Welcome to Edition #109 of Gorick's newsletter, where Harvard career advisor and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Gorick Ng shares what they don't teach you in school about how to succeed in your career.
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→ Read time: 4 min
STORY
How LEGO saved itself from collapse
You may have heard of LEGO—the colorful bricks that have sparked creativity for generations.
But did you know that LEGO nearly shut down?
It’s 2003. LEGO has been “on a binge of innovation”: The then-56-year-old company had created a host of new products, from jewelry to video games, and even introduced ventures like amusement parks.
These new launches “were successful”—but then the company found itself “virtually out of cash.” The company was losing money, dealing with negative cash flow, and facing a serious risk of debt default that could lead to the company falling apart.
In the midst of chaos, LEGO hired Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a 35-year-old former consultant who’d previously written a report on what LEGO needed to do to save itself. Immediately, Knudstorp started digging into the data. He implemented a “Consumer Product Profitability system” to figure out what products and areas were making money and which ones weren’t. What did he find?
Many of LEGO’s initiatives, while flashy on the outside, were quietly bleeding money.
His response? Knudstorp sold off theme parks, slashed unprofitable product lines, halved the number of unique LEGO components, and doubled down on what worked: toy brick sets and story-driven themed box sets like Bionicle LEGO.
The result? LEGO didn’t just survive—it became one of the most profitable toy companies in the world.
What does this mean for you?
The next time something isn’t going as planned, pause and look for a pattern. It might just tell you what to do next.
UNSPOKEN RULE
Be the one who notices patterns
At LEGO, Knudstorp didn’t fix the company by dreaming up new toys. He fixed it by looking at what was already being done—and picking apart what worked from what didn’t.
The result?
They were doing too much—and most of it was a waste of time.
When it comes to career building, knowing how to spot patterns is a superpower.
How do you identify a pattern?
Try filling in these blanks:
1. “For the past [time period], I’ve noticed a pattern where [this happens consistently].”
- E.g., “For the past 6 ad campaigns, I’ve noticed a pattern where the voiceover videos have a 23% higher click-through-rate than the music-only ones.”
2. “The exceptions appear to be when [this happens].”
- E.g., “The exception appears to be when the videos use calmer, slower music.”
3. “I hypothesize that [we could try this] and I could test this by trying [this step] and [this other step] over the course of [number of tests / length of time].”
- E.g., “I hypothesize that people would like videos that combine a voiceover and the calmer, slower music and I could test this by showing 3 versions of a video ad over 1 month: (1) voiceover + calm music vs. (2) voiceover only vs. (3) calm music only.”
4. “If my hypothesis holds, then I recommend [this next step]. If it doesn’t, I’ll try testing [this other test] since [rationale].”
- E.g., “If my hypothesis holds, then I recommend using the combined voiceover + calm music format. If it doesn’t, I’ll try changing the visuals since there are some modest differences in what we show that might impact our results.”
Pattern recognition isn’t only useful if you work for someone else. It’s also useful if you want to start your own thing! (Just take Doug Lemov, a former high school principal turned entrepreneur.)
Be the one who spots the pattern!
See you next week for my AMA,
—Gorick
What’s an “unspoken rule”? They’re the things that separate those who get ahead from those who stumble—and don’t know why. You can learn more about these rules in the workplace in my Wall Street Journal bestselling book called—you guessed it—The Unspoken Rules.
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Sources:
- “on a binge of innovation”
- “were successful”
- “virtually out of cash.”
- “Consumer Product Profitability system”
- Jørgen Vig Knudstorp in 2016
- Knudstorp sold off theme parks, slashed unprofitable product lines, halved the number of unique LEGO components
- toy brick sets and story-driven themed box sets like Bionicle LEGO
- “While LEGO flirted with bankruptcy in 2003, Bionicle accounted for 25 percent of the company’s total revenue.”
- one of the most profitable toy companies in the world.
