About

I started in the UN system, on youth programmes with UNICEF and UNESCO. Good work, properly funded, run by people who cared. Then a funding cycle would end, or the person holding it together would move on, and within a year it was as though none of it had happened.

That left me with a question I have been answering ever since: what does it take to build something that lasts?

It took me to product design at Central Saint Martins. Then, in 2001, to a toy company three years away from the worst year in its history.

I joined the LEGO Group that year. Three years later it posted the worst loss in its history and came close to going under: sales down to 6.7 billion DKK, a loss of 1.9 billion DKK. I was there for that, and for every year of what came after.

It closed 2025 at 83.5 billion DKK, and it is still growing. Around 5,500 people worked there in 2004. Nearly 34,000 do now, many of them in functions that did not exist when I arrived.

It hasn't been one company. It's been a series of transformations, each needing different capabilities, systems and ways of working. Across seven leadership roles I built functions that didn't exist before: experience design, ethnographic consumer insights, the rebuild of LEGO.com into a brand-owned content channel, consumer engagement in sustainability, leadership culture and marketing experimentation at scale. I ran what I built: carried the budgets, beat the targets, and handed over systems that still run today.

Twenty-five years is long enough to see what happens after you leave. That turns out to be the only part of the question that matters.

Build it so it keeps working

The pattern is consistent: build the capability, make it work without me, move on.

The experimentation infrastructure is still running across more than twenty markets. The rebuild of LEGO.com still carries over 40 million people a month, with the gains in NPS and conversion holding. The systems from leadership culture to capability building are still in place years after I left.

The test each time: if everyone who built this left tomorrow, would it still work?

What I learned is that good judgement doesn't scale on its own. The systems that produce it have to be rebuilt, system by system, as the company changes. That is the difference between change that performs briefly and change that holds.

What I'm still working out

Not all of it held. Some of what I built was taken apart by a reshuffle that had nothing to do with whether it worked. One piece I was proud of was closed down while the know-how it had created carried on quietly inside three other teams, which is a strange kind of success and took me years to count as one.

So I'm still working out how much of durability you can design, and how much of it comes down to who inherits your work. Twenty-five years in I have a much better answer than I had at the UN. I don't have a complete one.

Designer and strategist

Later came the TRIUM Executive MBA (HEC Paris, NYU Stern, LSE). Between the design school and the MBA sit the two lenses I work with:

• A designer's focus on how things actually work for people
• A strategist's ability to shape systems that hold under complexity and scale

Most of the people I've worked alongside have one or the other. The designers build things people love and can't tell you what it costs to run them. The strategists draw the system and can't tell you what it feels like to be inside it. This work needs both, because a system nobody wants to use isn't a system, and a thing people love that only one team can operate isn't a capability.

Where I am now

I'm completing my twenty-fifth year at the LEGO Group. From October 2026 I'll work through Oxime Partners with B2C brands and leadership teams on making strategy operational: the systems, ways of working and leadership infrastructure that keep a company deciding well as it grows.

In the meantime I write here on The Tenon, monthly, about what causes these problems and what fixes them.

If you want the problem itself rather than the person, it's on the Advisory page. If you'd rather see how I think before you decide anything, start with the writing.