Our favourite innovative companies
Management Today decided to have a look around the world at some of our favourite innovative companies, and share with you the story of their leaders. We resisted the temptation to compile our Top Ten, firstly as it would have been impossible to actually rank our favourites, and secondly we felt that it would have been an injustice to those that didn’t make the list.
William McKnight – President and Chairman, 3M, 1949 - 1966
“If you put fences around people, you get sheep” – William McKnight
McKnight became the General Manager of 3M in 1914 when the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company as it was then known was a struggling organisation on the verge of bankruptcy. By the time he retired in 1966 it had become a huge multi-national conglomerate, and a household name with operations all over the world. The success was due to McKnight’s ability to encourage innovation; and even back then he rightly identified that innovation was the key to success. He developed this culture through his recognition of the fact that making mistakes was an intrinsic part of innovation. His management style was a ‘loser approach’ which allowed people to have more autonomy than in similar organisations of the day. McKnight allowed his engineers to spend 15% of their time on projects, something which stimulated creativity, and something which other multi- national companies today strive to emulate.
“As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility, and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.”
“Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow,” William McKnight said in 1948. McKnight made research and development the heart of 3M, which led to breakthrough product
48 Management Today | September 2011
after breakthrough product, many of which remain even today; cellophane tape, Post-It- Notes, masking tape and waterproof sandpaper to name a few.
Steve Jobs – Co-founder, Chairman and CEO, Apple Inc., 1976 - 2011
Steve Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976. He can be attributed to joint authorship of 3 of the most significant technologies of the past 30 years: the personal computer, the Graphical User Interface and digital music. More recently Apple has had phenomenal success with the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad, the latter helping to revolutionise the publishing world with eBooks and eMagazines as well as being a challenge to the laptop market. Add to this the iTunes revolution and the hugely popular MacBook range. All of this saw the company’s share price rise 36-fold in the past decade.
Some say that Jobs’ success has been due to his ability to surround himself with the next people, and even as a young Apple chairman he poached the then-president of PepsiCo, John Sculley, to be his chief executive.
Nowadays, his employees say that Jobs is an amazing motivator, but one that is known to push his team to the limits, having a relentless eye for detail. Apple continues to create “must- have” products, which usually start life with the question “what do we want?” rather than “what can we create?” It’s this process that then leads to hardware and software being invented to facilitate the end product. Each time, if the product is not right, then Jobs does not hesitate to scrap an idea. It is through Apple’s focus on just a few
products, that they have become hugely successful. Of the iPad, which Goldman Sachs predict will grow from 45 million sales units in 2011 to more than 130 million in 2013, Jobs recently said, “We’re working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the globe”.
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