Review of 'Lego' on 'Goodreads'
2 stars
The first few chapters that cover up to the 70s are great, but once we hit the 80s and 90s it really pulls the focus away from the lived experience of the people described, away from the development of the product, and becomes more and more like a corporate brochure.
The print quality is lavish for a regular sized hardback-not too glossy, still fun to turn the pages. But it's the same problem; the Peace Gun (ha, for all of lego's pacifist posturing, they sold a full on working kid sized toy gun as one of their first plastic products!) gets several pages of description, whereas the entire 90s/2000s push towards video games and multimedia is basically glossed over.
Maybe it's just that the 80 and after just don't have enough room. There's vague discussion of the parade of suits walking through the boardroom, but collapses and meteoric rises in …
The first few chapters that cover up to the 70s are great, but once we hit the 80s and 90s it really pulls the focus away from the lived experience of the people described, away from the development of the product, and becomes more and more like a corporate brochure.
The print quality is lavish for a regular sized hardback-not too glossy, still fun to turn the pages. But it's the same problem; the Peace Gun (ha, for all of lego's pacifist posturing, they sold a full on working kid sized toy gun as one of their first plastic products!) gets several pages of description, whereas the entire 90s/2000s push towards video games and multimedia is basically glossed over.
Maybe it's just that the 80 and after just don't have enough room. There's vague discussion of the parade of suits walking through the boardroom, but collapses and meteoric rises in revenue are treated as acts of god with no explanation of what the company was doing right or wrong. There's one gripping section where they were about to do a huge layoff, then revenue surged up and yay, they didn't. No attempt to explain why.
It almost feels like two books. One is a saccharine account of a bygone era and the other is the world weary account of an adult doing adult things. This makes sense, because at end of the day that maps to Kjeld's childhood and Kjeld's adulthood. A lego fan will thrill in the early details of the company's rocky start, but a seasoned business professional will be bored to tears of the second part, and I cannot imagine who else it's aimed at.
One thing that's also fairly disappointing is that it really only covers leadership, not anyone on the creative side. The second part of the book could have been written about any large company, there's nothing that made it especially appealing to the Lego fans that the first part courts.