| |
LEGO North America President Emphasizes Corporate Responsibility
By Mara Lee
January 7, 2015
While the history of LEGO Systems Inc. in Connecticut is at least in part one of
a steely-eyed decision to move jobs to Mexico to save money, the group president
on Wednesday emphasized the gentler side of capitalism at the billion-dollar toy
maker.
Søren Torp Laursen, who declared that after 28 years with the company, “I have
LEGO plastic in my veins,” said he was fortunate to be a leader at a
family-owned business.
That’s because, he said, it’s better to be family owned in tough times than
“having to answer to sometimes pretty ruthless shareholders.”
Laursen did not paper over the job reductions in Enfield in 2007, which cut the
local staff at the North American headquarters from about 650 to about 360. But,
he said, with steady hiring in the past three years, the payroll has grown to
about 750 year-round workers and nearly 150 seasonal call center workers.
That’s still down from the peak in the 1990s of about 1,200, but Laursen told
the 400 attendees at a Connecticut Business and Industry Association event
Wednesday: “The average pay rate is three times higher as it was in
manufacturing.”
LEGO is looking to fill 45 jobs in Enfield now, in marketing, finance and other
administrative positions.
Laursen told the audience that a dozen years ago, the Danish-based company lost
$300 million in a single year and was at the brink of bankruptcy.
“We’d lost our way,” he said. It’s not that LEGO was wrong to try to develop TV
series, computer games and the like based on the LEGO product — LEGO has video
games and TV and movies now — but he said they were wanting to do too much too
fast.
After laying off 1,100 people around the world and selling majority stakes in
LEGO theme parks, the company rededicated itself to learning what its customers
wanted from LEGO sets.
That wasn’t the only strategy change, he said. The company also changed its
approach to retailers. “We were too arrogant selling to them” before the crisis,
he said. Now, sharing revenue with large stores is not just the company’s
practice, but it’s one of four priorities that management measures relentlessly,
he said.
The other priorities include creating quality products, protecting the
environment, and maintaining workforce morale. Laursen told the group that by
projects such as building windmills in Germany, LEGO is on track to be carbon
neutral by 2020. The company’s website says one of its workforce initiatives is
to improve diversity, and to promote more women into top positions.
Laursen said: “My bonus is based on these four promises, not on how much money
we make. Most other companies do it the other way around.”
Laursen showed the trend of growing sales and market share at LEGO, but said the
work is far from finished. He said “70 percent of our business comes from the
Western World where 30 percent of the future growth is going to come from.”
Laursen said the company is investing heavily in marketing in China and Latin
America and Mexico.
Source: The Courant
-end of report-
|
|
1 Message in This Thread:
- Entire Thread on One Page:
- Nested:
All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:
All | Brief | Compact
|
|
|
|
