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Niels B. Christiansen

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-09-17
most recent: 2025-09-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Are also putting on now more like a career lens to how do you what would you do? Then I would say make sure you try different things. It's not a race in that sense. I think few people that end up being CEOs just had a straight line there. I mean, there are opportunities on the way that if you grab them. They will be interesting, and it's never a straight line in that sense. It wasn't for me, I didn't plan it, but I jumped on some things that I thought was super interesting that fitted what I needed to do. And I think that, so that's what I would do, being a little bit more relaxed on the career planning, but being more focused on what is exciting. And then I think it will come.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I think if you think over time, the way we develop as people, I believe, is by getting a challenge. That's exactly big enough that we need to develop, but that's not bigger than we won't fail so miserably that we lose confidence. So I think for that sense, it's around following the interest or passions and trying to look for the next exciting opportunity or challenge within that and trying it out and learning from that. You know, I think we are, I think we're better versions of ourselves if we work with something that we are fundamentally interested in. Doing that, you tend to perform better. You may be offered the next challenge. You can go on that. I think that's the way to go and really if we...”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A high likelihood I would build a vehicle of some kind, a car or a fantasy thing or a combination of a car and airplane or whatever, but I think that would be it.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like reading stuff like Kenfoitt or Danish Life Davis. And I like things that are a good story that is also realistic in a way that gets me thinking differently.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm too competitive when I'm there. Which is annoying. I've always relaxed a lot. You know, working as a CEO, you know, we all put in many hours. And I've typically spent a lot of my free time with my family and my kids. So I did not have a lot of other things. I don't jump on a bicycle Saturday morning and then I return at mid-afternoon. I just don't do that. So I'm pretty good at relaxing. I want to be outside now and now playing golf. I'm with my family. So you can say it's boring, but I don't have three sports that I pull off as those. I practice, but only to keep fit.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get complacent or get too efficient in all your processes and having too many people involved and everything. And that's something we need to actively fight because with values like we have of being caring and collaborative on a lot of stuff, I mean, why would I not invite another 10 people into the meeting so they also know about it and they feel good about that? That's not what we want. So I think as a leadership team, we constantly need to work that. There is just an inertia that wants to make that happen. And we need to stay out of that.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we had a little bit of a wake up call in 2016-17 because I think it was exactly some of what Some of what happened, so I think the constant push on productivity and And the push on relevance. I think those are the two things I would mention that we focus on. We need to stay relevant. And if we need to change things and do things to stay relevant, then we'll do it. And then we'll keep making sure that just because we are successful and make a lot of money, it's actually a big danger because you can easily get...”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They have also delegated in that sense. Now, of course, it means that you need to keep each other informed. It also means that they have to be pretty clear on overall what are we trying to move up against. But if you can simply have fewer people involved in everything and more clarity around it, then you just gain speed. And you gain decision power throughout, and at the end of the day, you have more satisfied employees that spend more of their time delivering value and less time just negotiating with ourselves.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was just super, super important for us, and I'm pushing this now that we mean normally a leadership team would be sitting and they would have a lot of things on the agenda. They would meet every month in day-long meetings and stuff like that. And we've changed that. We've kind of created subgroups of even my leadership team that we delegate. We have now what we call a commercial triangle. It's the chief commercial officer, the chief operating officer, and the chief marketing officer there together. We've delegated to them to make all the decisions to make the wheel go every day on that. And only if they totally disagree or they don't know what to do, they can escalate. That goes down on all levels. It actually means that we as a leadership team, we meet one hour or one and a half hour every month and then four times a year for three days. That's it. The rest is being done in smaller teams and that has gone to the next level and they have”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have an anecdote from when I started, you know. I was also super humble coming into the Lego company, this brand, and how can you do that? And I came in and I think before arriving here, this is now almost eight years ago and before arriving here, I thought I had ideas to what would it be and what should change. a month into being here i stood in the town hall and i literally talked about us having too many meetings too many people in the meetings too”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And without this, not that. And that's difficult. And that's something that, I mean, I think that you're very clear and you stay on it. I think that's important for the execution part. The other one is, of course, the clarity. I mean, we have an operating model in the factory that you've had an opportunity to see today. I can tell you we have six factories right now around the globe. They look exactly the same. They operate exactly the same. So you can take an operator from here and bring the person to Czech Republic or Vietnam and they can work there tomorrow. And that kind of rigidity, and I think that gives you executional power as well, that there is very little doubt about what to do or there's very little freedom to change that process tomorrow. And that's what we have on this side of the picture.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of it is clarity. And then I think just. Can you say steadfast the way you, even as a CEO, when it's not interesting, you keep asking to it and you keep making sure that we staying at it. And you probably be surprised that a company like us that are very creative, we are quite focused on getting productivity out every year. We call it partner for productivity as a global program, and we crunch out significant. Significant productivity and Danish kroner every year. And I think everybody by now knows that productivity is what's paying for all the super exciting things we can do over and above.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's written by the new Dean at the Norwegian School of Economics. It's very interesting. But you know, it's also true that you can have the best ideas in the world. You don't get them executed with some speed they may not be worth anything, which is also why this your strategy, you can keep... Can keep honing your strategy until it's 100%, but sometimes it's better that you execute something that is 80% right rigidly than you wait too long and you try to optimize the last percentage.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is important. I think it's quite important, but it's kind of sometimes we say it makes sense to go slow, to go fast. So speed should not be misunderstood in the way that you shouldn't plan right or you cannot build some structure behind it. Sometimes you just have to move fast. But sometimes in order for us to be far four years from now, maybe we should be very, very clear on what we need to do. One of my learnings and experiences over something, if you just jump into it and you just run, if six months later you sit with something that doesn't really move, then you haven't accomplished a lot. So it's not single mindly speed, but of course speed is important. The world is moving really fast.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I choose them from everything it takes to create the surrounding we just talked about, whether the strategy is clear or I mean if there's an area that doesn't move or you know sometimes in an organization there can be journal that maybe there are departments that are not exactly the same opinion of needs to happen and it can just cycle in circles sometimes that needs to be brought up and kind of clarity created for one or the other things I try to spot those when they're there and be part of that but I try to let my team and their teams run with everything where I don't need to be in”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that was not why I'm saying it. It's just like, so I'm very hard on prioritizing. To do, I'm also internally very hard at prioritizing what meetings I'm in in that sense. How do you choose?”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I often get told I have the most structured calendar in this country in that sense that we plan very far ahead. So I'm super structured from a creative point of view, a creative company point of view. So all meetings for 26th, they sit. We know exactly in what cadence we have mod meetings. Honestly, Nicolai, I don't do this very often. I spend most of my time here. I don't go a lot to conferences. No, which is...”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's a two year horizon. And four years allows us two roles if you want within a period. So four years works well for us. But I think it has to be long enough that you can start initiatives and start to see some of the results. It needs to be short enough that it's not just a long-term ambition. Our long-term vision goes to 2032 or even 2039 where our most active owner turns 60 years old. So we think about the brand, how should the brand look in 2039? How do we make sure it is as strong as today? That's why we need to get in digital stronger and stuff. So we have different horizons, but the four-year horizon is a pretty well thought through, very also operationalized horizon. And that's probably why it shouldn't be too low.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we started off with three, and if you do it three, it feels like you're in it all the time. If you do five, it feels like the fifth year is so far out, you don't know what happens. So I don't know that four is much better, but it turned out that four works pretty well for us. It also is like, you know, our product development cycle. I mean, in a couple of months, we will approve the 2027 product portfolio.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, it's got to be the most what I think are the most important things. So, in that sense, that could be right or wrong. But I think there's a process of getting to that and be clear about that those things cannot be 20 things. They have to be fewer. I spend a lot of time And that four year plan is quite detailed, and we are aligned. And we continue until we are aligned in a way that it's quite easy to communicate these priorities. That allows in our situation a very good situation over those four years to actually execute up against that.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was around how to lead people in a direction without being necessarily the most, without knowing the substance the deepest. So he was not a technical person, but he knew how to excite technical people and allow them the space to do that and still create this feeling of being together. It's very hard to boil it down to exactly what he did. But I tell you, I learned a lot in the three years I had with him.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure I got it as an advice, but I made a choice at one point to go work for Netcom, actually, because I saw a CEO there that became my boss. That was quite different from myself. I mean, I'm analytical, I've been a consultant early in my time, so I'm an engineer, I went to business school, so quite classical in many of those things. And he had this personal leadership capability. He could create this pioneer sense around something and engage people. And it was quite different. And we were in many ways not alike in that, but I learned a lot from him.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the problems on the executional side of making it happen and making it sustainable. And that became different for the long term to keep that position because it happened so fast and there was a lot of competition and coming out of that. Then I've had a long period at that point in time the biggest industrial company in this country called Danfos where it was much more down to really understanding how would you manufacture the right way every single percentage of productivity you could get out was a competitive advantage on that and making sure how a very complex organization around the world got very excellent in execution around that stuff. And then my privileges, and here I sit at the LEGO group, and we are a beautiful combination of those two things.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we had worked with Ericsson back then on some wireless technology, it failed back to our discussion before. And upon that failure, we sat down and figured out why. And Ericsson actually went ahead from that failure and to find the Bluetooth protocol and said, listen, this is open for everybody. And then it was a race. We were the first ones. So all of the, if you think back some of the mobile phones that had a headset that was without a wire, I can almost guarantee that the likelihood was very high at least that we did that. And so I was really on the creative side and saw that. But I also learned from that journey of growing a company this fast. I mean, it was from a billion Danish criminal to three and a half billion Danish krono in one or two or three years.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if you go back. If I look back at my career, I just have had the privilege of being in different areas. I was running a smaller company back around, it was probably around 99, 2000, 2001, we became the first company in the world to launch a Bluetooth product.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Line on where you are. So I think the orc here will see me as very involved in strategic clarity and what we do, very involved in making sure that the operating model in the areas where we cannot go in many different directions is super, super clear. And we actually execute along it while over here on the creative side. I mean, every Friday they can do whatever they want. I mean, there's just different things, different ways of doing that and balancing that. I see that a lot as my role, and I try to provide that for the.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess When it's bad, I think it's that you use one brain instead of many. But of course, if you just, and that's my point, if you just open up and say, okay, I empower everybody to do whatever they want to, then I can guarantee you an organization like this can run in a million different directions because we have so many creative people. So it's kind of this, how do you steer creativity? How do you steer also decision making from many in the direction that you're trying to achieve by having a very similar”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I also have this kind of that it is not worth anything unless it really gets to fruition in a way and gets executed and there's processes behind. So I'm a little bit of both sides. I like to allow people the space to both be creative, but also to make their own decisions. So as a leader, I try to be quite clear on the guardrails or the overall direction of what we are trying to achieve in total so that there is a certain, I mean, if there's good clarity on the overall direction, then more people or more leaders within the organization would feel comfortable making their own decision because they know what we're trying to achieve. And I believe in that decision power, if it's there. And I think it's only really there if the frames are clear.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I'm somewhere, and maybe that's a good mix. I'm somewhere on two sides. I'm an engineer by training. So I used to invent stuff of technical nature. So I have kind of the creative side to me and I can get really excited about that.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can code like everybody else, so the many software engineers we have, they can code faster. Those are things where you can say here you get a real big increase. The other one is really day-to-day productivity for all of us. And I think we're probably like many other companies in that that I believe over time, we need to see productivity coming from that. And we're trying to figure out how do we do that in the broader scale by investing behind solars. We've been quite focused on protecting our data, our information, that we don't have models out there trained on Lego models or LEGO specific data. So in that sense, we've been trying to make sure we were well in control of the kind of the security and the IP and trademark things around that before we are now venturing into the things I talked about.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I'll just be honest to say AI is something we talk a lot about. It's still early days in really reaping benefits. We actually think about AI in two different ways. On the one side, it's kind of where can we make something more transformational? And if you look at our business, transformational is around, I mean, can we use it to foster creativity or to at least help our designers to spend even That's something. Can you imagine an app that immediately built me a Lego castle and it would give you a proposal for how to do that and the building instruction or whatever? Now that's probably a little bit out, but we have ways of using our technology to make designers more effective.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More than a thousand stores, 500 of those in China. So, in that sense, it's been back to your question how do you build brand stores have been very important in the process of building a brand?”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they're doing well. And it's a way for us to give a different legal experience than building, then you get into the legal world. But you cannot have a legal land park in every small town. So in that sense, it becomes a little bit different. And something you typically have to travel for.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we have Nope, nope. Have one in China And we opened it actually a month ago in Shanghai, we're building another one in China, but we have 11 globally”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portfolio the day after, but you kind of do have to do it all for that to gel and actually work out. So that's what we've done in China. And then we have kind of taken it from the bigger cities now to tier two to tier three to tier four cities. And that model we've replicated throughout China.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can tell you what we did in China We started out probably not unlike many companies, but we did focus on the bigger metropolitan area. So it's like Beijing, it's Shanghai, maybe Hangzhou or some of the bigger places in China. And really, at the same time started in more traditional brand campaign type thing. And then we opened retail stores. So we actually have quite a few retail stores in China that only has the lego brand in them because this opportunity to get into a store and get into the Lego universe and see that has been a very important way and it does better than a branding campaign for that sake. So you have to, I think, invest along several dimensions at the same time. And that's maybe an area where it's good to be family owned because that, I mean, it would be nicer if you could invest in brand building today and retail stores tomorrow and then”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's, uh, I mean, if you have a basic mission of getting to every child in the world or getting to as many children in the world as possible, then China and India for that sake are very important markets. So it's important. It's probably more important purpose and mission-wise than it is in pure commercials if you look at it today. And that's part to some of what we touched on before, that we are building a brand. We are creating distribution and retail reach while we're also starting manufacturing. So there's a lot of investments into China to make that happen. So it is important and we are quite successful in China right now. And we've been added for the last 15 years, I would say, significantly. But if you question went on to say how important is India, then I would say then we probably 10 years back on that journey and we have to start to do all these things. We're building a brand in a country that was not used to playing with Lego Bricks.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And basically say, listen, if the overall ambition for the world is to get CO2 down, then that's also what we as employees would need to be successful with.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you know, with bonuses, it's like you would like to incentivize an organization on what's good, what we want to, but you also would like to keep it as controllable as possible. I mean, you and I don't like a bonus that we cannot influence, obviously. So I think that's been the bigger problem here. So we focused in on mainly scope one and two, so things that are in the company's own control. And we checked on things that also had our measure on things that also matters from employee's point of view. Are you choosing your company car to be an electric vehicle or not? Or what choices are we also making internally? So most of the bonus at this point in time are on those kind of things. Now we have an ambition to very soon move to a broader.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then don't have single use plastic around. So we have had a big undertaking to make sure that as a company externally and internally, we got rid of single-use plastic because otherwise the durable plastic story is not a strong one.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we're doing two things. I think the starting point is really making sure people understand the durability of the LIGO plastic. That being said, there are two things that's in focus. One is that we would like to make it from more and more sustainable and recycled materials to the extent that is possible. And secondly, we would like to make sure that it doesn't end up in waste. Now it doesn't today, but with the billions we talked about before bricks out there, if there are people that wants to give the brickbacks back, it should not go to waste or in the garbage bin. Then we would want to make sure we provide a system to bring that back. And we are having take-back solutions in quite a few markets today. But I think that's important. It's not a big deal because, as you said, people don't want to do that. But I don't want a situation where somebody wants to and we cannot do it. Now the third thing is really that if you are into durable plastic and you want to run the argument that you just put forward in your question.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and for that, I actually think we are one of the best users of plastic. You can think of for that reason. You can have a brick for 40 years and it keeps getting in play. You give it to your grandchildren or your children and it brings on. And one of the requirements on our side is that we ensure this backward compatibility. So you can buy a set tomorrow and you can bring it together with the set, your grandparents bought, and has probably been in the bathtub or outside in the sun and whatever. And the clots power you talked about, it still works. So that, I think, is a fantastic use. That's a narrative we're trying to get out there, but it's not always that easy when you're in the big world of communication around plastic.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The brig on the sound of the brig or whatever. So we decided not to do it. That was considered, I mean, I had to deal with a lot of journalists around explaining why was that the right decision to do. But I think we came out of it stronger and we're in a Yeah, we dare do it. We dare bring it all the way to the finish line, although we decided not to do it at the end.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was complicated. We never really managed to bring that to big success. Not because necessarily the idea was not good, but we were not successful with that and we had to sit down and say, what are the elements here that were wrong or we didn't do right? And is there also any positive learning we can take out of that? Or if you take sustainability, we have been, we were testing 600 materials to find materials that had less U2, less fossil fuel and were more mixed. And at one point we actually proved that RPET, so recycled peat from PET bottles and so could be used into Lego bricks and could partly full or could fulfill some of the very strong tolerances and the requirements we had. Now getting towards the actually doing it we figured out it did not lower CO2. It brought a lot of other problems with it and there were too many compromises on the quality of”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's There's many different things we have those on products. It's typically things that will go on for a while. We've been launching new things back in the days of augmented reality, so two or three or four years back. We launched a new set called Hidden Sight, and it was quite fancy. You had your mobile phone. You could have this building, and you could bring it alive with ghosts that were flying, and you can make things around that.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I would think there's probably one in the company every day. But on big and small. So, I mean, the big ones, hopefully not that often. But there would be significant things that we will learn from at least four times a year at a certain scale that would also be at my attention.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A modeling, I mean, basically there is around a certain project, there's a list of people you need to have in this review. You have to describe what happened and you have to be very specific on why. Why did we end up in this situation? What's the learning we take out of that so we can apply that across? I mean, sometimes out of what is a failure, you can actually tweak some things or do something slightly differently or adjust and you can bring it back on. Or out of that, you close it totally down and you conclude I'm never going to do that again and you go ahead to do something else. And that's what it's really about not going on too long before that happens. Really learning from it to know”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a debrief, right? Yeah, it's a strong debrief along a fixed model have to come out with what are the learnings we're taking and where do we apply those learnings.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, and it doesn't make, I mean, that's what hurts if you see the same mistake happening twice. We actually had an example of this this year. That's when it really hurts. And that's when you look deeper.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't have a good name for that, but we try very hard to not kind of make the failure thing a very negative thing. So we call it AAR, so the after action review where we try to take the learnings out. So it's kind of a failure. You don't want to repeat the failure. And at least you want to get out of the failure with a learning.”
2025-09-17 · In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen · Niels B. Christiansen: Leading LEGO, Competing in the Digital Age, and Shaping Creative Minds · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source