3M: I Love You by Javier Ildefonso

My today’s post is to, loudly shout my love to 3M, as a consumer of their products and as someone who is in love of disruptive strategies. “Javier, do you love 3M? What about Apple, Google, Amazon…?” Yes, I love them but, my heart is for 3M. Said that, I have never worked there and I don’t know anyone working there and I am sure that, as love, not everything is like it is showed but… let me keep my love live. Let me share with you the reasons why I love 3M.
The core ideology of 3M is: Innovate, "do not kill a new product idea", absolute integrity, respect individual’s initiatives and personal growth, tolerate mistakes, quality and reliability product troubleshooting reach:

• Creativity is the ability to think about new ideas.
• Innovation is the implementation of these ideas.

In other words, creativity is the concept, the innovation is the process. Obviously, this process couldn’t occur without a proper organization supporting and encouraging it. Innovation doesn’t occur just in the laboratory, it just appears across the whole company.
3M understands that there are two types of market needs.

• Those needs that customers recognize
• Those needs that customers do not know they have. These are obviously, the most difficult to find and require a thorough and accurate approach to situations that customers are exposed in life. For 3M, these needs will generate the most useful and profitable products

Another thing that I like from 3M is the goal that they have to provide enough resources to find products capable of changing rules of the competition game. (it could be considered “Blue Ocean Strategy”). 3M people used to call them "Pacings Plus". They used to have 25 “Pacing Plus”, being in every division of the company, believing that, they can generate an unpredictable number of products. These are the kind of products born of an idea, being quite difficult to know how many products will generate a pacing plus and, how they will expand, but it is a great concept and strategy!
3M has an internal “rule” that I strongly support:

• 30% of their annual sales should come from products that are less than 4 years in the market. (how many companies are still living and basing their strategy on their “cow” products???? Take a note!)
• 10% of their annual sales should come from products that are less than 1 year in the market. Why? 3M believes that innovation is the ability to have awareness on time while, understand how best keep the pace and to achieve the best in innovation, you must move quickly.

Jack Welch (General Electric Chairman and CEO, 1981-2001) was asked by a journalist during an interview: “Mr. Welch, you are a man with a lot of power and you need to take many important decisions among the day, how do you know which is the right choice?” Welch replied: “It is easy, when I don’t know the answer or I am not sure about the decision I should take, I dig into my pocket and take one of the pieces I have. If the piece I chose is black color, I give green light to the project. If it is white color, I decide not going for the project. It is easy!” The interviewer was surprised and said: “Really? Do you take decisions based on random?”. Welch replied: “Yes. In many decision I need to take, I really don’t know which is the right answer but, I have clear that I need to take the decision quickly because, if finally I took the wrong one, I have enough time to reverse it before my competitor take the advantage. And if I took the right one, I am in a perfect position to have a competitive advantage prior my competitors. So, when you don’t know the answer, take the decision quickly!” (Apologies for any inaccurate statement, I don’t remember exactly the conversation but, the concept is that one I described)
Even 3M begins weren’t so easy, 100 years ago, they exceeded wars, depressions, recessions, changes on social behaviors, habits and beliefs, people, managers and also CEOs but, their strategy continues to produce results so, 3M has something different.
3M strategy is based on permanent adaptation, reinventing themselves every day and, that is the reason why I love 3M: Proper strategy definition, proper strategy implementation.
Raise your hand or simple like the post if now you love 3M a little bit more than before reading it.
If you don’t know what 3M products you consume, please visit the following site and surprises you: http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/All/3M-ProdServ/
Some values and figures about 3M that you can find on their website:
3M Values

• Act with uncompromising honesty and integrity in everything we do.
• Satisfy our customers with innovative technology and superior quality, value and service.
• Provide our investors an attractive return through sustainable, global growth.
• Respect our social and physical environment around the world.
• Value and develop our employees' diverse talents, initiative and leadership.
• Earn the admiration of all those associated with 3M worldwide.

3M at a Glance (Year-end 2013)

• Global sales: $30.8 billion.
• International (non-US) sales: $19.7 billion (64 percent of company's total). à How many US companies are failing by committing their global strategy based on US strategy? (I will evaluate it in a future post)
• Operations in more than 70 countries.
• 3M products sold in nearly 200 countries.
• 88,667 employees globally.
• 2013 3Mgives cash and product donations totaled $60.2 million.