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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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, when you are as creative as we are, we are creating failures, if you call it failure. I try not to call it failure in the sense because there's a”
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
“Very precise on that. But it's an ongoing focus to make sure that that happens because having a strong culture is only really valuable if you have it throughout. If you only have it in pockets, then I'm not sure it's so valuable.”
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 what we're learning is that we sit in Bylon together here, we sit in our Leco campus, we have a lot of employees here, and we have many who have been here for 20, 30, 40 years. So recruiting into this area, we could take a thousand people tomorrow and I would feel pretty certain that very fast they would get into the culture. Now, what we've also done is we created hubs in parts of the world where we wanted to put on new capabilities. An example is in Copenhagen. So we started out, opened an office and got between 300 and 400 digital experts into an office like that. That takes a little bit longer because you cannot mix them up with culture carriers that we have. So that takes a much stronger effort to do that. Similarly, when we start a factory in Vietnam, just greenfield and we start by recruiting that. And we have a lot of, we actually have a lot of emphasis on how do we do that? How do we bring people in who carries the culture and how can 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
“I think it comes from complexity growing too fast or us not being able to deliver the capacity to follow because you need to build quite so square meters in manufacturing every year to sustain the 15% and everything that goes with it. And it's hard. Maybe you can do it in a single year, but not year after year, I think.”
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
“or something along those lines. But there's something to that, and I'm aware that actually I'm eager to have the growth being at a good pace. But of course, I'm nervous if that growth gets to the point that gets too high. So probably the 15 you mentioned should, it's probably at the limit that I think a company like ours can sustain for the long term. And remember, we built all our products ourselves. So it's not like we can just source something more from somebody. It means factories. It means distribution centers. It means a setup. That's quite big and growing faster than that. What's the risk?”
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 a super good question because that's kind of the upper limit. Your question asking there is the limit to how fast it makes sense to grow. On the other side, there's also a lower limit in the sense that in the business like ours, it's really a momentum business. If we can grow at a decent pace, we can afford to make all the forward-looking investments that will drive that again. I actually once made a consulting come in making more of an analytical exercise on what projects the growth. The best projector of high growth is that we grew faster before. Which is interesting in the sense that momentum yields momentum.”
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
“We had in the around year 2000, I think there was a period of five or six or seven years, around 16, 17, it was kind of a two year period where we lost momentum before we came back.”
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
“We talked about the creative side. You can imagine with so many creative people running around, you can create a lot of complexity in very short term if you're not careful. I think we've had periods where the complexity had grown too much, and that, of course, makes it more difficult to execute in the right way and to control things. So that's one of the things that we are all the time for, and also takes a lot of my focus, balancing between being creative, but also being very structured with an operating model that allows us to execute these many billions of bricks that we need to get out. And that all of these sets every year, all these launches that they hit just right and do that actually is a balance between the two things. And if that gets... Typically creates problems for us.”
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
“We've been family owned for 93 years. Same family, fourth generation. It gives us an opportunity to take decisions with a slightly longer perspective. So we can carry through some investment programs and we can also sometimes carry through smaller blips or hiccups in a quarter. So, I mean, if you want to be very creative, you want to take some chances and not everything pays out. You shouldn't panic if that happens. You need to be able to stand through that. I think we've had good examples of doing that. And we are using that by actually also having quite a long perspective in some of our plans because we can sign up, we can sign up with an owner family for the longer term on some of those things. I think that's been the biggest advantage.”
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've been very focused on being a brand for everybody, so both for both genders of kids, but also growing into teens and into adults. But you're right, we are much more balanced between boys and girls today.”
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
“Would be a huge, no, it would be a Star Wars Millennium Falcon would be a big one, the Colosseum would be a big one. The Eiffel Tower is a very big one. Titanic is a big one. So that would be that, as you say, like a meter or a meter and a half high or really big constructions with a lot of bricks in them.”
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, and that's something that, I mean, that's an evergreen. That won't stay for a long, long time. I won't say it would ever not ever go out, but it's not something that goes in and out in a year or two, as most products would do.”
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, they would be take An exam would be Titanic, so we have the Titanic, you build that from several thousand bricks, you build everything in there and you close it down so only you know what's inside. It's kind of this size. So it's a big set.”
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
“We check with kits, we check a lot with kits, we check with adults, and then of course we have given the strengths of the brand, we have very strong corporations with a lot of brands and IPs out there. And that gives us also the privilege of having insights into what is coming. So if you know what the movie slates are that will be there in the next year or two, you have a much better chance of hitting right on your prioritizat”
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 you can say we know better at any point in time than the creativity we are coming out with right now. So we talked about the creative side and kind of some of the things we do to allow them to be super creative. But the creative process, if you look at it from the idea to the product, is also quite structured. So we call them P meetings. So we have a series of P meetings throughout the year where we bring a lot of people together trying to figure out how do the ideas we have and the contents we have, how does this play up against what are the trends in the world? Is it Formula One that's attractive? Is it Star Wars this year that's coming out with a new movie? What is it that would really drive attention? Is it Pokemon? Is it Super Mario? What are the things that are hot IPs or will be hot IPs one or two years out?”
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, because it's interesting when you talk, I mean, maybe I start with saying every year we change 50% of our product line.”
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 can come from many places, but I think they get inspired by their own passions or their own type of building technique can also be inspired by us looking into what are the trends in the world. I mean Formula One, we have a strategic partnership with Formula One. Yes, we've been in vehicles, but now suddenly that opens up a world for some designers or animals for kids. If you know you're into that, you can be a creative around a theme, but you can also be openly creative. And the flowers we see on the table, I mean, that's an open creation. The first time I saw that, I wasn't even certain whether that would be a good idea or not. But that just came out of a designer. They tried it out and we said, okay, let's try it. And if it works, we'll do more. And if it doesn't, we would stop this in this”
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 every two weeks they have a day where they can do exactly what they want outside any program. We do have to get products out the door, but we need to allow them to all the time have their ideas come up and come out. So it's quite an exciting area to be in. And it is very creative. And there's a lot of very creative people in the company.”
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, there's a physical building part to that that needs to be exciting. And that's an area we're actually even moving further on. But it's also the freedom you give them. So if you get the right type of people and you allow them to be creative in what they do. So we don't control them much.”
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 point is just we have the designers together, so you really create this super creative atmosphere where they can walk up along each other, where we can support them in the best possible way. I mean, they have access every day to every single Lego break that exists in every single color. They have all kinds of systems supporting and they have this very creative environment that allows them to be creative.”
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, very different approaches because you would have everything from designers or trained designers to architects to engineers, all kinds of people. It's almost like it's, I mean, a lego designer, that's something you really want to be. And you are really willing to lean into that and people work. So, you work in this place in the middle of Jotland in Denmark because we have liquid designers nowhere else.”
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 brings a smile to my face all the time because we are a super creative company. And if there's something, if you get the opportunity to walk alongside the department we have of lego designers, I mean.”
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
“If you think about competing for time, you want to be relevant. You cannot kind of be a Lego brand and then say we are only in the physical world because that's over. So you want to be where kids are and where consumers are. So we have games, we have a Lego Play social media platforms. We have a lot of IP partners where we also work very heavily into digital because kids want that. But they expect, of course, and representation in digital of the Lego brand that is authentic to what it is. And that's our challenge to make sure we show up the right way with the right values, no matter whether it's in digital or physical.”
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 far not a lot, which is a positive, I think. And I also think we have to also have to say that being on digital screens is not bad. It just cannot be the only thing you do. We typically see, if you do, do what you said before, you take this big bin of Lego bricks, you throw them on the floor, kids will build like you and I would build back then. It's not that different, which I think is quite encouraging”
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 makes it harder to stay relevant. At the end of the day, we are actually, we consider ourselves competing for children's time. Moorland just competing as a toy. And you're right. I mean, children actually in many countries around the globe, they spend more time on school, they spend time on after school whenever they're off that. They're typically on a tablet or a computer. So it's just a harder game to stay relevant on that. We know then when kids really get into it, they get super excited. We know parents like it and we know all the important development criteria. You have to use your brain and your hand in a coordinated way to build these methodical skills, to build the right connections in the brain earlier on. We know that. And I think we're just a prime tool for doing 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
“Yeah, exactly. It is a platform. I consider Legobricks actually being the ultimate platform or the ultimate modular system. And I mean, every company talking about how can we platformize things to make those more efficient, they always use the Ligobricks as the example for that. So I think that sits very deeply in our roots, of course, that everything we do better be optimized from a modularity point of view.”
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, it encompasses our values in a sense. So there's a lot of creativity, there's imagination, there's kind of this, I consider it a medium which you can impress everything you want to do or express yourself in a different way. It's almost like something is like writing in a sense. You can use the lego bricks for what you want to do. And the creation you make is your creation. It's not a legal creation in that sense. So I think it allows for that. And the brand encompasses all that, I think.”
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
“Emails and letters from kids and parents just within the last 24 hours I've had three thanking me for what we do, reminding them of what they did as kids and telling me how that has been fantastic for their kids or grandchildren. And it's super rewarding.”
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, it is important for the kids' parties, less important for the Yarrow part, because we do sell to all consumers today, but for kids, adults are typically the best ambassador to bring the first brick set in. We know that building together adult and kid is very developing and very exciting, actually, for both parties. So obviously following that, there's a big advantage in the countries where, I mean, I guess you and I, being Scandinavians, have had the pleasure of playing with Lego Bricks when we were children. That's not the case everywhere, particularly in Asia, in China, in India. It wasn't necessarily like that. So in some parts, you almost have parents as a natural ambassador. In other parts, we are building the brand as we go. And so there's a difference there, but it's super important. It's interesting when you set the lady you were sitting next to. I am probably one of the CEOs who gets most”
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 it's about this creativity, I think that's built into us people. I think everything from when we back 5,000 years ago, we were making a hammer out of stone where this desire and drive to create things. I think this is what Lego Bricks provide.”
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, it, of course, takes the outset in children, and we believe that children are our role models in the way they do, the creative way they attack the world. And we know that we actually provide something that helps children acquire some of the skills they need to live in society, more basic skills that when we actually teach children in school. And I think what we learned over the years, that's very applicable to children. It's applicable to all of us.”
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