Jørgen Vig Knudstorp
Adam Burns:
I know that when you joined Lego was in a degree of trouble, and it had perhaps divested almost to the point of destruction. There was too much kind of stuff going on. How do you now, in your business growth strategy, because the brand is back up and running again, it’s doing incredibly well, which must mean that opportunity after opportunity is coming your way as more and more people again start saying, “Oh, we could do this with Lego.” How do you make sure you don’t repeat those business growth mistakes?
Jørgen Vig Knudstorp:
I think it’s a golden rule when considering business and business growth strategies that most companies don’t die from starvation; they die from indigestion because there’s so much opportunity if you start opening your eyes to it. In fact, one of the major business growth strategy jobs I think is to cut all the wild weeds and stay focused on really building all the branches that are healthy for your business to build on. One of the rules I stick to in my business growth strategy is you can really only build an adjacency to your core business every 3-5 years because it’s such a major undertaking in terms of culture and capabilities. You need to build when you do build an adjacency that if you think that’s how you’re going to build your business is to add adjacencies all the time then I think you’re killing yourself, and that’s where our business growth strategy went wrong in the past. Rather than doing one adjacency every 3-5 years we did three to five adjacencies every year. So I think that’s what nearly killed us.
The other thing that people get wrong with their business growth strategies, by the way is of course people lose focus on their core business as they pursue these new adjacencies that become the new sexy thing to do, and so for me a major paradigm shift is the core business is what is the most exciting, and what we need to continue to reinvent every year and make sure we build our business on in the future. So that’s how I’m trying to get that balance that the core business is what we are most excited about, what we talk about the most, and then we have to use adjacencies every 3-5 years that we wanna pursue and that we wanna lead over to a new horizon to become a mainstay in the core business as well.