Introduction 3M is an innovative and creative company that flourished since 1930 with the invention of masking tape and again in the 1950’s with Scotchgard the fabric protector. Then during a glue that was invented that was considered a failure in the 1970’s someone came up with the idea of taking that glue solution and using it on the back of paper to hold the paper to anything. So the invention of the post-it came out and the business really took off. in the 2000 the newly appointed CEO James McNerney implemented the Six Sigma management style. He did this because he felt the company was stale and not growing as much as he felt. This new management style is “designed to identify problems in work processes, and then use…show more content… 4. Intuition and creativity should play the biggest role in 3M. However, with Six Sigma these two characteristics are very limited. 3M does not get tons of new ideas from all over in the company.
5. Preference to work would be with a company where decision making leaves room for risk and failure in search of innovation. Collaboration of multiple ideas is what created a lot of successful companies and products like Apple and Twitter.
Conclusions
I believe if 3M wants to grow as a company that it needs to go back to what made 3M the well known company that it is today; the leading edge technologies that were invented during the free time that was allotted for experimentation. Allow the people and engineers do the thinking and provide the latitude to experiment and give those people the opportunity to create the next big product to grow the firm and take it to the future. I feel that 3M is just in survival mode and has not really come out with anything big since the implementation of the Six Sigma program. You cannot hire great ideas or innovation, but you can hire people who have those characteristics and provide them the tools to do just that. Six Sigma has proven to make 3M profitable in the beginning but for the long run it has hurt 3M. 3M has not proven to make a substantial
