LEGO is still owned by the Christiansen family. What do you learn from LEGO about the advantages and disadvantages of being a private company?

LEGO, the well-known children’s building system, has been around for a long time and in an age when new toys come and go with astonishing rapidity and technology-based toys like computer games are reaching astonishing heights of sophistication, it might be diffi cult to understand the enduring market appeal of these basic building bricks. Now called LEGO Systems in Play, over 60 billion LEGO bricks and other elements are made every year:
indeed, if all the LEGO bricks ever produced were divided among the world’s population each person would have at least 100 bricks. The name LEGO is an abbreviation of two Danish words ‘leg godt’, meaning ‘play well’. The company was founded by Ole Kirk Kristiansen in 1932 and it remains a privately owned fourth-generation family business. It is now one of the world’s largest and most profi table manufacturers of toys, with its head offi ce in Billund, Denmark and branches throughout the world. The traditional interlocking LEGO brick has twice been named toy of the century – fi rst by Fortune magazine and then by the British Association of Toy Retailers.