What playing Lego® The Lord of the Rings™ taught me about B2B sales
Say what you will about Sauron, but he knew how to close a deal. And in order to learn how to be as goal-oriented as the creator of the One Ring, I played through the entire Lego® The Lord of the Rings™ (or LLotR for short).
To begin, I looked for the game only to find it collecting dust in my Steam library.
Unlike some people on the internet, a highly successful businessperson like myself spends their time journaling and doing drugs instead of playing video games.
But I believe we all grow with new challenges, so I started the game and started following the fellowship around middle earth.
POV: You enter your first lecture on ring making
The journey began with a prologue in that patented Lego look, all characters and parts of the environment made to be brand recognizable and marketable from the get-go. A first observation reminded me that communication is key in Middle-earth as it is in business, and it is an ever-evolving practice. Where before Lego figures might have used charades and pictures to convey the plot, now they were using their voices, a change that felt good until Boromir spammed his “Frodo” voice line at Amon Hen like it was a meeting reminder in my calendar.
After the first story parts, I found myself in an open world. Personally, I prefer the good old cubicle or corner office, but I cannot deny the advantage of getting my 10k steps in the overworld while learning about business. There also was a fast travel system that allowed me to jump around levels back-to-back, just like I am used to handling multiple Zoom meetings per day.
The rest of the story itself was the main plot points of The Lord of the Rings, something even savvy business people like myself have seen, so I don’t think they need a lengthy recap here. The Lego look added some charm, but high art, like those fancy paintings hanging in my office, it was not.
Even in Lego® The Lord of the Rings™, business is all about keeping a clean balance sheet and tracking your income and expenses down to the last stud. This becomes clear once you realize that certain areas in free play are only reachable with skills you do not yet possess. Just like in the business world, it is easier to hire someone with the needed skill than to try to learn it yourself; some buyable characters come with abilities you simply cannot get otherwise. Unlike the business world, once a character has been unlocked by paying them, they stay loyal to you and can be used in any free play instead of switching to a competitor for a monthly salary.
Teamwork makes the dream work
But it does not end with high payouts for characters; certain extras can be bought for sums that make the 500k needed to get an old, evil wizard look meager in comparison. Notable amongst these extras are the stud multipliers, giving you anywhere from 2 to 10 times the amount of digital currency you would normaly recieve. While multipliers like these are hardly obtainable in business, outside of running a scammy genAI company, even in the game they are not as good as you might think. If you do not prioritize them, it can happen that you only obtain all of them so late that their influence on unlocking other things is neglibel. Other extras are more impactful; take, for example, the great 8-bit soundtrack you can unlock or the cool outfits for some bosses. Buying your boss new clothes may feel weird, but in the world of business, we call people who do that ‘promotable.’
Business in Lego® The Lord of the Rings™ also seems to be about helping people, a somewhat foreign concept in the business world. While walking around in the overworld, I met many friendly faces that asked me to bring them items, which I could either find in the different levels or they had to be forged using mythril. Mythril is a rare resource; you get it for various tasks in levels, like collecting enough studs; in a sense it works as a bonus for productivity.
Besides that, you also get mythril from some people for doing tasks for them, creating a loop where you need to find an item to give to a person to get the mythril you need to make an item for another person. This little lesson in supply chains would be better if the rewards you get, besides more mythril, weren’t extras that you still have to pay for. However, this too is an important business lesson about production costs, where the people are making the extra for you to buy, and the price represents the extra costs they need to cover.
Even business can be fun(ky)
After learning quite a bit about business, I decided to go for the 100%; after all, you either give it your all or get replaced. This detour had me complete all objectives in every level, buy every single extra, make every item, and, of course, unlock every character. It was not a hard thing to do, besides some rather janky jump-and-run sections. As far as business things go, I would not say there was any lesson to be learned, so I ended by playing the last level one more time.
While watching Gollum tumble down the fiery maw of Mount Doom, I asked myself if there was a deeper meaning to all of this. Playing Lego® The Lord of the Rings™ made me relive a great and epic adventure, teaching me about supply chains, the importance of communication, and that sometimes focusing too much on getting a deal done can end you up in hot lava.
At the end of the day, I think not everyone needs to play this game to get better at B2B sales, but there are certainly worse materials in some MBA syllabi.