The LEGO story

One of the most overused metaphors in the world today is that of LEGO bricks. I’ve heard it all - unbundle, de-link, breakdown, build-up, etc often accompanied by a picture of LEGO bricks.

Okay, I’ll stop.

But in all this management-speak what we’ve happily done is forget about the real story of LEGO. It isn’t one of pivoting and unbundling. It’s a story of the relentless pursuit of craftsmanship and perseverance from 1932.

Ole Kirk Christiansen took over and ran a woodworking business which then burnt down. He rebuilt it. Went out of business. started manufacturing toys. Factory burnt down again. Rebuilt it again. Bought a plastic injection machine. Started making building blocks.

He and his family kept building, innovating, iterating, and improving the designs and built an empire. Today LEGO employs 16,000 people and is worth 8 Billion USD.

More importantly, it has brought joy and play to the lives of hundreds of millions of children through the idea of interlocking bricks.

This documentary captures the ups and downs so beautifully, I recommend you sit down with your family and watch it this weekend. There is a lot to learn from the LEGO story.

Most importantly the story shows the beauty of fine craftsmanship. It takes years to become good at something, years more to become exceptional.

Since I want this week’s writing to focus on the idea of craftsmanship, I’d love to end with a quote from the book Shopclass as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford:

“Today, in our schools, the manual trades are given little honor. The egalitarian worry that has always attended tracking students into “college prep” and “vocational ed” is overlaid with another: the fear that acquiring a specific skill set means that one’s life is determined. In college, by contrast, many students don’t learn anything of particular application; college is the ticket to an open future. Craftsmanship entails learning to do one thing really well, while the ideal of the new economy is to be able to learn new things, celebrating potential rather than achievement. Somehow, every worker in the cutting-edge workplace is now supposed to act like an “intrapreneur,” that is, to be actively involved in the continuous redefinition of his own job.”….

“…most people take pride in being good at something specific, which happens through the accumulation of experience. Yet the flitting disposition is pressed upon workers from above by the current generation of management revolutionaries, for whom the ethic of craftsmanship is actually something to be rooted out from the workforce. Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because one wants to get it right. In management-speak, this is called being “ingrown.” The preferred role model is the management consultant, who swoops in and out, and whose very pride lies in his lack of particular expertise. Like the ideal consumer, the management consultant presents an image of soaring freedom, in light of which the manual trades appear cramped and paltry.”

Until next week…

Also can’t get enough of LEGO memes.