Bob Chaundy’s BBC profile (c.2000) underscores IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad’s adherence to the Calvinist work ethic, emphasizing the importance of hard work, frugality, and diligence as virtues reflecting one’s salvation.

A firm Calvinist work ethic was instilled in Ingvar Kamprad from the very beginning.

In 1897 his grandfather killed himself with a shotgun when he could not pay the mortgage on his farm and three years after moving his wife and three children from the Sudetenland.

Kamprad’s widowed grandmother saved the farm from bankruptcy by sheer willpower and hard work.

It was she who infected the young Ingvar with enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler, whose seizure of her Sudeten homeland she regarded as liberation. Kamprad recently apologised for this youthful aberration.