Leadership Summit 2026: Mattel's CEO on Driving Consumer Engagement and Cultural Impact

**Alison Beard** (0:02)
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Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast, I'm Alison Beard.
Lots of companies talk about transformation, but few successfully reinvent themselves while staying true to what made them break through or stand out in the first place. Mattel is one of those rare success stories. In recent years, the company has evolved from a traditional toy manufacturer into an IP-driven entertainment business, turning brands like Barbie into cultural phenomena that extend far beyond the toy aisle. That transformation took a lot, but most importantly, it required strong leadership. Today's guest is Mattel CEO, Ynon Kreiz. He joined me as part of our recent HBR Leadership Summit, and we spoke about rethinking talent, redesigning the organization, building the right technology, and never forgetting the customer. Here's our conversation. Ynon, thank you so much for being here today.

**Ynon Kreiz** (1:28)
Hi, Alison. Great to be here.

**Alison Beard** (1:29)
As I said, you have gone from toy company to maker of movies, games, live events, and more in a very short time. The most notable example, of course, being the Barbie Blockbuster three summers ago. How have you reorganized the business and shifted your talent strategy for this new era of Mattel?

**Ynon Kreiz** (1:47)
It has been an evolution of our purpose and strategy.
From being a toy manufacturer company, a manufacturing company that was making items, to become an IP company that is managing franchises. And we evolved our strategy to grow our IP-driven play and family entertainment business. And this really brought together two very important concepts. The first is the continued expansion beyond physical product. And the second is an increased orientation around a holistic brand management to capture the full value of our intellectual properties across both toys and entertainment.
Toys are foundational to Mattel. And we believe there is a significant upside in the industry, but success in our toy business will drive success in entertainment. And success in entertainment will drive even greater success in toys. So we've been through a period of transformation. There was significant focus on operations, improving how we work. You know, we went through a period of optimizing our workforce. We reduced the non-manufacturing workforce from 13,500 people to 8,000 people. And within the 8,000 jobs that we kept, we made even more changes in terms of strengthening capabilities and bringing new leadership to certain key parts of the company, where we continue to drive innovation and expanding our core business.

**Alison Beard** (3:18)
So, when you make big changes like that, when you reduce the workforce, when you're cutting costs in some areas, even as you're adding in others, you know, that can be tough for an organization. And I'm sure a lot of our audience members are maybe being asked to do this in their own organizations right now as a result of AI. So, as CEO, how do you make those tough decisions? And then how do you bring the workforce through it in a way that keeps them excited and engaged to stay?

**Ynon Kreiz** (3:47)
I think it's really important to communicate and be very clear about the vision and the purpose. Very early on when I started, what we did is we took the old strategy that was in a binder that was three inch thick and we redefined the strategy and brought it down to one page. It doesn't make it necessarily easy to execute, but at least it's very clear to understand.
We communicated the strategy across the organization whereby every single employee in the company knows exactly what they need to do at the start of the year and how that ladders up to the overall purpose and objectives of the company overall. So clarity and being crystal about your purpose and mission, we believe is very important to our success.

**Alison Beard** (4:36)
Then what were the key steps in revolutionizing the culture of Mattel? Being more innovative, more creative, basically to build these muscles of exploring what else could be done with your existing assets.
How do you get people to start thinking more out of the box, especially when it comes to new technologies like AI?

**Ynon Kreiz** (4:58)
At the core, Mattel is an innovative company.
What we wanted to do is to bring that out and amplify that beyond the day-to-day operations. It's not that we don't manage a complex operation. We make product, we make physical product. We sell toys and different product in over 500,000 stores globally. This is about 75% of our business. The rest is online retail and e-commerce. So there is complexity in the business, but we simplify that. We reduce the number of items that we made, the number of SKUs by over 40% to make sure that what we do is actually productive and additive.