When Swedish newspapers complain of government bureaucracy or badly muddled industry, they often wind up saying: "What's needed is a Nicolin." The man who has entered the Swedish language as a symbol of the shake-up and the clean sweep is tall, squarejawed Curt René Nicolin, 42, one of Sweden's brightest young businessmen and the chief troubleshooter for the family that controls or persuasively advises more than half of all Swedish industry, the Wallenbergs. Says Banker Marcus Wallenberg: "Nicolin has a sense and a feel for management."
Nicolin bosses one of the Wallenbergs' most important firms, an 80-year-old electrical-equipment giant called ASEA (pronounced ah-say-ah), which is Sweden's equivalent of General Electric. ASEA not only produces a long list of products that range from giant generators to locomotives, but controls 26 subsidiaries that include Electrolux (vacuum cleaners) and STAL-LAVAL (steam and gas turbines). Sweden's biggest private employer with 32,500 workers, the ASEA group last year had sales of $336 million and earnings of $11.5 million.
Caught Eye. The son of a government forestry worker, Nicolin started his career as an engineer for STAL 18 years ago, before it merged with LAVAL. By the time he was 32, he had won recognition as head of the team that developed Sweden's first jet engine and commercial gas-turbine. He became STAL president in 1955, did such a good job of making the company cost-minded that he caught the eye of Marcus Wallenberg. ASEA was tops technologically, but its organization had become fat and unwieldy. The Wallenbergs moved Nicolin in to remake the firm.
Nicolin sold off unprofitable operations, reorganized divisions along product lines, reduced costly inventories and held back on hirings in order to reduce the white-collar staff by 8.2%. Result: the parent company's profits nearly doubled in two years. While accomplishing this, Nicolin was also lent out temporarily by the Wallenbergs to become president of the sick Scandinavian Airlines System. Using the same management techniques that were working at ASEA, he almost immediately cut SAS's losses of $193,000 a day. After nine months at SAS, he returned to ASEA, leaving behind an airline so revitalized that this year it is expected to fly in the black.
At the Timeclock. Nicolin begins his work day with an early-morning run, then punches the timeclock at ASEA!s, Vasteras headquarters just like other employees. He is on the move at least half the time keeping up with work in ASEA's 18 plants in Sweden and six abroad. He takes home paperwork but does not like to. "The crucial problem for today's businessman," he says, "is to find the time to think, and I try to reserve time for thinking."