Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry

Some 4 years ago, while cleaning our children's rooms, my wife dropped a Lego train, and the rarest thing to the utterly robust Lego happened: a little component broke off the train. It turned out to be a critical little part, making the whole train unusable. Having to explain to a 4 year old that his train was broken is nothing to look forward to as a parent, yet buying a whole new train set is unreasonably expensive as well. Our local toy store could not help out, but were kind enough to give us a Lego customer care number to call. Unassumingly we called them, having no expectations really. After all, who were we kidding, 1 component out of the zillion components Lego produces. And after all, we were just one of their millions of customers; why would they care...? We explained them what happened, explained the piece and the train model, they jotted down our name and address, and that was the last we expected to hear from it.Three weeks later a little envelope arrived. Adressed to my son (4 year olds love getting letters). It was a personalized letter from Lego to him, explaining how sad he must have felt when his mother had dropped the train. Therefore, Lego was glad to provide him with 3 new parts, no costs. And a free membership to the periodic Lego magazine.My jaws dropped. Not only did Lego totally outperform our expectations, they seemed to defy all logic. In the age of call centers and their associated customer carelessness, automation, mass production, depersonalization and standardization, they managed to do the exact opposite. It made my son and me life time fans of the company.This book is about how Lego manages to be so exceptional. Not by some wild eccentric leadership fad, but by a disciplined approach in their ways of working. Focused especially on Lego's innovation culture that developed after their near-death at the start of the century, the account stands for much more than innovation. It stands for a company with a soul and a deep-rooted belief that it wants to support children in their desire to explore, build and create. Written in a very pleasant style, it provides an in-depth account on Lego, based on a 5 year extensive study by the author David Robertson. It's highly inspirational, excellently documented and very convincing, and now gets me to understand the question how they managed to do that, which puzzled me since the day we received the spare parts for my son's broken train.

This book is about Legos. It shares the peaks and valleys history of the company from the beginning to now. The focus is on the businessprocesses of how the company lost its financial way and the painful steps necessary to recreate itself. I was fascinated to learn how theybegan to use feedback of adult and children users of legos as necessary in the development of products. Some of these adults and childrenwere hired. I think adults who have used Legos would be interested in the book. I think the book could be very valuable to companies whowant to restructure their companies. At the end of the book there are business websites where information is offered for businesses. Theyalso list websites where you can play with others.

I sponged this book up in a couple days, having looked a year ago for a good overview of the company and finding none. I was pleasantly surprised to see Brick By Brick available this year, and more so when I confronted the well-researched, well-articulated lessons Robertson seeks to tease out by focusing on the topic of innovation management throughout.In places I feel redundancy sets in and the book could have been 15% shorter (though, as Robertson drives home in the LEGO Universe retrospective section, I appreciate that Robertson probably felt he could have tinkered more but chose to ship sooner rather than later, and the book is a fine first release).I can vouch for the concepts the book champions as I have now been fortunate enough to visit Billund twice myself working with a team, who has onboarded me to the innovation process as I've sought to add value to their digital strategy.Thanks to Robertson's articulation, I was able to find LEGO parallels for many of my company's own lessons learned, from uncontrolled innovation that breeds Jack Stones, to untimed innovation that breeds too many great things to be sustainable no matter how you swing it.As one other reviewer points out, LEGO should now be compared more closely to Apple than to other toy makers. It's only fair given the global cultural impact they have and are continuing to have. As Apple is to our experience with digital interactions and content, LEGO is to our experience with physical building and cognitive development.

I thought the story was a bit dry and difficult to follow. I did it was worth reading to understand how Lego came back from the brink of bankruptcy.

First, a caveat on this review. I am a literal card-carrying AFOL (Adult Fan of LEGO), so my review is biased. I read this book more because it was about LEGO than as a business book, even though it is a business book first, which happens to examine an iconic toy company. That said, there are two main things that I enjoyed about the book.One is that it gives much of the backstory to the creative process as to where those wonderful LEGO products come from. My son and I have remarked over many a LEGO set "These guys are geniuses" for their ability to use parts for different purposes and for their ability to use LEGO bricks to create things as varying as simple toys, large scale models and iconic buildings.The second is the book looks critically at how business truisms and slogans work in practice. The authors list a number of business slogans that LEGO tried to apply leading up to their desperate years of the mid 2000's and analyzes how these worked in practice. The reader should come away with a better understanding of how good general business ideas still have to fit with the individual company and their competitive environment. There are in-depth examinations of why certain products succeeded and why other seemingly promising products failed.