A New Direction Period Of The LEGO Company

In 1965, LEGO set up a real development division. It was necessary, but Godtfred feared that the new employees would consider a business based on a single type of product too vulnerable. If the staff had decreed that the company would have benefited from a diversification there was a risk that new products that had nothing to do with the original idea would infiltrate within the LEGO company. He, for his part, insisted that the focus should be on the bricks and the whole system that revolved around them. By moving it, Godtfred feared that competitors would recover the gap between them and the LEGO and outperform it.

The new development division worked hard, introducing the assembly instructions to be attached to the boxes, the electric motors with battery compartment, the trains, and in 1969 came the largest blocks, suitable for the smallest hands. Slowly, LEGO changed its character. The company hired 100 new employees each year. The internationalization and the new people who coming from abroad also entailed a change of language, the work began to take place in English. In 1969, a dramatic accident occurred, Godtfred lost his youngest daughter, Hanne Kirk, in a car accident, where also his son also Kjeld Kirk reported serious injuries. The tragedy deeply affected Godtfred, who plunged into the melancholy and discouragement. As a company manager of a family business he began to think about the future. Now that Hanne was dead and Kjeld was seriously injured, who would help him expand and run LEGO?

So he contacted Vagn Holck Andersen, who was then director of the Incentive company, whose activity consisted in the acquisition, development, cooperation and generation transfer of small companies. Godtfred wanted to know what was the best way to secure a future for LEGO. He was also willing to sell it, if that was enough to ensure leadership that would take the company forward. Andersen realized that LEGO was being run by a self-taught company, who was involved in every little part of the company's activity. He was of the opinion that LEGO needed a management structure that could keep the company on its feet for the whole subsequent period of economic growth. The result was that in 1971 Vagn Holck Andersen took up his post at the management of LEGO, and in 1973 he became its managing director.

At the same time, LEGO was reorganised into five companies, grouped under the name of LEGO Gruppen. In the meantime, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen had gone to Switzerland for a master's degree in Business Administration at the IMD (International Institute for Management Development) in Lausanne. It was there that he met another Danish, Torsten Rasmussen, with whom he made a strong friendship.