273: Lego Friends. Sarah Jessica Parker. Richard Powers.

Good morning dear friends

In today’s letter:

• A Lego Friends’ case study demonstrates why strategy must be both data and design, insight and intuition.
• Sarah Jessica Parker reminds us that whoever we are the hustle is real and anxiety is human.
• Richard Powers’ writing reminds us that with time even wrecks become beautiful, that there is always the potential for redemption.  

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/strategy
In his truly excellent A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Management Effectiveness, Roger Martin observes, “It’s important to realise that the presence of data is not sufficient proof that outcomes cannot be different. Data is not logic.”

Martin uses the launch of Lego Friends to illustrate the point. The data said 85% of Lego players were boys. The firm had launched several girl-focused products, all of which had failed. The prevailing wisdom became that girls weren’t interested in Lego.

CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, was convinced that Lego simply hadn’t figured out how to interest girls in construction toys. His insistence led to a series of ethnographic studies that uncovered that girls were more interested in collaborative play.

This insight was integrated into the design of LEGO Friends. When it launched in 2012, it sold double the expected number and tripled Lego sales to girls, before settling into consistently being one of Lego’s best sellers.

Data showing sales to boys was a lag indicator. Data showing that girls are interested in collaborative play was a lead indicator, suggesting possibility.

Be clear about what data you’re using. History is important to understand, but it need not determine the future.

//self
This week David Szaslay’s Flesh was announced as the winner of 2025’s Booker Prize.

I loved this NYT article about Sarah Jessica Parker’s experience of being a Booker Judge.

First off, three years ago, she posted, “Oh let me try!!!” on The Booker’s Instagram Page.

I’m sure there was a touch more to it, but the fact that you can be world-famous, super-successful, and still be willing to hustle is pretty inspirational.

The judges met repeatedly to debate their choices and to whittle down the 153 finalists to a long-list, then short-list, then winner.

Parker reflects about her first meeting, “I was so scared about talking about books with the other judges. These were Booker winners, long- or shortlisted authors, or people like Chris Power — professionals who spend their time critiquing, thinking and writing about books.

But we discussed David Szalay’s “Flesh,” and after that first conversation I felt so much more comfortable. It wasn’t intimidating. I didn’t feel like I was defending my thesis. The theoretical, like many things in life, is much more scary than opening your mouth, and if someone disagrees with you, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong.”

I love that even someone as accomplished as Parker felt intimidated.

It gives us all the freedom to chill about our own panics. And, as she describes, the action is often less scary than our fears about it.

Naturally, there were disagreements. However, “discussion wasn’t an indictment. No one was attacking me and saying, ‘You’re wrong.’ They were just disagreeing for reasons that were as valid to them as mine were that the books were beautiful. It was really good for me.”

It is a tricky but powerful thing to get right, particularly in large, complex organisations.

Discussion, disagreement, is valid. In fact, you want it. But in high-risk, unsafe environments, discussion often becomes about being right. The need to be right prevents exploration, which limits imagination, which blunts creativity, and then you get bleh and meh.

///soul
A few letters ago I introduced you to the Polynesian creator god, Ta’aroa.

It is how award-winning author Richard Powers begins his novel Playground.

Playground is centred around the ocean’s beauty and friendships’ complexity.

The Truk Lagoons were a major Japanese naval base in the South Pacific during World War II. A US aerial attack in February 1944 transformed into a massive underwater graveyard of sunken ships and aircraft.

Powers describes, “A brass ship’s throttle, its handle stuck to a speed that failed to save it, lay like some wild Miro sculpture caked in starfish and worms. Morays nestled in the gun barrels. One ship’s crumbled mast was so coated with swirls of whip coral and anemones that it, too, branched as if alive. Troops of porcelain crabs skittered in formation. Nudibranches slithered across bits of broken blasted deck as if some wedding had scattered hallucinogenic bouquets,” noting, “Life was never very good at obeying human logic.”

We call them wrecks. Ocean creatures claim them as home. This winter a Cape Leopard appeared in the West Coast National Park for the first time in 170 years. Damage can be redeemed. Restoration, transformation, is possible.

Powers describes an island celebration, “For unemployed people who lived in abandoned buildings, they eat better than a good deal of the world. A feast of banana and breadfruit and fafa and sweet potato, pig and chicken, roast garden veggies, shrimp, crab, clam, sea snails and parrotfish, bathed in lemon and onion and coconut milk.”

He reminded me of Wangari Maathai’s Unbowed, in which she, too, reflects that in pre-cash crop Kenyan life, no one went hungry, malnutrition was unknown. The world, when respected, gave all the riches we need.

You might read it for those reasons or you might simply read it for sentences like this, “In the fall of our senior year, when the sweet gums turned burgundy, the maples went lemon and organize, and the oaks all over campus settled into shades of scarlet, when the daylight hours shrank and the air thickened with that sere, weird scent of anticipation…”

Best wishes

Karl

PS: You can learn about my executive coaching practice [here] and find me on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in creating space to strengthen your leadership team’s strategic, communication and reflective powers, I facilitate curated leadership journeys. The details are [here]. Please do share this letter with friends. They can subscribe [here].