David C. Robertson
Brick by Brick
ISBN: 978-0-307-95161-8
Like most kids, I grew up playing with LEGO sets. From a random tub of bricks in the late 1980s to several sets from the City line, I loved putting the kits together and building a small town in my bedroom. Like most kids, by the time I was entering junior high, I had mostly outgrown my LEGO sets and had passed them down to my little brothers. Now that I have kids, it’s been fun to help them build LEGO sets that they receive as birthday and Christmas presents.
In Brick by Brick, we learn about the highest highs and lowest lows that the LEGO company went through from founding in a small, rural town in Denmark, into the behemoth that we all know today. From their boom in the 1980s into the early 1990s, to innovation for innovation’s sake in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and financial recovery in the last twenty years, the author pulls back the curtain on what worked and what did not. Since most of the trouble occurred between the time I enjoyed LEGO and my kids were old enough to play with their toys, it was fascinating to read about all the different issues that company had around the turn of the century.
Many of the topics on which I advise entrepreneurs rang true in this book. Innovation and disruption are great when a company is coasting on past success. However, innovating for innovation’s sake many times causes leaders to lose focus. In the late 1990s, the spirit of LEGO leadership for innovation was in the right place, but they lost sight of what made the company successful over the past several decades. Processes that had worked were completely discarded rather than reworked. Major pivots prevailed, while minor iterations went out of style. This caused major problems after a few years and nearly led the company to bankruptcy.
Fortunately, necessary course corrections were made – eventually. A reflexive snap back to rigid corporate structures almost derailed the entire recovery. Threading the needle between the states of complete chaos and complete order is the task facing every startup founder out there who may not be sitting on a pile of money, so they don’t have that “second chance” to try again. Concepts like listening to the customer and slight iterations over wild pivots were not part of LEGO’s toolkit (or most companies’ toolkits) prior to the mid-2000s, even though they are staples of startup-world entrepreneurship today.
This book was an incredibly engaging read. I had a tough time putting it down each evening as I worked my way through the text. If you have a long flight or train ride, this is the perfect book to pass the time. I felt like it was in the sweet spot – not too short but not too long, the text wasn’t terribly dense but was still engaging, and the examples used by the author really brought the main points home.
Overall, 9/10, would highly recommend to anyone interested in the story of LEGO and would like a look behind the curtain to see that even the most well-known brands can have the same types of ups and downs as any other business. As you move through your own entrepreneurial experience in building a company from the ground up, just know that even the biggest players in your market can make nearly fatal mistakes – making the tough decisions is part of any CEO’s journey. Innovation is key to building a lasting company, but innovating for innovation’s sake without a clear goal is key to crashing toward bankruptcy.