"Brick by Brick" takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory.
"Brick by Brick" reveals how LEGO failed to keep pace with the revolutionary changes in kids' lives and began sliding into irrelevance. When the company's leaders implemented some of the business world's most widely espoused prescriptions for boosting innovation, they ironically pushed the iconic toymaker to the brink of bankruptcy. The company's near-collapse shows that what works in theory can fail spectacularly in the brutally competitive global economy.
It took a new LEGO management team - faced with the growing rage for electronic toys, few barriers to entry, and ultra-demanding consumers (ten-year old boys) - to reinvent the innovation rule book and transform LEGO into one of the world's most profitable, fastest-growing companies.
Along the way, "Brick by Brick" reveals how LEGO:
- Became truly customer-driven by co-creating with kids as well as its passionate adult fans
- Looked beyond products and learned to leverage a full-spectrum approach to innovation
- Opened its innovation process by using both the "wisdom of crowds" and the expertise of elite cliques
- Discovered uncontested, "blue ocean" markets, even as it thrived in brutally competitive red oceans
- Gave its world-class design teams enough space to create and direction to deliver
built a culture where "profitable" innovation flourishes
Sometimes radical yet always applicable, "Brick by Brick" abounds with real-world lessons for unleashing breakthrough innovation in your organization, just like LEGO. Whether you're a senior executive looking to make your company grow, an entrepreneur building a startup from scratch, or a fan who wants to instill some of that LEGO magic in your career, you'll learn how to build your own innovation advantage, brick by brick.

LEGO is one of the world's best-loved and most familiar brands, adored by generations of children. What is less well known, though, is how close this iconic company came to total collapse in 2003. Brick by Brick is the compelling story of a Danish family-owned company that enjoyed decades of success before its inability to keep in step with a rapidly changing market brought it crashing to earth. It's also the story of an extraordinary recovery. As disaster stared them in the face, the management of LEGO embarked on an audacious and innovative plan to turn their fortunes around, and then painstakingly implemented it. Today, the company is riding high once again, and enjoying results that are the envy of their competitors. Granted unprecedented access to every part of the LEGO Group, David Robertson not only charts each twist in the company's story but explains precisely what went wrong and how it was fixed. His clear-sighted analysis will prove invaluable to all those who want to understand how companies can not only ride the storm of change, but benefit from it.