Indulge the Tinkerer

In 1925, Dick Drew had an idea. As a sandpaper salesman for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, an organization known primarily for its high-grade abrasives, he often found himself in auto body shops selling to mechanics who needed to smooth their repairs. Somewhat absentmindedly, he noticed that the butcher paper mechanics used to outline paint jobs would routinely ruin the carefully-detailed lines, and wondered, “What if I could make a tape that wouldn’t tear the paint off the cars?” After all, it’d be something else to sell the bodyshops he served.

After weeks of tinkering with little success, his boss told him to give up the project. But he was convinced there was something to this idea, so he came in on nights and weekends to continue exploring (not unlike Xerox PARC’s Gary Starkweather). Long story short, eventually, he invented a product called “masking tape.” And within 3 years, his company, later known as “3M,” was selling more masking tape than sandpaper. Turns out, they were an adhesive company… (they had developed ways of adhering sand to paper, and thought that made them an abrasives company).

Now, they’re a new product company boasting somewhere close to 60,000 products, roughly two per every three employees. You might wonder, “well, which of those are product people?” I’d suggest that might be the wrong question.

Interestingly enough, just a few years after his sandpaper-salesman-turned-moonlighting-business-reinventor transition, Dick Drew learned about a new packaging product from DuPont called “cellophane.” Curious about the possibilities, he bought a few rolls and started experimenting with adhesives. The outcome: Scotch Tape, which within a couple of years became one of the company’s most successful products. Which is to say that one of the most successful inventors in 3M history started out as a sales guy whose job it wasn’t to come up with new ideas.

There’s something to indulging playful exploration when curiosity strikes. We should learn to listen to that sense of possibility. It may not be how you currently define the business, but if there’s an underlying capability / asset that the idea can tap into, there may be opportunities to have an unfair advantage in tackling much bigger opportunities.

Sometimes the capability to leverage isn’t expected. As this great Bain article mentions - Reliance went from petrol to retail to wireless infrastructure - all leveraging the core capability of navigating India’s Byzantine regulatory system.

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.