Does anyone remember these recognition programs: Pyramid of Excellence Award or 3M M&SCS - LSS Awards or Division Achievement Awards? Do any of these exist today and/or have they been replaced by other Corporate awards?
19 replies (most recent on top)
The innovation awards and ceremonies were truly wonderful and meaningful in the 80s and 90s. That began to change when Mcnerney came aboard in the early 2000s and starting favoring certain businesses over another. Can't have too many awards giving to businesses that Jimbo didn't consider "the future" at 3M.
Can't help but laugh how many times Jimbo was on business talks shows promoting the great medical products like Aldara (look it up as I'd rather not talk about its application here - kind of gross).
The process really became political under Inge and Mikey as they used some kind of predetermined winners in order to have excuses for promoting people because of factors other than brilliance and accomplishments.
FWIW didn't Maplewood campus have some kind of wall with the names of patent winners. Seemed like there was a place with plaques after plaques.
The CTEI awards did mean something to those who won, I believe. At least in my labs, it really was a peer selected event at the lab level. It was a pretty big deal to the winners.
And in promo meetings, it was a factor.
Multiple POE awards and a Corporate (Wonewok) one - still got laid off ;-)
Yep completely agree with @p6+1jm8w0wfx.
Every darn internal award in 3M is political ...some are excessive while some are less so.
Even 3M nominations for external awards , e.g. ACS or NSF etc. are also political.
Just look at some of the recent awardees and their credentials.
I happened to chat with some folks who are in award committees in a recent conference. They mentioned that even they are sometimes very skeptical about 3M's choices, but wary about rubbing industrial partners the wrong way !
I found the judging process to be a bit political with those things anyway.
Was one of the panel judges a couple of years for one of the corporate awards. I won't say which one to protect the innocent.
The panel judges did do their level best to elevate the truly stand-out projects for recognition. Then... the "steering committee" would get the final say, sometimes selecting projects that the panel judges didn't recommend as their top projects anyway. The project winners seemed to be a mix of those that deserved it by merit - as well as - those projects that won due to political motivations. The latter was based on elevating a certain person's project or downplaying the objective results of another one that was less politically popular.
Made me wonder if we were just wasting everyone's time doing the panel judging in the first place if the steering committee was just going to cherry pick the ones they found the most agreeable. But, then I took solace in the fact that nobody really remembers who won or lost, and no actual compensation was tied to the awards anyway.
You can use your 10-year paperweight as a pickling stone.
I believe rewards points will be brought back, with additional ‘governance’ which includes L3 approval. Seems like a bad use of high leadership to approve recognition points
Mike Roman said the quiet part out loud a few years back, "I'm not concerned with winning back employees, I want to win forward employees".
We are unburdened by what has been.
I took my internal awards to the bank and my banker told me “all your bills are paid”.
Right, wrong or indifferent, many who work at 3M were or are highly status driven. Lots of phds running around, degrees from prestigious universities, etc. 3M at the time was viewed externally as an amazing place to have a career. Internal awards played right in to the status-seeking proclivities of many who worked there.
It's also a generational thing. Proudly plastering your office or workspace with internal awards was really important to the silent generation and boomers. Much less so for the younger generations. All those awards represented were internal stats symbols that seemed to matter a lot inside, but not at all outside 3M.
The truth is, nobody inside or outside of 3M cares at all about your awards more than the end of ceremony. See if you getting a circle of technical excellence award 15 years ago, or a LSS award in 2006 helps you land a job inside or outside of 3M if you're looking.
The patent lunches weren't bad, I actually think a lunch and a plaque isn't that bad of a way to recognize people for patents. My current employer does it with lunch every year and a shockingly non-trivial amount of straight cash.
The 3M trips were really nice, but surprisingly limited in how many could go. PoE and CTEI trips were for those very lucky few. Sales teams were the ones that could usually get themselves a trip at least every other year, at least in the US.
Pre Covid, 3M used to provide a decent lunch as part of the IP recognition ceremony.
For the last few years, it has been appetizers ! Funny but true fact is officially they call it heavy appetizers with the word heavy in bold letters in the email !
I don't think they wanted lunches and trophies as much as they wanted better pay and job security. Don't recall getting a choice.
Joe Harlan stated he'd never seen a company workforce that demanded as many recognition programs as 3M. This was early on in his tenure as EVP of EC&B and he'd spent half of one of his town halls reading the names of POE, CTE and Golden Step winners (a truly solid recognition program for years). His aside to his very tall chief counsel after the event was "why do these people want trophies and lunches? The only recognition that ever mattered to me was more money in my paycheck."
To his credit, I think he was pretty instrumental in having the corporate POE winners' trip to Wonewok moved from winter to spring, when participants could at least enjoy the resort.
You can see how valuable these awards are by looking up past winners of corporate CTEI awards and seeing how many were laid off or left the company voluntarily.
Ah yes! Pyramid of Excellence. Some recipients deserving, others not. How someone with a 2 out of 5 on the performance review is "excellent" is laughable.
3M doesn't want to recognize employees in any meaningful way.
Even a crisp high-five is too much to ask for.
BB is all for digital and paper awards and trophies, as long as you print it off on your home printer so as to avoid costing 3M a dime.
What started under Mikey (elimination of service dinners and Holiday events at the production facilities) is only accelerating under the guy from Florida who sure as heck is not at Maplewood this week with minus 35 wind chill.
Glad I retired after 35 years. What a mess!
Do any of these awards actually inspire you to perform better next year? From my experience after winning a significant corporate award as a complete deflation and showed me that it's just BS and lip service. My regional manager only remembered my name because it was written on his hand at the presentation. Why bust a gut to deliver if this is the cr-p you get????