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Dear Jake,
Long letters ask for long answers. Let me give you what you asked for ;-)
Jake McKee wrote:
> While we certainly have communication issues, I'm not sure this was
or is the
> source of all our problems of past and late. Certainly it plays a
role, but
> we've had plenty of other issues too, not always things you can see
on the
> outside :)
I always try to think of "mistake" instead of "malevolence" when a
problem occurs somewhere. And when I think "mistake" I have to think
"why did it happen?" and "what can be done to prevent it from happening
again?". I try to apply these principles of my day-to-day job to
occurences and evntes happening at TLC. Whatever else this analysis
shows, at the "why did it happen?" stage there was almost always a
communication problem involved.
Example: I talked to a person who was in charge of one of those building
corners in Legoland Günzburg. One of my questions was: "Don't you have
an awful amount of 'loss' here?". An interesting talk erupted around
this issues, like parents asking wether they could somehow purchase what
their kid built, etc. One aspect was that certain parts 'vanish' more
often than others, because they can't be bought in the shops. I asked
wether they have told someone about this, and I got the answer that they
tried numerous times, but nobody up there listens. Everything is planned
and done in Billund, and information from their own employees at the
'customer front' is not heard. -> A communication problem.
Example: PaB Walls: Typical question by customers "Why don't you have
these or that parts?". Typical answer: "We have no influence on what we
get sent from Billund". A typical customer question I overheard numerous
times was for minifigs. At least in Oberhausen, they now have two or
three glasses of random minifig parts, but this took ages to come true.
-> a communication problem.
Example: A german private television announced a "Lego-Show" somewhere
in 2003 (IIRC). Although the trailer shows that TLC had certainly some
involvement into this, neither Kate (Who was our CD rep back then) nor
anybody else at the company we asked seemed to know about this. -> a
communication problem.
Example: When I bring up the topic "Lego" while talking to toy shop
owners/resellers, they usually react very negative about the company and
their relation to resellers. They actually use swear-words when
referring to Lego as a company in more than 80% of the contacts I talked
to (Quote: "Lego ist ein Scheiß-Laden"). One reseller even said that he
would love to throw Lego from the shelves, but was forced by some
contract with his chain to keep it in the shop. A regular complaint is
"The right hand does not know what the left hand does at this company".
I haven't seen an improvement of this situation in the last years. -> a
communication problem?
By the way, the resellers learned about the colour change from their
(angry) customers, not from your company. -> a communication problem.
Example: The List of Universal Colours. The last list you gave us listed
some colours that are not 100% identifyable. So others and I asked for
clarification, i.e. is the "beige" you listed really the colour we call
"tan"? What the heck is "nougat" and "light nougat"? No answer so far
from you. I asked Jan when I met him in the 1000steine chat about this,
and he said that he was not allowed to give us the colour numbers of the
colours we wer in doubt about. But there is already a published list at
peeron and other places with colour names, numbers, definitions from
Lego, IIRC given to the community by you. And suddenly, the Community
Development guy is not allowed to clarify this single piece of
information? -> a communication problem.
Jake, how many more examples would you like? I closely follow the small
and big things happening in and around TLC for years now, and - as I
said - most problems stem either from "nobody listens to us" or from
"nobody told us" _within your company_. Some stem from inexplicable
instances of "I'm not at liberty to talk about this" - and I can
understand that there are a lot of things that a company representative
can not talk about, I'm just talking about inexplicable items here. I
don't know how you would classify these instances, but I see them
clearly as communication problems. And when these problems occur
regulary, I see that as a sign of communication breakdown. The heavy
compartmentialisation (SP?) and internal competition between
subcompanies in your group is not going to help this situation, either.
> Communication is always difficult in any group of people larger than
about 3.
> I've worked at 5 person shops who had major communication issues. Get
a group of
> 2 or more people together to talk about anything, and you're going to
end up
> with some level of communication problems. I'm sure German kids play
the "phone
> game", right? (Where you try to get one sentence message correctly
from person 1
> to person 10... and never comes out). Communication would be perfect
in any
> organization if it wasn't for those pesky humans :)
Of course communication problems occur more offen in bigger groups. That
is perfectly normal. So the goal must be to do something about this.
Kate once talked about a project of straightening up the whole
front-to-the-customer, i.e. tighter integration of all people and groups
that have any kind of customer relation. Is this still on the list of
things to do?
> Can we do better, can we improve our communication? Of course. Always. No
> question about it. We work on that every day.
Yes, this is seen and acknowledged. And this is a job that never ever
ends...
> But in all seriousness, I'd challenge you to come up with an example of a
> company of this size (or any size) that does not have communication
issues. It's
> the nature of being part of a group of humans who lives in multiple
countries on
> multiple continents in multiple time zones, speaks multiple
languages, and
> develops multiple products and projects.
I never said that a company this or any size will be without
communication problems. But the amount of problems stemming from
communication issues seems to be quite high at TLC in comparison to
other large (and way larger) companies I deal with. If it wasn't that
striking, I would not bring it up as an issue. And I got the impression
over the years that TLC or its management does not notice that there is
a problem, therefor I try to bring this issue up as persistent whenever
it strikes again.
> In some ways, the perception of "bad communication" is the result of an
> increased and deepened relationship between the company and the
community.
> Because you, the community members, have some incredible access deep
inside the
> company (via Community Development), you sometimes get information
faster than
> parts of the company like the field sales reps or call center reps!
Yes, acknowledged, we get some information quite early, and I'm not
complainig about this. But you see the problem that other people in
charge of customer communication like field sales and call center people
are not properly informed about things that are going to hit the
customer. And way to often they learn about potential issues not from
the people in the company who caused them, but from the customers and
resellers. We got aware of the bley issue by people who opened sets
containing oddly-coloured bricks. And this change to the core system
obviously came from the sky over night, as nobody seemed to know about
this. No sales rep, no call center, and no community development group,
either. Yes, for you, this issue may be past (although it will haunt you
for ages to come), and some information structures surely have been
changed in the aftermath of this, but I would not bet significant parts
of my body that something like this will never happen again, universal
colours and promises from corporate high to and fro.
> Like every company on the planet, the LEGO Group's goal is to
generate revenue.
> After all, I need (as do all my colleagues) to be able to put food on
the table.
> I don't work for free, and I doubt you do either. LEGO Direct,
however, was based on Brad's mantra: "Marketing {with} our
> consumers, rather than {to} our consumers". This principle, together
with my own
> mantra ("Everybody goes home happy") guides all of our community
development
> activities and interactions.
Yes, this is noticed, and I noticed, too, that you are making (even
significant!) inroads with it. My personal shopping preference is in
other directions, though (I prefer Bricks&Mortar any time over an online
presence, despite I can't be classified as a technophobe). I wouldn't
mind to be able to purchase more S@H exclusived in the brand stores, as
an excample. But basically, LEGO Direct is trying to sell something to
the customer, so I consider attempts to learn what the customer wants
not as the Big New Thing, but a absolutely basic business goal. The
baker and butcher around the corner do the very same thing or else they
would not be around for long. If learning about the customers desires
and wishes is something radically new at TLC, then they have made a
significant mistake in the past, though ;-)
> Personally, I think we (community and LEGO) have made some amazing
progress to
> this end since this launch to achieve this goal of developing a
relationship
> with the community. The fact that we can even have this open, frank,
honest
> conversation is proof of that, don't you think?
I sincerely hope that this relationship is improving even further.
Customer relation beyond complaints handling is still something that
does not come easy to TLC, and a lot of trust has been burned as cheap
firewood in the past. And trust is important in any relationship. For
many of us, the trust in many aspects of the product still stands, but
the trust in the company is more or less gone.
I, personally, take everything you or Jan or Kate or whoever else from
the company say or write with an extra large grain of salt. Not because
of a personal distrust, but because nobody knows what the company behind
you is up to next. You've been caught by bad surprises as cold as we
have been, and neither you nor us can be absolutely sure that this will
never happen again.
> But I dunno... maybe I'm too close to the situation. Are you (or
anyone else)
> saying that the community/company relationship hasn't really achieved
anything
> since the formation of LEGO Direct 5 years ago?
This is not what I said or meant. A lot of things have improved since
then, but other events struck this relationship more than hard. It is
propably not far from an overall plus minus zero. This is not a fault of
Community Development, on the contrary, just a summing up of all
relevant factors. The communication has definitly improved. The offers
to us have definitely improved. The trust in the company is gone, though.
>> Community Development is something good,
>> although a lot of aspects are still unclear
>
> Glad to hear you like the idea of the Community Development Team - that's
> encouraging to hear.
> I'm a member of the Community Development Team, and work daily with
the rest of
> the team, as well as my boss who runs the team. I'm happy to answer
any and all
> questions related to the Community Team, all you have to do is ask.
So... what questions can I answer for you?
It might be a strange question, but what excactly are you and your team
members doing in the Community Development? And I don't ask for
something like "Improving the general relation between TLC and AFOLs",
but more like how are you achieving this? It would be quite interesting
to hear things like "This week, I went to X and talked to this local
AFOL group about their next event in Y.", or "We had a discussion with
the Z group about new products and how the AFOLs might react to them",
or "We had a lively discussion with the Ambassadors about this and that
topic.". Something like that. It is quite understandable that you can't
divulge everything, and this is OK, but your job is propably more than
appearing at some events presenting new sets and writing the occasional
LugNET post ;-) - and most of this is too far behind the curtain. How
about a kind of Community Development Blog?
And how about a Community Development FAQ (even if it is at Legofan.og
;-)? Who are you, what are your goals, what is your (teams) position in
the company, what you can do, and what you definitely can't, information
about the team members and how to contact them, something like that.
OK, I think thats all for an answer at the moment. I sincerely hope that
this helps you to understand my issues and position a bit better. I was
and I will be there to help the product and the brand. My methods may be
odd, my style might be harsh sometimes, but the overall goal is to
improve the situation.
Yours, Christian Treczoks
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: CEO-Letter // The answer
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| In lugnet.color, Christian Treczoks wrote: Christian, thanks for your indepth response. We can have discussions much better when the posts are calm and logical like this. Just to make sure it's clear, I'd like to point out that you're absolutely (...) (19 years ago, 10-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego, FTX) !
| | | Re: CEO-Letter // The answer
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| (...) HUGE SNIPAGE (...) as jake replied to this post and i must agree, this is the right way to comunicate with the lego company. others are more likely to listen to you if you are calm, cool, and you take your time to think about what you want to (...) (19 years ago, 10-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: CEO-Letter // The answer
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| I'm not going to get into color change discussion, but Christian brings up a few points about other stuff that I'd like to take a few minutes to respond to. (...) While we certainly have communication issues, I'm not sure this was or is the source (...) (19 years ago, 9-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego, FTX)
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