As I began to read Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry, written by David C. Robertson with Bill Breen and published by Crown Business, it occurred to me that LEGO blocks offer a unique opportunity to master the core principles of Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction.”

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress. In Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy: Third Edition (1942), the Austrian economist wrote: “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.” (p. 83)

Although Schumpeter devoted a mere six-page chapter to the concept when characterizing capitalism as “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” it has become the centerpiece for modern thinking on how economies evolve. It also suggests a process by which almost any organization, whatever its size and nature nay be, can become stronger and healthier by constant and rigorous elimination of anyone and anything that is not essential to its success.

That is precisely what happened in 2004 when Jørgen Vig Knudstorp and his leadership team transformecd the LEGO Group — “brick by brick” — into one of the world’s most innovative as well as most profitable and fastest growing toy companies, in ways and to an extent once thought impossible.

You may be astonished by what can be built with LEGO bricks and even more astonished by how playing with LEGO bricks can generate ideas that will make an organization stronger and healthier.