Gustaf Douglas

A founder with great heart

Gustaf’s courage to go his own way, sometimes against the tide but always with compassion, honesty and a genuine commitment, and not least patience, is behind Latour’s fantastic success story.

Interest in people, listen and care about others, respect their uniqueness. If there is something that characterized Gustaf as a person, it was his humanity. Helping the most vulnerable and finding people to develop with, runs like a common thread from his childhood and early youth to the successful group of companies he created, with over half a million employees today. With a genuine interest, he engaged employees at all levels in the companies he was active in. Gustaf understood that education and training under a positive leadership and encouragement can make people grow and do amazing things. It became an impor-tant guiding light when he recruited leaders for his companies, who in turn carried forward this view and other important values in their businesses.

Curisosty, regardless of whether it concerned people, techniques and companies, or other enrich-ing subjects such as art and literature, was also something that Gustaf stood for and that characterized his deed. He learned from his mistakes and dared to take risks, but above all, he understood the importance of keeping up with the latest developments, as a person and as a company. Continuously investing in R&D, with the ambition of offering products that are slightly better than previous versions, has permeated, and continues to permeate, all of Latour’s holdings.Gustaf early witnessed how great technology leaps and market events quickly could change the conditions for a business. Having a keen sense on trends, understanding how different factors link to each other and, not least, having full transparency in the value chain and being a part of the operations, in “reality” as Gustaf said, are important insights he conveyed and which we took to heart.

But the leading star we perhaps strongest associate with Gustaf is his long-term perspective. Maybe he was trained from a young age in long-term thinking by growing up in the countryside, where returns on forest and land required a large portion of patience. The often difficult consideration, to try to see beyond what we can see, is something that we have learned from Gustaf. This means investing with care, building with caution and humility, with no other goal than to always become a little bit better, for employees, owners, customers and not least the society. What today is called sustainable development is thus what was Gustaf’s strategy from the very beginning of Latour’s history. Gustaf’s memory will continue to inspire and guide us. Latour will honour his legacy with his spirit – in a responsible, long-term and sustainable way. And we will of course continue to act like Gustaf in business, to do them with the heart but calculate properly with the brain.

The friends at Latour