Creativity is seeing what everyone has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought – Albert Einstein

One of the Christmas gifts my wife and I gave to our oldest grandchild, Tyson, was a Star Wars lego set. I have to admit, it looked pretty awesome and at the age of six, I thought perhaps it would be more of a challenge for him to assemble.

Needless to say, he was very excited about this gift. And word back to us was that before the night was over, he had all but assembled it by himself. Indeed the force was with him.

We’ve come a long way from the early days of lego when I was a kid. Lego now releases more than 850 different sets each year. 

I read a fascinating article at brickbucks.net about the production process for a lego set. It takes about 18-24 months for a Lego set to be produced which means sets that are released today were already in development long before they ever found out if the initial wave would be successful. 

From a leadership perspective, I found this quite intriguing. Here are a few of my takeaways on leadership thanks to lego.

• You have to risk failing if you want to succeed. Success is never guaranteed when you start out, but failure is a certainty if you don’t.
• There are no limits to the creative forces of your team if you work together as a team. 
• Timing is everything. At lego, they are observing, anticipating, and preparing their releases that coincide with the release of movies, video games, theatrical releases, etc. Lego is out front with impeccable timing. Smart leaders understand the *law of timing.
• Smaller can be better. A strategy that Lego has utilized in its marketing is appealing to smaller themes that might appeal to a particular audience such as Botanical themes, etc. The more specialized themes Lego makes available, the larger the audience becomes.

Think about your own leadership for a moment. In what ways can you afford to be more innovative? How well do you keep a pulse on your surroundings and how that impacts you as a leader? How well do you understand the significance of timing? Are you a catalyst for creative thinking and ideas or do you stand in the way of it?

These are the things that impact your leadership. And yes, often it’s the small things like a lego that can cause you to pause to think about such things. But if you’re ever stuck with your lego set, I know a kid who can help you.

 

©2023 Doug Dickerson

 

• Click here to read the Lego article
• The Law of Timing – When to lead is as important as what to do and where to go.                                                                 From John Maxwell’s The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.