Why Can't Lego Click?

Well, yes and no. Can you imagine the reaction of Ole Kirk to video games? It wouldn't have taken him 15 years to produce cool Lego video games -- games that, as it turns out, do translate Lego values from the tactile to the virtual world.

Lego has changed in just the past five years. Product cycle times are falling: In time for Father's Day this year, Lego Direct, the catalog and Internet-sales division, produced the Sopwith Camel biplane kit. The plane was designed in a single day, and the kit was approved in something like two weeks. Lego has gotten religion on licensed toys completely -- perhaps too completely. Its preschool line includes Winnie the Pooh Lego sets and Bob the Builder Lego sets -- and the company this fall will roll out extremely secret, extremely elaborate Harry Potter Lego sets.

Lego is also discovering an important aspect of storytelling: the creation of ongoing Lego characters with whom kids can identify. Beyond Bionicle, a new adventurer named Jack Stone is being aimed at younger kids. And Lego, which has often seemed to float great products onto store shelves and then wait to see if anyone notices them, is cautiously trying some modern, even viral, marketing techniques.

Kjeld is trying to remix the culture of Ole Kirk and the culture of GKC. His dad, Kjeld says, would have thought Bionicle was "going too far. But it is a good example of expressing our values in a cool, contemporary way.

"Lego values are not just in the brick," Kjeld continues. "They are in what you get out of the brick." Lego the company needs to learn to be more like its core product, Lego the brick: nimble, adaptable, plastic -- but fundamentally unchanged -- no matter what kind of creation it is a part of.

To be both fair and blunt, Lego has had only two daring, visionary moments: One came from Ole Kirk's insistence on plastic toys and the future of the brick. The other came from GKC's insistence that a whole system of play could be built around the brick. The most recent of these two moments is 40 years gone. It is time for Kjeld and his team to find a similar leap. Lego can survive a long time by making good products. But trendiness -- even high-quality trendiness like Bionicle and Harry Potter -- is not leadership. Once, for a brief moment, Lego changed the way kids played as well as the way kids learned to think. Lego hasn't been that kind of leader in a long time.

Kjeld's chief deputy, Poul Plougmann, a former VP of finance at Bang & Olufsen, sounds almost like a member of the family when he talks about Lego. The company, he points out, has a much larger presence than its business would justify. A billion-dollar-a-year business, in global terms, is tiny. But according to research that Lego follows closely, the Lego brand is the seventh most powerful worldwide among families with children, behind only such names as Coca-Cola and Disney. People take Lego seriously, which is good news; but that view has created a legacy of expectations not to be trifled with.

Plougmann explains the value of Bionicle, for instance, by way of metaphor. Many kids, by the time they are 11 or 12, no longer think Lego is cool. They've moved on to action figures, war games, video games. Plougmann describes those kids as out on a frozen lake, in need of rescue. Bionicle is a way for them to step back off that ice. "We offer them a ladder across the ice," he says. "Bionicle is a craze. It's cool. It's a great story." His eyes twinkle. "It's a recruiting tool. We need to take those kids back.

"The important thing," says Plougmann, "is that we not grow beyond our values. We are here only to develop kids. And we should be smart enough to make a business out of it."

Charles Fishman (cnfish@mindspring.com), a senior editor at Fast Company, spent many hours playing with Legos -- both as a 9-year-old and again for this story. Visit Lego (www.lego.com), or learn about the legend of Mata Nui (www.bionicle.com), on the Web.