Beyond the show — Lego · Jørgen Vig Knudstorp · 2004

The company is weeks from its covenants. Do you keep building the entertainment company, restructure the costs and keep everything, or cut back to the brick — and what do you sell to pay for it?

You are thirty-six, a former McKinsey consultant who has been at Lego for three years, and the family has just made you chief executive of a company losing ≈ DKK 1.9 billion a year on ≈ DKK 6.3 billion of revenue. The banks are watching the covenants. The brick patents expired years ago and cheaper compatible bricks are on the shelves. Video games are taking the hours children used to spend on the floor. The previous decade's answer was to become an entertainment company: four theme parks, a television venture, clothing, software, action figures with no bricks in them, and a range that has doubled to around 13,000 unique elements. Star Wars, one licence among all of that, is the one thing that has sold. The designers are proud of the range. The parks are the most visible thing the company owns.

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