Just curious
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Asking for a friend? Swedish meatball perhaps?
That’s like asking how much pfas can be blamed on 3M.
No single person could singlehandedly destroy such a great and admired innovation machine in one swoop. This was a combination of intentional and unintentional gaffes the life of which 3M will become the "Kodak moment" (destroying a great company by inflicting it with lousy management that sla-ghtered the innovation engine) in Harvard Business Review studies.
Inge deserves a "silver" (2nd place) medal for his part in the ruins of what was 3M.
- Desi's failure to have homegrown successor. He had an entire decade to prepare for the handoff. He was a swell guy whose tenure started Nov 1/1991 as 3Mers at the Campus were given a paid day off during the amazing Halloween blizzard (look it up!).
- 3M board fell for the same "GE managers are the cream of the crop" garbage that Wall Street was pitching. Enter McNerney in Dec 2000. Jimbo gets the "gold" for how he shifted focus on customers and innovation to a singular focus on beating QTR earnings targets given to him by WS. Throw in rank-and-yank and sick sigma for CRL and a toxic HR. What could go wrong? Then he bolted for Boeing and now airplanes and parts fall from the sky.
- Buckley was a good guy, but he's the guy who brought Aearo into 3M in 2008. Joe Harlan should have been his successor and may have saved what was left. But he was an external hire and the Board didn't want 3 in a row so they hired Inge.
- Inge saddled the company with massive debt to goose the share price to scare off the activist investors who had gone after DuPont, Dow, Pepsi, Kraft, Heinz, etc. This earns him the silver.
- Mike was simply overmatched and Peter Principle award winner who couldn't even Advance 3M. Maybe Culp from GE could have helped keep the ship afloat, but now it's an unemployed (now CEO) Bill Brown to break up a mortally wounded company.
A significant amount but not all.
Aearo was a disaster, even beyond the lawsuits Aearo never really added much/any growth worth the price 3M paid, or overpaid, for it.
The worst sin he committed was pillaging the 3M balance sheet to pump up the stock price. In a just world he would be in prison for what he did. He was quite literally taking out loans to buy back 3M stock. He turned 3M's balance sheet from a fortress that survived over a century into a swamp that is nearly ready to bankruptcy today.
He was an incredibly dishonest, arrogant racist. Totally self serving. And immoral too. A number of liaisons of current senior execs…
I think a decent amount... But there are many others.
My view, the parties to blame for the downfall of the empire:
- Team that did the 'due diligence' on the aearo acquisition.
- Michael McLain, aearo CEO leading up the acquisition... do you really think he was unaware? At the very least, he had poor processes and culture that allowed that.
- 3M Executives that approved the aearo acquisition.
- 3M/Aearo leadership that decided to sue the earplug competitor and in the discovery process revealed that the aearo ear plugs were actually ineffective. Whoops!
- 3M Executives in the 70s and 80s that knew the truth about pfas and took no action. About 20 years ago when I started I heard from some old timers in MRD, even before the pfas issue really took off, that said there absolutely were warnings to executive leadership about how this could bring down the company in the future. The Cassandras were ignored.
- Inge took no real action to resolve the existential threats, only a token settlement with MN, and juiced the stock with share buy backs financed by debt.
- Roman/Monish. Well, you already know.
His legacy seemed to revolve more around manipulating share prices to ward off a hostile takeover, so this one opinion would be less blame for layoffs compared to others.