an old colleague from lego posted this on linkedin the other day. she's no longer there and i don't know why she left or if she was pushed out. this isn't about her story. it's about mine. and the stories of a number of other friends. it's a story that i haven't seen anyone telling. because everyone loves the product lego makes so much, but weirdly no one tells the truth about what an utterly shit place it is to work.
i scrolled past this post, and i'll admit i had hard time taking it seriously, what with it being written in comic sans and all (despite the resurgence of that font in recent years). i'm quite certain this person is using it without knowledge of that. then i stopped to ponder. i think she's got the right things on this list, but what she doesn't realize (or is trying to ignore, because she's campaigning to get back in or to cash in on her time there), is that they're the wrong way around. everything that lego is actually about, when you are on the ground, inside the hallowed halls, is the stuff on the right, not the bits on the left. and i think if people started to speak up, there would be a lot of folks who agree with me on that.
to be fair, if i read her caption, she's talking about innovation, not about it being a great place to work. but if you really look at them, those items on the list aren't about innovation, they're about a workplace where you'd like to work. and lego isn't that. except in the imagination.
i'm still scarred by my year there. i had come to them with experience from companies like microsoft and maersk, but it was like i'd never had a job before and none of that experience counted for anything. the head of the department i was in had started at lego when he was 16. he was then approaching 60 and had been parked in an obscure corner of lego, forever a senior manger and never a vice president. he was known within the afol community, because people there recognized that if they wanted to be sent free lego, they needed to kiss the ring of this sad, awkward man, who had trouble looking anyone in the eye.
maybe that was where i went wrong. i didn't kiss the ring. i had too much respect for myself and my experience. and maybe he knew that i saw right through him and knew he had been sidelined. maybe he could see that in my eyes and it made him have to face it himself, which wasn't fun for him. and that's why he had to do away with my job after only one year.
at the same time as he did so, he had to admit that i'd actually done a really good job and he couldn't fault me. he told me that lego wasn't ready to work closely with their adult fans. what a joke that has turned out to be. they're working with them in a major way today. and i was a big part of starting how that would pan out. he can never take that away from me, even though he took my job away. that was ten years ago.
he retired a couple of years ago, still not a vice president, even though there are many vps in lego. still a little norwegian nobody in an obscure corner of tech house in billund. that obscure corner isn't so obscure anymore now that he's gone. hopefully, he was also pushed out. and i suspect the old colleague that posted this was too. she was one of his minions. and so now, she's left spinning yarns about lego on linkedin...full of ego and strategizing, trying desperately to look an authority in what she thinks is an unironic use of comic sans.
No comments:
Post a Comment