Leadership Innovation: Sandpaper... Without the Sand?


By Steven K. Haught, MBA

In the 1920s, a gentleman by the name of Dick Drew worked as a sandpaper salesman at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.

One day Drew was thinking about the challenge of painting a car — it wasn’t a specialty of his but he could appreciate the problem. What he did know inside and out was sandpaper, and he intuitively realized that sandpaper could help solve the problem. 

What he needed was a roll of sandpaper without the sand. This became known as masking tape and it transformed more than just how we paint cars.

That company we know today as 3M — Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company.  Dick Drew’s insight in the early 1920’s wasn’t an anomaly, it was an example of the type of innovation that has defined 3M as a company for 100 years. What made them so consistently creative and innovative?

3M has a “flexible attention” policy. In most companies, flexible attention means goofing off on the company dime. In 3M it means playing a game, taking a nap, or going for a walk across an extensive campus to admire the deer. No kidding!

3M knows that creative ideas don’t always surrender to a frontal assault in front of a computer terminal or in a group meeting. Sometimes they sneak up on us while we are paying attention to something else.

3M also rotates its engineers from one department to another every few years. Some of the engineers probably don’t like that, but the benefits are part of what sets the company apart as a leader in innovation. Why make someone with years of expertise in soundproofing or flat-screen displays work on a vaccine or an air conditioner? For the company it seems wasteful and for the employee it can be stressful. 

But for a company that makes masking materials out of sandpaper… the real waste would be to let ideas sit in their tidy silos, never to be released so a team of minds can imagine the possibilities.

The key concept here should hit home with executive leadership looking for, hoping for, the “next great thing” is reducing silos.

Many companies, whether by design or by accident, tend to be very compartmentalized. In essence, you are given a tiny box within which to work on your project, but you often won’t have a good idea of what’s going on in other areas of the company.  Everybody works isolated from everyone else.  The opportunities for cross pollination are limited unless you commit to moving positions/projects.

By adding just a little disorder, a company can give it’s employees the freedom to think differently and maybe even help them out of a rut that is often caused by looking at something with too narrow a focus. 

Sometimes we just can’t “see the forest through the trees” — we’re stuck in our little box.
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