The world and its business environments are in a state of constant change. The reality today is that organizations and their leaders are faced with increasingly daunting demands for change and, unless they build organizations that can keep pace with these fast-changing environments, it will be a challenge simply to survive while, at the same time, continuing to thrive and embrace uncertainty and disorder. One effective example of a world-renowned company that survived an existential crisis to become the number one brand in its field is the LEGO Group.
In Building a Global Learning Organization (Productivity Press, 2014), the authors showed how to develop and implement a global structure for learning based on the TWI (Training Within Industry) methods of good supervision. The goal was to create and sustain standardized work across multiple languages and cultural platforms to maintain the highest quality of the product as the company expanded internationally. In the book, you learn how the LEGO Group, as a multinational global company, worked on business transformation through changes in organizational learning systems, including new ways of working and other Lean transformational initiatives. Great organizations across the globe have used this text as a benchmark for global and national rollouts of the TWI programs and standard work initiatives.
Based on this rich experience building a global learning organization, it became clear that basic structures needed to be put into place in order to effectively create and manage the change process. In this book, you get a first-hand account of how the LEGO Group met these challenges by developing and implementing a framework for change to create a common approach to designing, leading, and anchoring change in a thoughtful, effective and impactful way. The author gives you insights into the journey which began by designing the LEGO Way of Change, a philosophy fully in line with the "LEGO Promises" of People, Play, Partner and Planet. She describes the process of testing the approach in a bigger transformation which, based on pilot learnings, was implemented in transformational initiatives.
This book outlines some of the approaches to change that LEGO implemented in order to ensure change is both successfully implemented and sustained including in-depth guides on impactful interventions with both leaders and employees in the organization. The author discusses personalizing and navigating change as well as designing change into the organization and measuring its impact. You will continue learning more from specific case studies focused on different kinds of transformation, from reshaping functional teams to optimizing lead time through improved ways of working. The case studies will be across various functional areas including development, marketing, and operations.
Essentially, this book is a first-hand account of dynamic organizational change management and how it is accomplished on a global scale from one of the most successful and truly progressive organizations on the planet, the LEGO Group.
About the Author: Gitte Jakobsen has been involved in organizational and leadership development in the LEGO Group since 1997 with roles both as staff manager and as a specialist. She has extensive experience in the development of complex marketing, production, and people processes based on her experience in creating and leading global activities where she built training organizations and knowledge management activities across LEGO Learning Centers in Denmark, Mexico, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and China. Additionally, she is developing global LEGO programs like World-Class Craftsmanship with the objective of building up LEGO toolmakers and Technology Leaders of Tomorrow. These efforts were outlined in her Shingo Prize Recipient book Building a Global Learning Organization published by Productivity Press in 2014.
In 2009, Jakobsen completed a master's degree in educational psychology at the University of Aarhus and has since been working as a Learning and Change Specialist providing both practical and theoretical perspectives in her positions as HR Senior Manager and, later, Change Director of Strategy and Transformation. Her core responsibilities lie in supporting the LEGO business areas in selected strategic initiatives for leading change in an engaging and sustaining way.