A Lego-lover’s guide to preparing for the AI age

In London’s Design MuseumAI, an exhibition currently on display by Ai Weiwei, a Chinese artist, includes a 15-metre-long work called “Water Lilies #1” based on the triptych by Claude Monet. Look closely and it is made of 650,000 Lego bricks—which integrates Monet’s impressionism into what Mr Ai calls a “digitised and pixelated language”. That is a good analogy for Lego itself. The Danish toymaker is on a long-term mission to digitise and pixelate its own fount of human creativity: the plastic brick.Three digital experts from McKinsey, a management consultancy, profile Lego’s transformation as part of their new book, “Rewired”, which outlines the dos and don’ts for businesses rebuilding themselves for the age of digitisation. Beware: the language of digital transformation is treachery to common English. It sounds more like corporate yoga than a marathon of software development. Executives need to be aligned. Teams are pods. Be agile. Define your downward-facing domains. McKinsey, drawing lessons from 200 firms, provides clarity despite the mumbo jumbo. But to make it easier on the ear, Schumpeter will use Lego as a guide to help illustrate some of McKinsey’s insights. Call it the yellow-brick road to generative artificial intelligence ().