Subject:
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TLG and people who love Lego
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.dear-lego
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Date:
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Sat, 23 Jan 1999 14:20:20 GMT
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Reply-To:
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lpien@iwantnospam.ctp.STOPSPAMcom
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Viewed:
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1115 times
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Dear TLG:
Your current policy seems to be that to get to a certain point in the
corporate hierarchy, you need to be Danish.
That's fine, and it's certainly your perogative. But I feel you'd be
better served by a different selectivity.
Please ensure that the people that work their way through the hierarchy
are people that, in addition to having good business skills, actually
LOVE the product. That is more important in a specialty firm like yours
than their ethnicity.
Your latest missives are giving evidence of having been ghost written by
folks that may have business savvy, but could care less about the
product itself. Further, I'd say most of the Danes I've interfaced with
don't seem to have that love of the brand, either. The underlings do, or
at least a lot of them do.
Take the US specialty model designers. They all love the brick. But do
their bosses?
The best S@H reps, the ones that we cherish special relationships with,
love the brick. Go high enough, and their bosses are Danes who see TLG
as the only Danish game in town, not as a special thing.
Certainly the fellow I talked with at LIC last night didn't seem to.
My Danish friend at LIC was adamant that Town Jr. (or easy build as he
called it) was where the rest of the lines were heading. He said that
it's selling fine and is NOT the cause of the losses, but would not say
what was. He did not see why the fact that the spaceport rocket nozzles
are one piece instead of 3 was an issue to anyone. He did not understand
what the adult fascination was with the product. He did not think that
the increase in violence in the product lately is a disturbing trend,
nor did he even buy into non violence as a core TLG value. He had no
interest in learning more about us or what we do or why. He did not see
what the issue was with 4561 and asked why we cared whether it had train
windows. He did not see why we want better parts packs.
I bet he doesn't even use the product much himself.
If these are the people that make decisions, TLG is doomed.
Why does this matter? No love == no understanding of what will and won't
work, or sense of doing the right thing. Your road back is to market to
and build on your core strengths, not flail around with flash and
peripheral stuff or lose sight of your core values.
The railroads in the US fell into this trap, run by a bunch of people
who thought razors and raisins could be sold the same way. Company after
company fell prey to marketing moves. Amtrak finally became more
sucessful when it was run by a railfan. The big railroads now are run by
execs who LOVE the business, and at their level it shows. However middle
management disdains the fan (or "buff"), won't hire them to be
engineers, and then wonders why they can't attract rank and file to a
long hard job with crazy hours that requires you to be away from your
family a lot. (kind of like my job, I type this in the NW WorldClub in
MPLS since my flight last night got to GR, could not land, then came
back to MPLS almost out of fuel after 3 hours of bouncing around
vertically and laterally while holding. But I digress)
IBM fell into this trap, but was saved by someone who KNEW that the
first thing he needed to do was learn what it meant to be an IBMer, and
to learn what the IBM products were all about. So he had techies and
managers come and talk to him for months until he got it. Lou Gerstner
didn't know jack about computers when he arrived but he does now and it
shows in his every move, and IBM is better than ever. Apple fell into
this trap too. It took Jobs to turn things back to their roots.
Do I need to go on with more examples?
TLG, you're a family run company. Don't give that up. Don't strive to be
a public company driven by earnings and quarters. Do what's right. Do
what you believe in. You can afford it.
If you truly believe that kids today are changing away from your
product, fight back. Don't change yourself to give in to it, come up
with products that draw kids in but enable them to move on.
Well, on the upside I got some playing cards and some of those rubber
brick erasers at LIC.
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