Why Can't Lego Click?

Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen (his last name was accidentally misspelled with a "K" on his birth certificate) is the grandson of Ole Kirk Christiansen, the carpenter who founded Lego -- and Kjeld, 54, is now CEO and the man whom employees call "the owner." The house where his father, Godtfred, grew up -- a brick building with lions flanking the front steps -- is now nestled amid Lego's corporate buildings. When the owner visits the group that develops toys for preschoolers, he climbs the stairs to his father's childhood bedroom.

The only thing more vivid for Lego than the bricks and the history are what are known universally within the company as "Lego values." Not just the importance of free-form play. No Lego-designed toys are allowed to portray weapons from the 20th century -- although a recent exception involved a new, advanced kit for building a Sopwith Camel, the Allies' World War I biplane fighter. Long before the invention of software, Lego made all of its toys backward compatible. Bricks produced in 2001 work seamlessly with bricks from 1971. And every toy that Lego offers -- even the simplest ones, given away with McDonald's Happy Meals -- requires construction, the touch of a child.

You can't have a conversation of 10 minutes without staff members making an unself-conscious reference to those "Lego values." Even the small band of hip, cynical New Yorkers posted in Lego's new SoHo office, a group busy creating online product features and a Web-based Lego community, talk about bringing Lego values to areas desperately in need of them: the Internet, games, and kids' software.

But history and values haven't helped Lego avoid turbulence. The company has been trying to find its footing for a decade. Kjeld described last year's billion-kroner loss as "disastrous." His handpicked deputy, Poul Plougmann, described the performance as "miserable." And in the wake of 2000, one of the first things that Kjeld and Plougmann did was write a "go-get-'em" booklet for employees. The cover is Lego-brick red; the title is "Remembering Why We Are Here."

For Lego -- an influential, beloved company -- the question is whether there is any way to adapt its history and values to the hypnotic world of Game Boy, Xbox, instant messaging, and Pokémon. Can the past be a guide to the future?

Long ago, in the Danish village, there was another time of worry. During the Depression, the carpentry business of Ole Kirk suffered greatly. The carpenter decided to focus on making things he thought nearby farmers would need to buy, even in difficult times: household goods like stepladders and ironing boards, and wooden toys like ducks, fire engines, and buses. The toys started as a sideline, but they became well known for their quality.

In 1947, Ole Kirk discovered a new material, plastic, and he brought a plastics injection-molding machine to his village -- the first such machine in the entire country. Plastic toys were a strange idea, and many of Ole Kirk's toymakers were astonished and upset: "We're a wooden-toy company, Ole Kirk!"

But Ole Kirk would not be turned aside. One of his early plastic toys was a set of small building bricks that snapped together, first called "automatic binding bricks." Ole Kirk was so intrigued with them that he often carried one in his pocket.

Everyone who has ever played with Lego blocks knows the secret of their success, if only intuitively. What makes Legos work is something the company calls "clutch power." When you snap two Lego pieces together, they stay snapped. They go together with a satisfying sense of solidity, and they resist coming apart. Without adequate clutch power, you wouldn't be able to build anything complicated. It is clutch power that makes Legos such a flexible, adaptable toy. And it is that plasticity that makes playing with Legos -- in the right setting -- as absorbing as reading any book or playing any video game.

People who study children and how they play can't speak highly enough about these classic Lego elements. "The thing that is so compelling about Legos is their flexibility," says Lynn Galle, who is the director of the 75-year-old laboratory preschool at the University of Minnesota's well-regarded Institute of Child Development. Unlike, say, a video game, says Galle, there is no right or wrong way to play with Legos.

But anyone who hasn't looked at Lego toys since his or her own childhood is in for a rude shock. The shelves at Kmart, Target, Toys "R" Us, and Wal-Mart, aren't stocked with bins of multicolored bricks, windows, and wheels. Indeed, the blocks sometimes can be difficult to find -- crowded out by a vast array of intricate Lego kits that look more like models than open-ended play toys. Whether or not there is a "correct" way to play with Legos these days, most modern Lego kits are so elaborate that they come with a folder of step-by-step construction instructions.