Subject:
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Re: Appreciating what TLG and Lego Direct have done for AFOL's
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.lego
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Date:
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Thu, 25 Nov 2004 09:58:48 GMT
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Viewed:
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4539 times
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Scott Lyttle wrote:
> First off, I've observed several times that no matter what TLG does, you're not
> going to be happy. I like to say "you can be part of the problem, or part of
> the solution". So far, I only see you are part of the problem. All I hear is
> gripe, gripe, gripe, and blame, blame, blame out of you.
Sorry that I gave you a wrong impression. One important point is that I
am very straightforward - When I consider something to be a mistake, I
say so. Because the worst thing to do with a mistake is to ignore it in
the hope it might just go away one day. Believe me, it won't. And there
are a lot of mistakes recently to gripe about. The other point is that
you obviously read only the wrong half of my postings...
> Have you ever come up with ideas on how to improve things, and perhaps e-mailed
> Jake privately?
Yes. Several times, on several issues. I offered and gave help and
results (e.g. I translated Jakes announcement for foreign readers, etc).
My main contact person is not Jake, though, as he is responsible for
your side of the pond, not mine ;-) I even communicated with Lego way
before there was a Jake, Kate or Jan to talk to.
> I work in international business. I've found that there are very different
> ideas and methods that differ from continent to continent. For a private
> company to keep this going, and for so long, is a testament to Lego in general.
I work in an international Business, too. And I noticed that Lego, a
company with a product portfolio deeply connected to European style of
living and playing, is struggling very much - too much actually - on the
American market. It is abandoning its European customers now while not
winning American ones, and wasting a lot of resources on both markets by
ignoring the differences. This might soon lead to the use of the word
"testament" in an undesireable way, though.
> Is Lego trying to improve? yes.
Yes, they are. And success is showing. But I doubt that the current rate
of successes vs. failures is getting better, given the fundamental
problems the company fails to address again and again.
> Do they care about their customers? I certainly like to think so.
As I said, they are trying to appeal to the American market, and
increasingly fail to appeal to the rest of the world. Up until the bley
upheaval, they even did not know about AFOLs (except for some borderline
figures in the company), a group of customers that were actually hard to
miss with all their presence and devotion if anyone cared to look.
> Is there still a high quality in the production of plastic bricks? yes.
This I seriously doubt. Wherever I look, be it complaint rates about
defect/incomplete sets, breaking bricks, toleraces increasing, colour
quality issues (Did you really miss the knight bus fiasco?), the quality
went downhill in the last year. Quality is expensive, and with the
pricing level they try to achive in the US (Just today someone in a
german discussion griped about a set being _thrice_ the price here than
in the US!), they have to cut costs. And they certainly did.
> (although you may debate the quality of color mixes--believe me, it's not as
> easy as it sounds to get a repeatable and stable color mix, especially with
> color suppliers--I've worked in plastics manufacturing where color was
> involved). Quick SPC (Statistical Process Control) lesson. Every product, when
> manufactured, has an acceptable range of quality. Sometimes it's good,
> sometimes it's on the low end. The process has to be tweaked continually.
> Given the fact that (as I understand) most of the molding machines are
> automated, it's difficult to sit on one machine and continually watch the color
> (not to mention staring at one color for too long a period will make your eyes
> go crazy--trust me, when looking at two white parts and trying to determine
> which one is "whiter" can really mess you up).
This is one little part of the problem, although modern technology
(Colour calibration systems) can easily take care of this, and
automatically reconfigure a such a process to minimize rejects.
For me, the REAL problem was the way they handled e.g. the Knight Bus
issue by basically stating that the majority of their customers wer too
dumb or to lazy to complain about an obvious mistake, thus making it
none. If you, the customer, were to complain about this, it was you who
was to nitpicky. Customer, go F*** yourself.
> Does Lego make mistakes? Show me a company that doesn't--everybody makes
> mistakes.
Yes, any entity is prone to mistakes. And admitting that one or a
company made a mistake is actually a very honorably act rarely seen.
Other companies that make mistakes try to hide them (bad) or try to fix
them, without drawing too much attention to it (OK). But admitting a
mistake and telling your customers "well, you've got to live with our
mistake, as we don't care fixing it" is IMHO the worst a company can do.
> Does Jake run Lego? Hell no. So stop blaming Jake for every time he makes a
> statement from Lego. Jake is trying to be a true liason and keep the AFOL's
> informed. Are there things Jake can't tell us? Tell me how long anybody who
> works for a company who divulges company secrets will be there. I'm sure that
> there are parts of whatever company you work for that you can't talk about.
> That's part of being a professional.
I don't blame him. If you had read my posts about Jake, you'd know that
I a) appreciate what he is trying to achieve, b) don't trust him like I
would trust a friend, because he is bound not to be fully open (it is
not his fault, and it by no way meant negative. I want this to be read
as a neutral, purely mathematical determination of a trust level. When
he says something, it might be true. Or it might be what he got told to
be true without getting the necessary background information), and c) I
dislike some of his ways to communicate (and have told him so, because
other people disliked these ways, too, and he has improved from thereon).
So I blame _him_ only for _his_ mistakes, like some communication
problems he caused (and later rectified). I don't blame him for the
stupidity of the corporate juggernaut behind him.
> If all you ever do is badmouth Jake, he's probably not going to take your
> concerns to heart. Just like the cliche "you catch more flies with honey than
> with water". It's amazing how much you achieve when you are nice and rational
> about things.
As I said, my basic attitude to Jake is neutral (with some grains of
salt applied to everything he says officially, as I would with every
corporate information outlet). And being a slobbering dog at the heels
of the master, like some other people in this discussion, is not my kind
of thing. Being straightforward and open has proven to be better on the
long run than saying "Yes, Master" and "Of course, Master".
To those who worship "Holy Saint Jake of the Brick" I'd like to give the
reminder that Jake is still human and hasn't been seen levitating in a
glowing halo recently ;-)
> > Yea. I can buy ten shades of pinkish geen-orange lilac now. GREAT! The
> > even introduced new colours sind the bley desaster. But they are too
> > inflexible to return to the old grey.
> Maybe they can't get the old grey from suppliers any more. There is a very
> large ISO and environmental standards push to make things more environmentally
> safe. Maybe part of the process of making the old grey (and not from a TLG
> standpoint-but maybe a color supplier production standpoint) was stopped because
> of it? Yes, it's possible speculation on my part, and we may never know the
> "real" story behind it. We don't know the market forces causing those changes,
> and it's best not to make statements on things one doesn't fully understand. In
> the end, it just makes one self look a little uninformed and stupid.
Well, all these points you just raised about the colour change would be
valid, and even acceptable reasons - and have all beend denied by Lego.
What they told us did not make sense to a lot of people. The main
reasons given were "Good Thinking" and "test groups liked the new
colours more". That the Good Thinking not even involved consultation
with the Legoland model builders sheds a bad light on what they call
"Good". The whole story sounds fishy and incomplete, and this is the big
nagging point. This is one big "Not caring about the customer" issue.
> If you read any of Jake's talk from Brickfest 2004, you would see that he's made
> great strides internally from people not even paying attention to him, to people
> asking him about things. One must crawl before they learn to walk, and then to
> run. (From dealing in international business, I've found that European
> companies are usually the slowest to respond to change.)
The problem is that Jake has to fight internally, that he has to make us
known within the company at all.
And concerning your impression of European companies being slow: just
consider that any European company you are dealing with in America will
have a certain size. And you have to deal with a lot of smaller American
companies, too. But the speed of response to change is primarily a
function of size, thus giving you the impression that we are slower.
Pushing IBM or GeneralFoods into a certain direction is propably not
faster or slower that pushing Siemens or Daimler. And of course, your
"Joes Garage" around the corner is about as flexible to customers'
demands as "Willis Werkstatt" over here - but chances are that you never
heard, and will never hear of "Willis Werkstatt" all your life (Both
names are fictional, of course).
> I understand your feelings, but the way you've been voicing them, they tend to
> upset more people in a negative feeling than being sympathetic to your needs,
> and that is just giving an overall negative effect.
I am fully aware that a lot of people are not used to and therefor
shocked by honest, open, strainght-to-the-point statements, and that
some of them can't cope with people who call a mistake a mistake. I feel
deeply sorry for them, as they have lost a vital communication function.
The worst mistake is always the mistake not found or ignored. Open
communication could have prevented a lot of desasters in the past.
yours, Christian Treczoks
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