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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 right
that the communication at the LEGO Company can and should be improved. My only
point is that communication is one of the hardest things for any organization to
do effectively. Heck, my wife and I run into communication problems and we know
each other better than anyone else!
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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.
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So how do you know that the information is not heard? Can you tell me with any
certainy that the information simply didn’t make it to the right ears? Do you
believe that there’s any chance that the information made it through channels
but the idea was declined or is in progress or is being discussed or any number
of other options? What channels did this person use to get this information
across? How hard did they push it?
In a perfect world, an employee would have a single point to drop an idea, and
it would get near immediate reaction and explaination. But we don’t live in a
perfect world. If someone believes in an idea, they often have to push it.
Certainly I’ve witness this first hand as I’ve worked for 4.5 years to hammer
home the concepts of community. If I hadn’t pushed (and pushed and pushed and
pushed...) nothing would have ever been changed.
Based on this one conversation with this person, and without any further
research, facts, inside understanding, etc., I’m not sure that I would agree
either of us know enough to call it a communication problem.
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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.
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If we were to suddenly expand the PaB selection to 4000 elements, we’d be
missing something for someone. There’d be someone coming in and asking for
something not in PaB. That’s the cool thing about PaB - it gets people thinking.
We’ve had problems over the years where there hasn’t been enough of an overall
game plan with certain projects. With PaB, there’s now a real game plan, and
that means that there is more central control than perhaps a local store might
like. Is that bad? Is that a communication problem? Not necessarily.
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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.
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Heh... I’m actually quite glad that you brought this one up. It addresses a
crucial point that I think sometimes people forget.
Kate (when she was working on community stuff), Jan and I are only one person.
We can only find and process so much information in the course of a day. While
Jan and I both try to keep up with as many project/activities/co-promotions/TV
spots/product launches/product status/brainstorming meetings/fan activities/fan
discussions as humanly possible, there’s only so much time in the day.
If a single full-time employee was tasked with nothing more than keeping up with
everything LEGO related happening in the world, they would never be successful
at keeping up.
We do a our best to keep on top of as much information (many of my evenings are
spent on the couch reading fan community and internal Web content), but there’s
simply too much happening to expect any single person to be aware of it all.
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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?
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I’d actually say that you’re right - partially. There are plenty of other issues
here besides communication. We can communicate with toy dealers all day long,
but that won’t solve the issues they’re having. We’re aware of, and working on
these issues.
-- snip --
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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.
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Jan and I are still working on this. I’m not sure it’s a communication problem
exactly, but it’s certainly an internal problem. It’s a long story saved for
another day, but we are trying to get this solved.
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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.
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Then as someone who studies business, and specifically the LEGO business, I’m
sure you can understand that both of those answers are common responses in the
face of upset/anger/confusion/problems/etc.
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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.
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Not sure that I’d agree with you that they’re “problems”. There are times when,
for whatever reason, I’m not going to share something. Trust, as you mention, is
certainly a factor here.
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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.
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I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to change your mind on these issues, so I’ll not
try. Again, I’m not sure that I agree that me not being able to share things
sometimes is as much a “problem” as it is reality. We have competitors at the
walls all the time, and sometimes it’s just bad business to be 100% open with
everything we’re doing.
As far as “heavy compartmentialisation”... well, sure we have some
compartmentalization. What company doesn’t? In the past it’s been much worse
than it is today, and we still have improvements to be made. That said, from
what I’ve read/seen at other companies, we’re actually doing quite well in this
sense. I have friends who work at medium sized companies who can’t talk to other
departments without first going to through their boss. And as far as internal
competition, I just don’t see this at all (at least in the way I think you mean
it).
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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?
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This concept touches many many things we are doing and working on. (Including
this very message I’m typing! :))
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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!
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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.
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Well, there’s only so much that each of us can effect though, right? We should
probably focus mostly on what’s important to you personally, and what I’m able
to effect personally.
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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.
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Of course, that’s reality. Sometimes there are mistakes that happen and we’re
aware of them as soon as we make them. (And in those cases, we should certainly
spread the word, as often happens) But in most cases, we don’t realize a mistake
has been made until someone tells us something went wrong. If people were able
to identify every mistake they made as soon as they’d made it, they’d be able to
instantly correct it and there’d be no mistakes ever happening.
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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.
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Yes, but part of the mistake that was made (and admitted to, and apologized
for...) was that the team that implemented this didn’t properly inform or
solicit feedback. They didn’t do this because they didn’t realize it was
necessary. Of course this was wrong, and of course, they now realize their
mistake. But the mistake was caused because in their minds they didn’t think it
a decision worthy of discussion.
As I’ve stated many times, there has been an important lesson learned for many
of us internally out of all of this, and I’m already starting to see more
feedback, discussion, and notification about things happening internally.
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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.
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Let me help you out on this one - things like this absolutely WILL happen again
(although hopefully not with the color issues!). The fact is, things go wrong
when you’re dealing with a system/community/group as large as this. Mistakes
happen, things don’t go according to plan, problems exist. That’s how life
works.
That said, I’m working every day to increase the awareness of the fan community
within the company, but also the company within the company within the fan
community. (As shown above in the responses to the examples you give) This
increased awareness will hopefully lead to a decrease in bad suprises and
mistakes. Avoidance is crucial, but reactiveness if often more important.
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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.
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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 ;-)
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This gets into an entirely philisophical and bigger conversation about the core
nature of business. I was talking just last night to an industry friend of mine
and was saying that a big side effect of the Industrial Revolution was that
business began a path of disrespecting the consumer. This wasn’t any one
company, but the overall concept of “business”. The pushing of goods, where
consumers either bought or didn’t buy. With the grow of the Internet and a
massive explosion in consumer choice in the last 10 years or so, the shift began
to happen where consumers began to demand interaction with the companies they do
business with. Some companies have responded wonderfully, others have responded
but take a while to turn fully around, and others have not responded at all. I
personally think we fall into that middle category. A company isn’t some big
concept in the sky (a belief that was also a side-effect of the Industrial
Revolution), but a group of people. So to change a company is to change a group
of people. That takes time.
OK, back on topic.
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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.
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I completely and totally agree that trust is a huge deal. It’s what I’ve based
my entire relationship (and it is a relationship) with the community on - this
idea of an open and honest communication. I think the relationship between the
company and the community overall (clearly not you personally, as I understand)
has improved 100-fold in the last 5 years.
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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.
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True, and again, there’s going to be problems in the future. That’s the only
given in this situation. But for every bad surpise, we’ve delivered 50 bits of
information or insight. For every major mistake, we’ve made 100 small successes.
That in no way excuses the the mistakes and surprises, but I do think it’s
important to keep things in perspective a bit.
(And no, I’m in no way saying that the color change wasn’t a huge huge deal)
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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.
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So you’re saying that overall, we’re not any further along (overall) that we
were 5 years ago? I sure hope not.
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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?
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I actually have a blog over at http://www.bricksonthebrain.com/blog. I started
this up a while back, but it was only getting a couple readers, so the time vs.
value equation didn’t encourage me to continue (since I was doing most of the
writing at night or during lunch). But perhaps it’s time to try it again.
What does everyone think? Would this be of interest?
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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.
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Sounds like a good blog post :)
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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.
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Christian, after our 2+ hour conversation in person in Germany last year, I
really feel like I have a solid understanding of where you’re coming from. Posts
like this one are highly effective in opening a true discussion. Hopefully my
responses will help convince you that perhaps we’re not as clueless as you think
we are ;)
Jake
---
Jake McKee
Community Liaison
LEGO Community Team
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Message has 7 Replies:
 | | Reply 1: The Building Corner Person
|
| Dear Jake, I hope you don't mind me splitting the replies into several parts, in order to reduce the complexity. (...) Actually, I can't give you more details that could be labeled "evidence", as I didn't bother to ask back then. I was just talking (...) (19 years ago, 14-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
| | | Reply 2: The PaB walls
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| (...) Of course there would still be complaints if the PaB walls features thousands of elements, beacause there are still some parts missing for the one or other single customer. But: I brought the example of minifigs for a reason. According to PaB (...) (19 years ago, 14-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
| | | Reply 4: A simple case of communication courtesy
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| One short note beforehand: If you consider this reply mindless criticising, tell me so. But it is intended to hint at something you might not have noticed and thefor be unaware of. (...) It is indeed nice to hear that this is still being worked on. (...) (19 years ago, 14-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
| | | Reply 5: Miscellaneous
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| (...) Indeed. But they are usually linked to communicationwise upset/anger/confusion/problems. Some kind of reaction or non-reaction must have provoked this "nobody listens", "nobody told" impression, don't you think? (...) And I fully accept that (...) (19 years ago, 14-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
| | | Reply 6: Issues vs. Mistakes
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| (...) I, personally, am not the topic. I am just pointing to the issues where Lego might have a problem. If I don't get an answer to a question, I have to think that this might happen to other people, too. And they might be more upset or confused by (...) (19 years ago, 14-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
| | | Reply 7: Businesses, Customers and Trust
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| (...) Accurately observed. (...) I wouldn't credit the demand of interaction to the explosion in customer choice - on the contrary. If the customer can readily choose from a range of products with sufficient quality the one that fits his needs, an (...) (19 years ago, 14-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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| 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 (...) (19 years ago, 10-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
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