The world's favourite toy company nearly died — not from doing too little, but from doing far too much.
Harder version: read this lesson at C1 level →
Look at each word. Say what you think it means. Then tap the card.
Tap a card to see the meaning.
Write one word from the cards in each gap.
1. I can't on my work when the television is on.
2. He has a lot of because he borrowed too much for his house.
3. She was very ill in March, but she completely by the summer.
4. My brother is a big of Italian football.
5. The company had to two hundred jobs to save money.
6. There is one important in this office: nobody eats at their desk.
1. focus · 2. debt · 3. recovered · 4. fan · 5. cut · 6. rule
Read each part. Then answer the questions before you read the next part.
The Lego company is Danish. The same family has owned it since 1932. For most of that time it made the most loved toy in the world.
But by 2003, Lego was in serious trouble. Sales were falling. Debt was near one billion dollars. In one year the company lost hundreds of millions. The family talked about something they had never talked about before: maybe we must sell the company.
The strange thing is why. Lego had not been lazy. Lego had been extremely busy.
The bosses believed that children did not want plastic toys any more. Children wanted screens. So Lego did everything at the same time: theme parks, clothes, watches, jewellery, video games, television programmes, schools, its own shops.
Every single idea made sense on its own. Together, they made a company that did twelve things quite well and could not say what it did best.
The problem went right down into the plastic. Designers were free, so they invented more and more new bricks: about thirteen thousand different shapes and colours. Each new shape needed its own steel mould, and a mould could cost tens of thousands of euros.
At one point the company discovered it was making several slightly different versions of the same little police officer.
Nobody in the company could say which products actually made money.
True or false? Click your answer.
1. In 2003 Lego was making a large profit.
2. Lego's problem was that it did too little.
3. Lego was making about thirteen thousand different bricks.
In 2004 the owner stepped back. He gave the company to Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, a thirty-five-year-old who had worked at Lego for only three years. He was the first boss from outside the family.
His first message to the staff was not exciting, and that was the point. He said: there will be no beautiful vision for a while. First we survive. Cash is more important than growth. Growth can come later.
Then he started cutting.
The Legoland theme parks — much loved, and very expensive to run — were sold off. The clothes, the watches and the other side businesses were closed or given to other companies. Factories were moved and joined together.
And in the warehouse came the least romantic rescue in the history of toys. The number of different bricks was cut by about half — from thirteen thousand down towards six or seven thousand.
There was a new rule. If a designer wanted a new shape, they had to explain the full cost. A new colour needed a business reason.
The management said something that sounds strange but is true: creativity works better with limits. The brick itself proves it.
Lego also went back to the people it had forgotten. It talked to adult fans again. It invited expert builders to help design new sets. And it put its energy back into the old, simple worlds: city, castle, space.
The whole plan fitted on one line: make the brick the hero again.
True or false? Click your answer.
1. The new boss came from the founding family.
2. He told everyone that growth was the most important thing.
3. The number of different bricks was cut by about half.
It worked, and it kept working for ten years.
The company was making a profit again within two years. Then it started to grow. By the middle of the 2010s, Lego had passed Mattel and become the biggest and most profitable toy company in the world.
The Lego Movie in 2014 was a huge success — and it was also two hours of advertising for the product.
The lesson people usually take from this story is about cutting costs. That is only half of it.
Lego did not recover because it spent less. It recovered because it answered one question that it could not answer in 2003: what are we actually for?
The answer was seven letters long. The brick.
Everything else — the parks, the watches, the clothes — had been an attempt to escape that answer.
True or false? Click your answer.
1. Lego became profitable again within about two years.
2. By the mid-2010s Lego was the biggest toy company in the world.
3. Lego recovered mainly because it invented many new kinds of toy.
This is a story about quantity. Lego had too many bricks, too much debt and not enough focus. These structures are how English talks about the wrong amount of something.
too many + things you can count → too many bricks, too many products, too many meetings
too much + things you cannot count → too much debt, too much choice, too much work
not enough works with both → not enough bricks, not enough money
Important: too is always negative. It means more than is good. Do not use it to mean very. "The film was too long" = it was a problem. "The film was very long" = just a fact.
| Structure | Use with | Example from the story |
|---|---|---|
| too many + plural | countable | Lego made too many different bricks. |
| too much + singular | uncountable | The company had too much debt. |
| not enough + noun | both | There was not enough focus. |
| too + adjective | — | The company grew too fast. |
Write too much, too many or not enough in each gap.
1. Lego made different shapes of brick.
2. By 2003 the company had debt to pay back.
3. There was discipline about costs.
4. The company was doing things at the same time.
5. The designers had freedom and rules.
1. too many · 2. too much · 3. not enough · 4. too many · 5. too much / not enough
Each sentence has one mistake. Say the correct sentence out loud, then check.
1. The company had too many debt.
2. There were too much different bricks.
3. We don't have money enough for this project.
4. This coffee is too hot, I like it very much.
5. Lego made too much products and not enough profit.
1. The company had too much debt. (debt is uncountable)
2. There were too many different bricks. (bricks are countable)
3. We don't have enough money for this project. (enough goes before the noun)
4. This coffee is very hot — I like it very much. (too hot means you cannot drink it)
5. Lego made too many products and not enough profit. (products countable, profit uncountable)
Take your time. Short sentences are fine.
Tell me the story of Lego in your own words. Six or seven sentences is enough.
Tell me about a time you had too much of something, or not enough — work, choice, free time, information.
What did you do about it?
Lego had to answer one question: what are we actually for?
Answer it about your own job, your team or your company. Try to do it in one short sentence.
To save the company, the new boss sold the theme parks that everybody loved.
Was he right? What should a company protect when it has to cut?