But the area was booming as iron ore and other minerals were being discovered nearby. 3M's founders intended to mine corundum, a super-hard mineral that could be used to make grinding wheels. After two years of work and investment, they found that their mineral wasn't corundum; it was anorthosite, a softer material that was terrible for making grinding wheels. The founders gave up on selling the mineral and decided to start manufacturing grinding wheels themselves, a business of which they were entirely ignorant. that didn't work out. so they turned their focus to making sandpaper, another business they knew nothing about.
The one fortunate result of their repeated failures was that they were forced to find a new investor, a successful entrepreneur who supplied cash and eventually took over as president. he knew nothing about sandpaper either but was shrewder than the founders and guided the company to its first profitable product, and abrasive cloth that led 3M tot he sandpaper business. getting there had taken 12 years.
the company progressed slowly. in the early 1920s a young employee, an engineering school dropout named Richard Drew, was delivering new sandpaper samples to a local auto-body shop for testing. he heard workers raging over the lousy tape they used to mask areas for painting; when removed, it took paint off or left adhesive on the car. drew promised them he'd invent something better, though he had no idea how. after weeks of work, his boss told him to knock ti off and get back to work on sandpaper. Drew kept developing the tape when he could sneak the time. the result, introduced in 1925, was masking tape. one of 3M's all-time hit products.
we can see the forces shaping 3M's culture. almost from day one, the company was searching obsessively for new ways to make money. it didn't just want new products' it desperately needed them to stay alive. and when an employee defied his boss to work on a product he was passionate about, he produced a major success.
crucially, Drew's boss was William McKnight, the future CEO who was then general manager. that experience in particular, the masking tape story, changed McKnight's view about managing researchers. that's when the 15% policy began, long before it was formalized or named.
Adopting it was far riskier and braver than it appears today. Giving employees such freedom not only surrendered managerial control but also directly contradicted the leading business wisdom. it was the heyday of Taylorism, scientific management, time and motion studies. employees weren't humans' they were moving parts in a giant machine, and the last thing you wanted them to do was think. Frederick Taylor was brutally clear: one of the first requirements for an ironworker, he wrote, "is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in hi metal makeup the ox than any other type." and it was hard to say Taylor was wrong. his methods increased productivity so enormously, Peter Drucker has observed, that our prosperity today is simply unimaginable without him. Drucker has even called Taylor's thinking "the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since The Federalist Papers."
who would dare to say such thinking is plain wrong? yet McKnight and 3M's other leaders in the 1920 and 1930s realized that industrial researchers were a different breed, what we now call knowledge workers, who are best managed by different rules.