Reading in BrandWeek about some guy by the name of Jason Poland of Houston who just won the elite position of Model Builder at Legoland California, after besting a number of other wannabes in the ultimate build-off at the family theme park in Carlsbad, reminded me of something I read a couple of years ago about some management guru who went around major corporations giving seminars on management techniques based on building stuff out of Lego. Participants had to pay ten thousand dollars to take part… And, buy a six thousand dollar box of Lego blocks! I mean c’mon, you could go to Toys Are Us and buy the store for $6K. Wonder if that particular scam is still being worked? Wouldn’t be surprised if Tom Peters hasn’t glommed on to it.
I'm here for the seminar!
Hi George!
I got a real chuckle out of this posting, because I'm the blogger for www.itbadbusiness.com, which covers scams and unethical business practices- but I know exactly the training exercise you're talking about because I used to run those training sessions myself! I worked as a management consultant for a very well known and prestigious NY based consulting firm.
We used to use legos to build little boats on "production line" to demonstrate principles of MRP II. You're right, the lego kits cost a fortune(though I don't recall if it was as much as $6,000) Now, I'm not defending the price but I will tell you two things about the product that you might want to consider:
1. I was told that the pieces were specially designed and were not standard lego pieces. They were intentionally made os that there could only be one way to build the little boats
2. The cost of virtually ALL these kinds of products designed for corporate training (board games, building games, team building games etc.) seems vastly overpriced because they must consider a. the research/development costs b. the fact that these are not mass marketed c. the deep pockets of large corporations that are willing to pay for this kind of nonsense.
I agree that to the casual observer the price of these sorts of "training manipulatives" seems outrageous, but it's typical for a training "game" to cost many thousands of dollars. Especially if you throw in a few consultants to run the training session
Posted by: Jocelyn S. | June 11, 2006 5:42 AM | Permalink to Comment