Former Volvo CEO Pehr Gyllenhammar was instrumental in turning the Swedish automaker into the company it is today. Upon becoming CEO, he wanted to concentrate on making upscale Volvo sedans and station wagons successful in the global market.Courtesy of family
He was known in Sweden as Mr. Volvo. Pehr Gyllenhammar took over as chief executive officer of the Swedish carmaker when he was 36 and led the company for 23 years. Still a relatively young man when he left Volvo, he went on to a successful international career in the insurance business and as a corporate director and adviser to more than 30 companies and organizations, from the insurance giant Aviva to the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
He was also heavily involved in Thomson Corp.’s purchase of Reuters Group PLC, a media and financial information company, to form Thomson Reuters Corp. in 2008. (The controlling shareholder of Thomson Reuters, The Woodbridge Co. Ltd., owns The Globe and Mail.)
Mr. Gyllenhammar, who died at home in Toronto on Nov. 21 at the age of 89, was both a small-l and capital-L Liberal, a man who believed in Sweden’s combination of socialism and capitalism. He was a strong supporter of Sweden’s Liberal People’s Party and was thought to be a potential political leader. He reinforced that view with his writing; he published seven books including Jag tror på Sverige (I Believe in Sweden), in 1973. His final book, Character is Destiny: Reflections on Innovation & Integrity, was published in English in 2020.
In a Reuters podcast that year, Mr. Gyllenhammar said he was pushing radical environmental and social changes at the carmaker long before they became fashionable. He was a fan of corporate social responsibility and spoke out about corporate compensation, saying CEOs were paid far too much.
“The assembly line is very impersonal,” he told Swedish Press, a monthly magazine about Swedish culture. “I changed the production lines so that instead of having 90 seconds per task, like Charlie Chaplin [depicted in the film Modern Times], the workers could see what they were making. This improved both quality and loyalty of the workforce.”
As befitted someone running a car company, Mr. Gyllenhammar insisted on driving himself to work rather than use a company driver. A man from an aristocratic Swedish background who was successful at just about everything he touched, he was known widely by his initials: PG. He was so popular among Swedes that he was voted Sweden’s most admired man for nine straight years.
“Pehr also took a genuine interest in the lives and concerns of others, irrespective of their social standing, which allowed him to connect with people from all walks of life,” his wife, Lee Welton Croll, said. “In business he was far more interested in the insights, experiences and opinions of the shop-floor workers and front-line staff than the opining and politicking of executives.”
Pehr Gustaf Gyllenhammar was born in Gothenburg, Sweden on April 28, 1935, into a prominent family. He worked for the insurance firm Skandia, where he succeeded his father, also named Pehr Gyllenhammar, as chief executive.
He was the CEO at Skandia for just months before his father-in-law, Volvo CEO Gunnar Engellau, hired him in 1970. Mr. Gyllenhammar soon took over as CEO of the Swedish car company, serving in that role until 1983 and as chairman of the board for the following decade.
One of Mr. Gyllenhammar’s early decisions, which upset some Volvo enthusiasts, was the cancellation of the Volvo P1800. The sculpted, if underpowered, sports car was driven by the suave lead character in the television series The Saint, played by Roger Moore.
Mr. Gyllenhammar wanted to concentrate on making upscale Volvo sedans and station wagons successful in the global market, which he did. It is amazing to think that Sweden, a country of 8.7-million people when he left the firm, produced two world-leading car brands: Volvo and Saab. At the time, Volvo produced 208,000 cars a year and was the 27th-largest carmaker in the world.
Mr. Gyllenhammar “was instrumental in shaping Volvo Cars into what it is today,” the company said in a statement upon his death. “Among his many significant and pioneering contributions to our company, he championed a steadfast commitment to safety, enhancing our focus even further on building safe family cars.”
While in the lead role at Volvo, Gyllenhammar insisted on driving himself to work rather than use a company driver.Volvo Historical Archive/Volvo Historical Archive
He left Volvo in late 1993 after a board battle over a failed merger with the state-owned French carmaker Renault.
The fight was the subject of a 1998 business case study by the University of Virginia, which said Mr. Gyllenhammar’s proposed merger was done in by opposition from unions and Swedish banks and pension funds.
“The resignations of the firm’s executive chairman, Pehr Gyllenhammar, and four directors accompanied the board’s action. While many groups and individuals ultimately influenced the board’s decision, almost all observers and participants agree that the main impetus for this change was a rebellion against the merger by a handful of Swedish financial institutions holding a minority of the firm’s shares,” the study said.
Five years after the collapsed merger, and without Mr. Gyllenhammar at the helm, Volvo Cars became part of the Ford Motor Co. Volvo’s car division was later sold to Geely of China, which Mr. Gyllenhammar called a tragedy, saying the company “no longer exists today … having been dismantled at a furious pace without getting anything in return.”
Mr. Gyllenhammar moved to London where he became chairman of Commercial Union, which grew into Aviva, and was Britain’s largest insurance firm when he left it in 2007. He was chair of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 2006 to 2011 where his first job was to save the orchestra from near bankruptcy.
Mr. Gyllenhammar’s connection to Canada arose serendipitously. On a flight from Copenhagen to London, he met Dr. Croll, a psychologist who grew up in Ottawa but who is also an American and British citizen. The couple were married in Stockholm in April of 2013.
“We shared the same values, interests, and had complementary professional lives, which afforded us unique insight and perspective into each other’s professional worlds. I earned my PhD in industrial and organizational psychology at 26,” Dr. Croll told The Globe in an email. “Pehr’s professional world was literally my métier, and I was able to understand and support him on work-related issues and challenges that few could relate to.”
The couple’s daughter was born in January of 2016, when Mr. Gyllenhammar was 81. Three years later the family moved to Toronto.
“Our move to Toronto in 2019 was due to a constellation of factors: Brexit meant the way we had previously divided our lives between Stockholm and London was no longer possible. Pehr’s principal clients were based in Toronto, and the tone and direction of U.S. politics under Trump made relocating to the U.S. unappealing to him,” Dr. Croll said. “Pehr was happy to move to Canada, a country he had great respect for and believed shared many core values with Sweden.”
Mr. Gyllenhammar found his adopted country different from Sweden, though.
“The cultures are very different. The population in Canada is more international than almost any other country. You have people from the Far East, the Middle East, Asia, from everywhere really,” he said. And the man known as Mr. Volvo harboured some bitterness about what became of the company he ran for almost a quarter of a century.
“Sweden has many advantages and very good technology, good workmanship and loyal people so in that sense I still think it’s a good country,” he said, “but on the other hand I lost my appetite when they dismantled what I had built.”
Mr. Gyllenhammar was an athletic man, played tennis to a high standard, was a scratch golfer until a few years ago and was a keen sailor. His wife described him as competitive and fearless.
“A lover of the sea, he was a passionate yachtsman and an exceptional ocean racer. He raced for years and won many Swedish and international competitions, including Cowes. All of his boats were named Amanda and were differentiated from one another using roman numerals. Even after moving to Toronto, he continued to enjoy sailing on Lake Ontario during the summer, albeit at a more leisurely pace than during his racing days,” Dr. Croll said.
Mr. Gyllenhammar leaves his wife, Dr. Croll; their daughter, Barrett; four children from his first marriage, Cecilia, Charlotte, Oscar and Sophie; and eight grandchildren. His first wife, Christina, predeceased him.
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