copco is good—it just celebrated its 150th anniversary on February 1 of this year. It has 49,000 employees in 70 countries, customers in more than 180, and in 2022, an operating margin of 21.4%.
In addition to Torsten Gårlund, the authors include Ingvar Janelid, Dick Ramström and Hans Lindblad.
Never let a lending library go unexplored. You never know what’s waiting for you. Whoever left it for me, thanks. I’ll put it back for the next person.
