Boston Days - Part 12

Leg Godt: How a 94-Year-Old Toy Company Out-Engaged the Smartphone

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers what a Harvard classroom, a LEGO store in downtown Boston, and one small race car taught me about customer engagement and repeat business.)

Footfall is rented. Engagement is owned. That is the only difference between a store you visit once and a brand you return to for life.

I had waited forty years for one walk into a LEGO store — to build something with my own hands beside other children, browse every shelf without an agenda, and spend a modest, self-imposed budget down to its last dollar. 

Small ambitions, held for a very long time.

I understood why that wait mattered inside a Harvard classroom, months before Boston. Early on during my Senior Leadership Program, we studied LEGO's turnaround as a case in discipline. 

Founded in 1932 by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Denmark, the company took its name from "leg godt" — play well. 

The interlocking brick arrived in 1958, the minifigure in 1978. Then came theme parks, video games, and licensing deals that nearly buried it — $800 million in debt by 2003. 

A new CEO cut thousands of products, sold the parks, and rebuilt around the brick. 

By 2015, LEGO had overtaken Mattel and Hasbro to become the world's most valuable toy company — still earning over $9 billion a year, as newborns now inherit smartphones before toys.

That paradox pulled me into the LEGO Store in downtown Boston. 

A three-storey brick giraffe named Gio guards the corner, stopping strangers before they step inside — engagement earned on a public sidewalk, for free. 

Inside, a wall traces the company's history, ending on its founding motto: only the best is good enough. 

Nearby sat a bin of loose bricks, no set, no instructions, where I built beside a teenager, a toddler, and a father, united by nothing but the bricks. 

A sign above read "Adults Welcome," and I took that personally.

I browsed every wall, each merchandised as a complete idea, then bought the one thing that mattered — a small LEGO Formula One race car, a nod to three decades watching the sport, and a deliberate choice of Team LEGO over any real one. 

Twenty dollars, two hundred and one pieces, one evening of building I still remember.

A smartphone holds a child's attention for an hour. It cannot hand a stranger a brick and watch two generations finish something together. 

That difference is why LEGO still outsells every screen, ninety-four years on.

Retailers spend fortunes chasing footfall and forget that footfall without engagement never returns. 

LEGO stopped chasing new customers decades ago — it simply gave the ones it had a reason to return, never with a discount, always with a brick placed in the right hand.

Boston was teaching me again — that repeat business is never bought. It is built, one engaged customer at a time.

(I am writing "Boston Days" as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11 here.

Boston Days - Part 6

The Cleaning Liquid I Couldn’t Find. And What It Said About the World’s Most Advanced Retail Market.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Indian Quick Commerce boom”)

It started with a dirty iPad keyboard.

Three weeks of intensive sessions, constant note-taking, and the kind of daily use that leaves a screen looking like it has lived a full life. I needed a cleaning liquid. A simple, everyday SKU. The kind of thing that sits on a shelf in any electronics accessories aisle back home.

I walked into the nearest neighbourhood store. The staff looked at me the way you look at someone asking for something that simply does not exist in their world.

I tried another. Same result.

I turned, predictably, to Amazon. Thursday delivery. This was Monday. Prime or no Prime, apparently, does not always mean fast.

And that is when it hit me — not as a grievance, but as a genuine retail observation.

I am sitting in the city that gave the world MIT, Harvard, the internet, and more patents than most countries have produced in their entire history. And I cannot get a bottle of screen cleaner delivered to my door before the week is out.

Back in Chennai, I would have opened Zepto. Nine minutes. Done.

That contrast stayed with me longer than it should have, because it is not actually a logistics story. It is a structural one.

India’s quick commerce — Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy Instamart — was never designed in a boardroom as a solution to affluence. 

It was built to solve a very Indian problem: the gap between what modern consumers needed and what traditional retail could deliver. Dark stores, hyperlocal networks, mobile-first consumers, and a density of demand in our cities did the rest.

America’s retail architecture was built around a different model entirely. Large-format stores. Vast parking lots. The weekly family grocery run. A suburban rhythm of shopping that was never designed for impulse or urgency at the last mile.

The demand density that makes a dark store economically viable simply does not exist the same way in Boston’s residential neighbourhoods. Labour costs and real estate economics add further complexity. 

And so, despite GoPuff and DoorDash Dash Mart and Instacart’s best efforts, quick commerce here remains fragmented, expensive, and largely confined to dense urban pockets.

Amazon is trying. Walmart GoLocal is trying. The intent is visible. The execution, at scale, is still some distance away.

I eventually found a workaround, as one always does. But the question stayed with me through the rest of the day.

India built quick commerce out of necessity. And in doing so, leapfrogged the very markets that once set the global retail agenda.

That is a sentence I would not have expected to write ten years ago. I find that I mean it rather completely.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 3

The Universe Has a Sense of Timing

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Power of positive manifestations”)

300 minutes. That is precisely how long the day’s sessions had run — case studies, leadership frameworks, management metrics, and the kind of deep deliberations that leave you simultaneously drained and quietly electric.

As the glass doors of the Chao Centre swung behind me, I made a deliberate choice. Not the room. Not the power nap. The campus. The Boston evening. The open sky.

My first stop was the Tata Hall — a building that carries unusual emotional weight for every Indian who walks this campus. 

Donated by the late Mr. Ratan Tata, it stands as a quiet monument to Indian generosity meeting global ambition, housed in elegant red brick and understated dignity.

Spangler came next — the social heart of HBS. Closed for the day by 5 pm, it stood still in the evening light. A banner near its entrance read: “Hard work. With humility. For humanity.” I stood there long enough to let those words do their work.

Then came Baker Library. As participants of the Executive Management Program, access is granted until 7 pm — a privilege I was not about to surrender to fatigue. I stepped inside and simply stopped moving. 

Over 700,000 volumes. Reportedly the world’s largest business library. The ceiling, the amber light, the cathedral silence — it felt less like a library and more like a place of pilgrimage.

Earlier that day, I had written to a few luminaries associated with HBS, quietly hoping for a response. 

As I walked past the Dean’s quarters in the early evening, my thoughts turned — almost involuntarily — to Prof. Nitin Nohria.

The 10th Dean of Harvard Business School. Its first Indian-American leader. And by most accounts, one of its finest.

His decade at the helm, from 2010 to 2021, was nothing short of transformational. He introduced the FIELD curriculum — a bold pedagogical shift that brought real-world, experiential learning into the HBS classroom. 

He championed the MBA Oath, calling on graduates to pledge ethical and responsible leadership — a quiet but powerful act of institutional conscience. 

He launched HBX, now HBS Online, democratising business education beyond the walls of this storied campus. He made HBS more global, more inclusive, and more honest about what the world actually needs from business leaders.

I was still thinking about him as I rounded a corner near the library.

A gentleman in a white shirt. Round glasses. Walking at an unhurried pace.

I looked. Hesitated. Walked closer.

“Prof. Nohria?”

“Yes,” he said.

I stood still for a few seconds. What had just happened?

What followed were ten of the most quietly extraordinary minutes of my professional life. He asked about me — genuinely, not perfunctorily. I told him about 25 years in Indian retail — the airport retail ecosystem I helped build at BIAL when it first opened in 2008, the hundreds of cafes I scaled across India at Cafe Coffee Day, the dealer network I doubled for Royal Enfield. 

He listened with the full attention of a man who does not perform interest; he simply has it.

We spoke about the present and the future of Indian retail. His optimism was not the polished variety one dispenses at conferences. 

It was thoughtful, specific, and warm — the perspective of a scholar who has watched markets evolve and still believes in what is coming.

I walked back to my room a different person.

The universe, it would seem, rewards those who choose the campus walk over the power nap.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.