Kjeld Kirk

"Importantly, Kjeld Kirk had learned about market segmentation at IMD. He believed that LEGO should create different LEGO products for different ages and interests, so the products would more precisely meet the needs of each child."

"Kjeld Kirk therefore defined three areas: • Toys for children under school age, to be marketed under the name DUPLO • Construction toys up to age 16, which would carry the LEGO System label • New products for play and hobby with the working title XYZ"

"Kjeld Kirk therefore defined three areas: • Toys for children under school age, to be marketed under the name DUPLO • Construction toys up to age 16, which would carry the LEGO System label • New products for play and hobby with the working title XYZ"

"By the threshold of the 1980s, LEGO had grown so large that neither Godtfred nor anyone else could manage to explain the quickly growing number of new employees about the values and attitudes in LEGO culture. Kjeld Kirk therefore hired three employees tasked with arranging a series of seminars for the leaders, called LUP (LEGO Univers Partners), thereby strengthening self-understanding and culture. This later became a leadership course—“The IMD Experience”—which created a common understanding of strategy, organization, market situation, and LEGO’s unique foundational ideas."

"With Kjeld Kirk’s entry into the management, LEGO was effectively undergoing a new generational shift. But it did not proceed peacefully. Godtfred and Kjeld, as father and son, had many emotions involved in their discussions with each other. There were almost daily heated discussions or even outright arguments, so that Godtfred’s wife, Edith, often had to intervene between the two men. Kjeld Kirk experienced unreasonably much skeptical opposition to his ideas from his father, who kept “interfering” in the operations. Godtfred, who had invested his whole life and existence in the company, and who loved working with the products and the company, felt a loss of his identity by relinquishing influence and stepping back."

"Kjeld Kirk had managed nearly to tenfold LEGO’s revenue without abandoning LEGO’s core idea. Under his leadership, the company expanded the range of LEGO products, while delving even deeper into the product idea itself, among other things by collaborating with psychologists and experts in children’s play. For example, in 1989, Seymour Papert was appointed LEGO Professor of Learning Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and LEGO Futura—the LEGO development division—opened an office near MIT. Papert had developed an educational theory he called “constructionism.” According to the theory, learning is particularly successful when children are engaged in constructing something they enjoy making, such as a sandcastle, a poem, a machine, a story, a computer program, or a song. Equally importantly, Papert collaborated with LEGO on a programming language that allowed children to control the things they built with LEGO elements and program them to move and respond to, for example, light. The personal computer had made its way into homes, and with it came computer games, which increasingly captured children’s playtime. For Kjeld Kirk, it became crucial for LEGO to take a new evolutionary step. His father had moved LEGO from wood to plastic. Now Kjeld Kirk saw it as his task to elevate LEGO from physical building blocks to digital bytes. The question was just how."

"“LEGO’s core idea was thinning out. LEGO had become a sausage machine, looking at prices, at blocks in buckets for $4.99 each. Kjeld wanted something different, but marketing analysts said there was no market for computers in bricks. He couldn’t get his ideas through; they didn’t want to make it. So he asked me if I wanted to do it. I wanted to.” At Kjeld Kirk’s direct request, LEGO Dacta developed a prototype of an IT-controlled LEGO robot that could be programmed to follow a line on the table. After the presentation of the prototype to management, Kjeld Kirk said with great satisfaction: “That is the strongest expression of LEGO’s values for the next 20-30 years.” The combination of construction toys and IT programming expanded the possibilities for creating with LEGO and was a direct continuation of LEGO’s fundamental idea. Two years later, LEGO Mindstorms was launched as a bid for LEGO in the computer age. The “smart” bricks meant that children could now use LEGO to construct behavior or intelligence. In the next ten years, over one billion kroner worth of Mindstorms kits were sold."

"Kjeld Kirk supported the new ideas of a broad push into a range of new areas with the LEGO brand as the waving battle banner, making it possible to create new revenues that could replace the loss on the bricks. With growth as a guiding star, LEGO’s marketing people set out to develop a wide range of new product areas where LEGO could leverage its brand. Video games, movies, the internet, clothing, action figures - everything suddenly became relevant and was being developed for enormous amounts. One of the major decisions was to accelerate the rollout of LEGOLAND parks worldwide. Godtfred himself had been part of the decision to build the first LEGOLAND outside Denmark in London, but he wanted to see it operate for a few years before moving on – he wasn’t sure about the concept. Now the decision was to open a new LEGOLAND every three years and not wait for the experiences from London. The investment in the new parks was enormous. Most of it was done in LEGO’s own management, because it was still a LEGO value to preferably produce things themselves to have control over the quality."

"When Kjeld Kirk returned to LEGO after a year’s absence, it was without the old energy. He had lost the desire to take the CEO seat again to be part of the endless series of meetings inherent to the job. Ideally, he wanted to find a new way to run LEGO. He had a clear realization that LEGO needed to reinvent itself to survive in the new, IT-driven global experience economy, which offered children so much excitement that hadn’t existed ten years before. The question was just how."