
Laura Meyer Ahlström: Sustaining a 170-year Legacy Through Storytelling
From Women in Family Business by Women in Family Business
May 9, 2025 · 38 min
About this episode
Laura Meyer Ahlström discusses her role in sustaining her family's 170-year legacy through storytelling in a global family business.
Maintaining cohesion and connection in a vast, globally distributed family business while honouring its 170-year-old history is no small feat. Yet for Laura Meyer Ahlström, Family Functions Manager of Finland’s Ahlström Corporation, a multi-generational enterprise with over 420 family members, fostering unity and connection through the art of storytelling is a gratifying challenge. Laura’s connection to her family’s past deepened during childhood visits to their ancestral home in Norrmark, Finland, where she uncovered historical letters and photographs. These discoveries revealed the powerful resource the family archive represented and how it could inspire and excite both current and future generations. Today, Laura harnesses this rich legacy — blending tradition with innovation — to unify the family’s voice and articulate its values across generations. In this episode, Laura Meyer Ahlström reflects on her role as Family Functions Manager for Ahlström Corporation, a global leader in fibre-based specialty materials. She shares her experience using the family’s films and biographies to create multilingual narratives that resonate with and unite family members at home and abroad…
People in this episode
Guest: Laura Meyer Ahlström
Topics covered
- family business
- storytelling
- legacy
- entrepreneurialism
- multilingual narratives
Keywords
- family functions
- Ahlström Corporation
- storytelling
- legacy
- multilingual narratives
- entrepreneurialism
- family cohesion
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Ahlström Corporation
Places: Norrmark, Finland, Finland
More episodes of Women in Family Business
- Kim Samuel: Leading with Belonging · May 22, 2026 · 58 min
- Riham Fathy Ellaw: Leading Modernisation in a Traditional Business · March 27, 2026 · 41 min
- Women in Power: Lived Realities of Leadership in Family Enterprises · March 8, 2026 · 35 min
- Nadine Karadag: Climbing the Corporate Ladder, Honoring Family Legacy, and Building Startups · July 19, 2024 · 34 min
- Christina Wing: The Art of Having Difficult Conversations in the Family Business · April 23, 2024 · 40 min
- Samira Zakour: Flexible Mindsets and the Development of Leadership in a New Era · February 23, 2024 · 31 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Women in Family Business podcast page.