I just finished reading Brick by Brick by David Robertson. It is the story of The LEGO Group’s financial ups and downs over the past twenty years. After experiencing major success during the eighties and early nineties, LEGO began to struggle during the late nineties as the digital age arrived. In response to the changing environment, LEGO brought in new management whose goal was to shake LEGO from its past and modernize it for the 21st century. Unfortunately, this did not go well and after a series of misadventures the LEGO Group was facing bankruptcy. At this point LEGO promoted a new man to the head of the company. His name was Jorgen Knudstorp and he was more of a conventional thinker than those he replaced. Instead of envisioning world domination, he focused on cost cutting, down sizing and returning LEGO to the path that had brought it so much success in the past.

Knudstorp’s most interesting method for turning around LEGO was not to speak grandly of the future and therefore encourage employees. Instead, he took the opposite approach. Adapting a pessimistic view of the future, he encouraged his employees to do the same. He felt that LEGO’s problems stemmed from overconfidence. LEGO is run out of a small town in Denmark, most of the employees grew up around LEGO and had developed a belief that the company was invincible and would always be a step ahead in the toy industry. 

Knudstorp’s goal was to show the employees that the failure and breakup of the company was a very real possibility. Only hard work, hard decisions and determination would get the company away from the cliff that its “everything is awesome” mentality had led it to.

While reading this story, I could only think of how similar a situation our nation is in. We have gotten sucked into the same manner of thinking that plagued LEGO. All of us are aware of numerous issues facing our country, ask just about any person you see and you will receive a laundry list of problems. While no one is short on problems, everyone is short on solutions and if we do have a solution we like, very few people will do anything about them.

Today, in this country, we hold the belief that any issue can be solved by simply throwing money at it. Actually solving the problem with reform or reduction causes too much friction, so we drown our crises with dollars.

Except you can’t solve a problem by pouring money on it, you can only delay it. Even the solution of unlimited cash poses a problem, because we are no longer spending our own money, we are spending other people’s. We are building our future supported by postponed problems and other countries money, and that will only continue to work for as long as they trust us with an ever increasing amount of money. But why should they trust us?

Because we are America…duh.

This seems to be the answer given by those who preach the doctrine of unlimited spending and accepted by the majority of the country. But we did not become the America we know today by printing or borrowing money, we got here by running our country like we run our own lives: frugal, disciplined and hard working. We now as a nation are living out a Charlie Sheen style fantasy.

Our generations have known only the success of our country. We don’t remember the wars or disasters that challenged our existence. We know only wealth and power, but these are not endless commodities, they are precious. Just as at LEGO, we have expanded in too many directions and lost sight of the core reason we are so successful. We must look at the world clearly and see that the decisions that have doomed so many countries before us are being repeated here today.

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Tags: America, conservative, Democrats, economy, gop, Lego, Obama, politics, republican