The Story
It started with a 12-year-old who hadn’t learned what was impossible.
When Martin Lindstrom was twelve, he built a miniature Legoland in his parents’ garden. Not because anyone asked him to. Not because it was part of a career plan. He simply loved LEGO—and had an idea he couldn’t leave alone.
Then LEGO’s lawyers arrived.
What might have ended the story instead led, eventually, to an opportunity to work inside the company he admired. A child who had looked at a brand from the outside was invited to see it from the inside as a 12 year old kid.
That experience stayed with Martin. So did a conviction that has shaped his work ever since: people who haven’t learned how things are “supposed” to be done can sometimes see possibilities everyone else has stopped noticing.
The Leaders50 Succession Award takes that belief into the boardroom. | Three young people get an extraordinary view of leadership. Five established CEO´s get the chance to see their organisations with fresh eyes.
Each brings something the other cannot learn alone.
Big business
breakthroughs often
begin with very small
observations.
Disney Company and many more, alongside several governments and countries.
Much of that work begins in everyday life. Inspired by his experiences early in his career, Martin has spent decades alongside his team visiting people’s homes, cooking with families and shopping with them, looking for the small details that reveal an unmet need or a familiar frustration.
These observations underpin his Small Data approach, connecting human insight with evidence to inform products, services and organisational change.
Martin is the chairman of Lindstrom Company, and author of eight New York Times bestselling books, including Buyology, Small Data and The Ministry of Common Sense, translated into 60 languages. TIME magazine has named him one of the world’s 100 most influential people, and Thinkers50 has featured him among the world’s leading business thinkers for a decade.
