And he acknowledged that the same cuts likely would have occurred with or without a major economic slowdown, though had the economy fared better they might have come more slowly and through attrition. McNerney s transition has been closely watched for a variety of reasons. And he came to 3M at a time when the company s stock was a laggard and some big Wall Street investors were agitating for changes. McNerney, however, doesn t strike a revolutionary pose. And he embraces 3M s ground-up approach to creating new products.
Most companies identify potential products and then go to the lab to make it work.
Prioritization at a corporate level of some of the spending on research. It s the big ideas I want to fund. It s not about killing those ideas. McNerney says he likes 3M s international organizational structure, which gives tremendous authority to the people who head up operations in each country. At most, he ll make clearer who s responsible for what.