Last Friday the global workforce at the LEGO Group all stopped whatever they were doing and joined in to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the company that has brought play and creativity into the hands of millions world-wide.
It was a time of reflection for all of us as well as a great celebration and I was particularly pleased to be joined by several prominent members of the Brickish Association here at our party in the UK, where the weather for once was all blue skies and baking hot - a freak incident amidst solid months of torrential downpours. Talking to these fans one truly is reminded of the fact that despite many people seeing LEGO as a toy, it really is a creative material and the only limit to what can be created is your own imagination. These are individuals, many with serious high-powered jobs - whose sheer brainpower is at the heart of their day-to-day working life as well as it is at the heart of their LEGO hobby. So is LEGO the thinking person's creative material of choice? I'd like to think so for sure.
The motto for the LEGO Group has always been 'Only the best is good enough' and that has kept us on steep path of continuous self-improvement in terms of product innovation, quality as well as play value - but it is also an ethic, which I see disappearing more and more from society around me. Not just from so many companies, intent on making a quick buck by cashing in on consumer's inability to tell the difference between one product and the other, their lack of information or even society at large, where image and spin is what wins elections as this article details, not rolling up your sleeves and getting things done. It is a curious world where as we have lost the safety of jobs-for-life in companies passed down from father to son, we are increasingly also losing the accountability that comes with that. We as employees are quite happy to stand by and witness shambolic behaviour by our colleagues and employers, comfortable in our knowledge that in a year or two, we will have moved on and our decisions and theirs, however unethical, will not stick to us, our reputation as individuals will not be tarnished. Shareholders, more intent on dividends, don't care about the means that earned the profit, as long as it's there and companies are getting so desperate about paying dividends we are seeing them taking out loans from banks for no other reason than to hand the money to their shareholders.
As LEGO still remains a family-owned company, we still adhere to the same principle of 'Only the best is good enough', originally articulated by the founder of the company, because whether we like it or not - longterm that is exactly what it comes down to. The Kristiansen family have a name, a reputation, a history and a responsibility to children all over the world as they see it, and all of us who work for LEGO feel the same. We like to stand for something good in the world, and that only comes from taking a long-term view and carrying the responsibility for your actions and behaviour rather than copping out for short-term profit.
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