Lego’s revival has been called the greatest turnaround in corporate history. A book devoted to the subject, David Robertson’s Brick by Brick: How Lego Rewrote the Rules of Innovation, has become a set business text. Sony, Adidas and Boeing are said to refer to it. Google now uses Lego bricks to help its employees innovate.
Lego’s saviour is the aforementioned Vig Knudstorp – a father of four, perhaps not uncoincidentally – who arrived from management consultants McKinsey & Company in 2001 and was promoted to boss within three years, aged 36. “In some ways, I think he’s a better model for innovation than Steve Jobs,” Robertson has said.
Considering all of us gravitate toward the familiar. The books and authors you respect and read don’t change much if there is no venturing outward, and sometimes that venturing occurs with books facing a diminished readership, an extinction. I recognize small presses I revere proclaiming the new voice of a generation on my return report. I want to save it from exile, to prop it up and give it one more chance to make an impression. I want to buy it. But decisions must be made, and for the time being I log it somewhere in the back of my mind, on that running tab of books to come back around to when I have more time—whenever the hell that might be.
The way that food has been photographed over the years is a reflection on the times we live in. The first still-life like images of overflowing fruit baskets soon branched out into ways of commercializing food. As photography evolved, food was sometimes used to make statements during important moments in history, such the Great Depression or the fight for civil rights.
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Today, we want food to look real. In the past few decades, food photos have taken on a real-time documentary feel, from a chef captured mid-flambe to a scoop of ice cream that has just begun to melt.
As soon as I saw the cover art, I knew I was in luck: my publisher had come up with a gorgeous, smart design for the book jacket of the novel I’d spent years writing.
There was just one problem with it… a problem that seemed to worry no one but me.