Corporations: 3M

3M Company is one of my favorite brands because for me, it makes practical products attractive.  And I don’t think we can ever run out of ideas to make our modern lives easier, so I believe that practical products are a good business idea.

The story of 3M, like many businesses, is abound with failures.

Failure #1:

Five northern Minnesota entrepreneurs extracted a mineral which they believed to be “corundum, a mineral almost as tough as diamonds and an ideal substitute for garnet, the mineral abrasive found in grinding wheels used by furniture makers. The founders of 3M were banking on success when the company was born in 1902.  Each man contributed $1,000 in start-up funds in exchange for 1,000 shares.  They started their venture in Two Harbors, a booming frontier village on the North Shore of Lake Superior.”

But as it turns out, “3M’s product was actually anorthosite, a soft mineral that is inferior to garnet.  3M’s partners voted to cut their salaries and then abolished them altogether. Meanwhile, impatient suppliers wanted their money, and 3M owed its own employees back pay. (Each of the partners contributed money to cover the payroll.)  3M had little success selling its stock to raise operating capital, and the company was racing head-long for disaster.  Only two investors stepped forward—Edgar Ober, a St. Paul railroad man, and John Dwan, a Two Harbors lawyer and co-founder of 3M, who had a reputation for smart investments.

Photo Credit: Jonathunder

Failure #2:

The founders chose to focus on manufacturing sandpaper, a business they knew nothing about.  If the company was going to make sandpaper, it needed a source of garnet and only two deposits existed in the United States.  *But the company moved to Duluth in 1905 and found a source of Spanish garnet.

3M built its new plant, a two-story, 85-foot by 165-foot structure with a basement. It wasn’t the best construction, but it was all the budget allowed. When raw materials arrived from Duluth and were stacked on the first floor, one Saturday, the weight tested the timbers—and the timbers lost. The floor of the new plant collapsed and every carton, bag and container landed in a heap in the basement.

Failure #3:

With the plant finally restored, 3M faced quality problems. The company had sales of $212,898 in 1911, but disgruntled customers were sending its inferior sandpaper back. To make matters worse, 3M had no lab or technical expertise to figure out what was wrong with its sandpaper or how to fix it.

After weeks of frantic study, a worker noticed some crushed garnet left from manufacturing that had been tossed in a water pail.  The water’s surface was oily.  If the garnet had been contaminated with oil, it would resist glue and never stick to the sandpaper backing.

Photo Credit: Achim Hering

SUCCESS

Retracing the route of the Spanish garnet shipment, 3M discovered that its sacks of garnet had crossed a stormy Atlantic Ocean with an olive oil shipment.  When the ship pitched and rolled, a couple of casks broke and oil soaked into the garnet bound for St. Paul.  3M was left with 200 tons of oily garnet and a pack of angry customers.  Fortunately, Orson Hull, 3M’s resourceful and determined factory superintendent, finally found a solution after many experiments.  He “cooked” the garnet and roasted the oil away.  That incident led to 3M’s first quality program.  *But, regaining the trust of customers would take much longer.

For me, that’s a lot to take.  But 3M shows that if we learn from our mistakes, if we persevere, and if we explore possibilities, we can make positive contributions to the world:

• The world’s first waterproof sandpaper, which reduced airborne dusts during automotive manufacturing, was developed in the early 1920s.
• A second major milestone occurred in 1925 when Richard G. Drew, a young lab assistant, invented masking tape – an innovative step toward diversification and the first of many Scotch brand pressure-sensitive tapes

Photo Credit: REisemann3937 and Fungkamseng

• In the following years technical progress resulted in Scotch® Cellophane Tape for box sealing and soon hundreds of practical uses were discovered.
• In the early 1940s, 3M was diverted into defense materials for World War II, which was followed by new ventures, such as Scotchlite™ Reflective Sheeting for highway markings, magnetic sound recording tape, filament adhesive tape, and the start of 3M’s involvement in the graphic arts with offset printing plates.
• In the 1950s, 3M introduced the Thermo-Fax™ copying process, Scotchgard™ Fabric Protector, videotape, Scotch-Brite® Cleaning Pads and several new electro-mechanical products.
• Dry-silver microfilm was introduced in the 1960s, along with photographic products, carbonless papers, overhead projection systems and a rapidly growing health care business of medical and dental products.
• Markets further expanded in the 1970s and 1980s into pharmaceuticals, radiology and energy control.

• In 1980, 3M introduced Post-it® Notes, which created a whole new category in the marketplace and changed people’s communication and organization behavior forever.
• In the 1990s sales reached the $15 billion mark. 3M continued to develop an array of innovative products, including immune response modifier pharmaceuticals; brightness enhancement films for electronic displays; and flexible circuits used in inkjet printers, cell phones and other electronic devices.
• In 2004, sales topped $20 billion for the first time, with innovative new products contributing significantly to growth. Recent innovations include Post-it® Super Sticky Notes, Scotch® Transparent Duct Tape, optical films for LCD televisions, and a new family of Scotch-Brite® cleaning products that give consumers the right scrubbing power for a host of cleaning jobs.

Sources:

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_WW/History/3M/Company/At-a-Glance/

A Century of Innovation The 3M Story Book

Brands: Bench

Bench was never my favorite clothing brand.  I liked their body sprays somewhat, but as a whole, I did not like their designs.

Then, I think it was in the year 2000s, the brand started upping the design quality.  They’ve incorporated more graphic design and expanded their product line.  Hand sanitizer might seem really cheesy, but it is convenient to be able to have clean hands all the time.

I love their PinoyLab line because it shows cool and positive images of Filipino culture.  Yes, that picture above is for Monday’s midterm elections in the Philippines.

Brands: IKEA

I’ve loved IKEA ever since I was a kid.  In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia where I grew up, going to IKEA was special.  It was a longer drive than usual for my family, and I usually slept along the way.

Photo Credit: Twincinema

Of course the setup of IKEA itself is special.  It has the one-way Scandinavian showroom layout so that customers can see all the products before they can reach the check-out counter.  So for me, IKEA was not just a store, it was a visual experience.

Of course my parents were really the ones buying something, but usually they would get me an oatmeal cookie at the exit cafe.  Again, this adds to my IKEA experience.

So I still have our IKEA catalogues from that time and the paper is already brittle.  But it’s still cool.  The designs are still cool.  IKEA is one of the reasons I love design and IKEA has taught me that for things to look good, it doesn’t have to be complicated.  The nice clean lines also add to the comfortable quality of IKEA furniture.

I find it interesting that the spelling of IKEA is just a letter difference from IDEA; because IKEA, especially through its catalogues, encourages people to get ideas from them, as something free one can get from a business.  It’s really something when a business can also inspire.

Going through the catalogues, one can even learn lessons on entrepreneurship.  For example, to keep prices low, IKEA:

1. “Designs the Price Tag First”

- with this limitation, innovation is key

2. Makes most furniture so that they can be FLAT-PACKED

- thereby lowering storage and transportation costs since they don’t transport air

3. Lets you assemble the furniture

- Sorry for the people that hate this, but I find the IKEA tool and assembly method convenient.

Another thing that I love about IKEA is its product naming system.  Using Scandinavian proper names and words allows it to share more of Scandinavian culture to the world.  According to Wikipedia, the naming system is as follows:

• Upholstered furniture, coffee tables, rattan furniture, bookshelves, media storage, doorknobs: Swedish placenames (for example: Klippan)
• Beds, wardrobes, hall furniture: Norwegian place names
• Dining tables and chairs: Finnish place names
• Bookcase ranges: Occupations
• Bathroom articles: Scandinavian lakes, rivers and bays
• Kitchens: grammatical terms, sometimes also other names
• Chairs, desks: men’s names
• Fabrics, curtains: women’s names
• Garden furniture: Swedish islands
• Carpets: Danish place names
• Lighting: terms from music, chemistry, meteorology, measures, weights, seasons, months, days, boats, nautical terms
• Bedlinen, bed covers, pillows/cushions: flowers, plants, precious stones
• Children’s items: mammals, birds, adjectives
• Curtain accessories: mathematical and geometrical terms
• Kitchen utensils: foreign words, spices, herbs, fish, mushrooms, fruits or berries, functional descriptions
• Boxes, wall decoration, pictures and frames, clocks: colloquial expressions, also Swedish place names

My Photo: I got the idea of gluing 3 shells in a row from the IKEA catalogue.

Whether we like it or not, all of us are representatives of our country.  Even businesses represent our respective countries.  My last post about Ayala was also about a business that represented its country well.

Now it’s up to us, even as individuals, whether we represent our country well, or not.

Corporations: AYALA

I have grown to love Ayala Corporation.  But in the past, I felt that they were not connected to the Philippine masses.  Of course they could be more connected to the masses, but for me, their achievements have only lifted up the country.

Photo: Copyright © 2008 Filipinas Heritage Library (A Division of Ayala Foundation, Inc.)

So how was the Philippines’ first conglomerate established?

Casa Roxas was the beginning of Ayala.  The business house was founded by Domingo Roxas and Antonio de Ayala.  Antonio, from the small town of Alava in the Basque Country of Spain, was poor but determined to make something of himself.

In 1834, they “opened a distillery that started small but grew to give high value-added to Philippine sugar, and was later known as Destileria y Licoreria de Ayala y Compañia.

Photo: Copyright © 2008 Filipinas Heritage Library (A Division of Ayala Foundation, Inc.)

In 1851, one of Roxas’ heirs bought the Hacienda Makati, a tract of farmland outside Manila.  This was to be the site of Ayala’s landmark initiative in Philippine real estate development.”  But more importantly, Ayala turned the rest of that land into the country’s premier financial district.

One could go on and on about the enterprises the corporation has gotten involved with: banking, insurance, tranvias, telecommunications, electronics, information technology, motor vehicles, water infrastructure, and of course — malls.

But my favorite is NUVALI.  When I first saw ads of this GREEN real estate development, I was inspired to know that there were more efforts towards a green future.

Photo Credit: KC Canlas

Ayala shows how entrepreneurs can contribute to the country and society.  But as individuals, we can also do the same.

Source: http://www.ayala.com.ph/ayala_175th_rich_heritage.php

Mistakes

In 1956, American writer William Faulkner stated in an interview with The Paris Review,

“…Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error…”

Of course I do believe that we can learn from others’ mistakes, but learning from one’s own mistakes is so basic, so simple.  And yet we still make the same mistakes, over and over again.  Why?

Growing up, I have felt guilt over many mistakes.  Fortunately, I have realized that those were other people’s voices in my head focusing on the bad, instead of focusing on what we can learn.  Now, instead of feeling guilty and feeling bad about myself, I feel empowered that I can learn WHAT NOT TO DO.

I was developing this paradigm through my experiences with job interviews.  Because after a month into my first job, I heard that there was a bigger salary being offered at another call center.  And in my haste to achieve my dream, I decided to quit (since our account was closing anyway, and I didn’t like the new one), and decided to apply for that job.

So I had already learned from my first interview, that I should not mention that I was an undergrad unless asked; because even though they had hired me, they were actually looking for college grads.  Now I had that in mind for this next interview, but this time I was asked why I studied sociology.  Of course I knew why I studied sociology.  I wanted to apply it to my writing.  But at the time of the interview, I had actually given up writing and I was just focused on saving up enough money to leave the country.

I didn’t prepare an answer that would explain why I studied sociology in relation to why I wanted to be a call center agent.  So I ended up somewhat fumbling my answer and I mentioned that I was an undergrad.  I wasn’t able to show how articulate I was and I didn’t get hired.  Although I heard whispers that they weren’t actually hiring walk-ins, and they interviewed us as a group — very shady — I still learned something from that interview: Prepare a well thought out answer to that question.  Which I did after that.

I found another call center that I wanted to apply for, but I think they were looking for telemarketers.  I was already tired of that and I wanted to take incoming calls instead.  So during the interview, I wasn’t really aggressive about wanting to sell.  Of course I didn’t get that job.

I decided to only go after jobs that involved inbound calls.  And for the next job application, there was a typing test.  For some reason, the keyboard was placed in an awkward position and it was too far away from the screen and I had difficulty typing, so I didn’t completely pass the test.  I didn’t get hired despite getting positive feedback regarding my interview.

Photo Credit: Mike Gonzalez (TheCoffee)

Of course there was another call center that I wanted to apply for.  And there was also another typing test.  The funny thing is, the keyboard was again in an unnatural position.  They say it’s an ergonomic rack, but it was too low.  So what did I do?  I unfastened the keyboard from the rack and put it on a more comfortable position for the typing test.  Of course I passed.

Learning from my own mistakes has been a rewarding experience.  But I also believe that we can learn from our own country’s mistakes.  I will take the Marcos dictatorship as an example.  It was wrong for all its violations of human rights as well as corruption.  And Imelda‘s excesses were appalling.  But they did have some good things in mind.

Under Marcos, “new public schools were built, and massive infrastructure projects were undertaken that did improve highways and bridges.  In particular, the Pan-Philippine Highway and the San Juanico Bridge–the longest bridge in the archipelago spanning the straits between the islands of Samar and Leyte, Imelda’s home province–were held up as examples of the New Society constructively engaged in modernizing the country.”¹

Photo Credit: Morten Nærbøe

Unfortunately, “the Marcos government’s programs, which relied heavily on international lending agencies, had increased the country’s external debt to $28.5 billion, giving the country the dubious distinction of being among the ten most indebted countries in the world.”²

So that explains why the succeeding administrations kept infrastructure spending low.  But they could have found other ways to finance that.

I had a Japanese student whom I was prepping for a job interview with Asian Development Bank and she said that her goal was to develop the financial system in Asia specifically in the area of government bonds, because it is still underdeveloped in some countries.  This is obviously true since previous administrations have simply resorted to borrowing from international lending agencies.  But now, I do see “infra bonds” in the business section of the newspaper, and yes, President Noynoy Aquino has made infrastructure his priority.

But did we have to wait for more than twenty years for that to happen?  Well, I will say, if the Philippines had simply taken the straight path to prosperity via industrialization and modernization causing salaries to be sufficient, my father would’ve never gotten a job at Saudi Airlines and we would never have moved to Saudi Arabia and I would’ve never had a globalized education.  The knowledge I have gained through that experience has only given me an advantage and I hope everyone strives to gain knowledge from other cultures.  That’s the benefit I can attribute to the Overseas Filipino phenomenon.

Photo Credit: Asuspine

But if we don’t learn from our mistakes, we can never eliminate poverty, horrendous traffic, crappy roads, crappy salaries, and power failures.

Now…in Ancient Greece, one of the words for mistake was Hamartia.  The word hamartia comes from hamartanein, which means “to miss the mark,” like in archery.  Unless we’re extremely lucky, or have extreme natural talent – who in the world can hit the bulls-eye the first time around?

So…how do we hit the target?

That’s right.

We practice.

Sources:

¹Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos, (New York: The Overlook Press, 2010), p. 241

²Luis H. Francia, A History of the Philippines: From Indios Bravos to Filipinos, (New York: The Overlook Press, 2010), p. 272

Music Class: Freddie Aguilar

Freddie Aguilar‘s music is world-class, such that his song “Anak” generated a hundred cover versions, was released in 56 countries and in 27 different foreign languages, and has sold 30 million copies.  Billboard reported that the song was the number two world hit of the 1980s.

But since my blog tackles educational reform, I want to share his other song “Estudyante Blues”.

Schoolboy Blues

Translation of “Estudyante Blues” by Marck Ronald Rimorin

They always seem to see me
They always seem to blame me
And everything just seems to be my fault

I wake up in the morning
I eat, they talk me down
Before I’m off to school that day

When I explain my story
They always get so angry
And I don’t know what to do

I follow their instructions
They never seem to listen
I feel hurt when I realize

That I don’t really have freedom
I follow whatever they say

I come from classes that day
I go back home right away
But nobody’s there waiting for me

I’m lookin’ for my mother
I cannot find my father
The only person there’s the helper

Then I call out my best friends
Go out with them for “errands”
And then we all end up in trouble

When I explain my story
They always get so angry
And I don’t know what to do

That I don’t really have freedom
I follow whatever they say

They always seem to see me
They always seem to blame me
And everything just seems to be my fault

That I don’t really have freedom
I follow whatever they say

They always seem to see me
They always seem to blame me
And everything just seems to be my fault

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anak_%28song%29

Marck Ronald Rimorin

Books: Bob Ong

When I was still working in the call center, I was lucky to have been part of a team that was considered crème de la crème.  We were a tight-knit group and we celebrated each others’ birthdays.  So when the July birthdays came up, one of my team members asked me what I wanted as a gift.  It would have been easy for them to think of a gift for me since they know I love to read, but I said “anything in Tagalog” — since I read mostly in English, yet I believe in Philippine culture.

They gave me MacArthur and Kapitan Sino by Bob Ong.  MacArthur was a fun read and I loved his informal style, but I’m already over images of poverty in the Philippines.  It’s so easy to see in real life — I don’t need to read about it.

Kapitan Sino was also nice.  I know someone who didn’t like the story so much, but I admire the story’s superhero main character who sacrificed himself for the good of others.

So after I finished reading those books, I told one of my new team members about it, and she told me about ABNKKBSNPLAko?!.  Actually, my team manager had already mentioned that book before, but when my team member said in the simplest terms: “It’s about education” — I just had to go out there and buy it.  When I went to National Book Store to buy it, I of course saw his other books like Stainless Longganisa and Bakit Baliktad Magbasa ng Libro ang mga Pilipino? (Translation: Why Do Filipinos Read Books Upside Down?).  So of course I ended up spending more than I had intended.  How could I resist a cover design of writing implements and a blurb that says (translated from Tagalog): ” … stories by leaking pens about the importance of reading, reaching your dreams, and the correct way of writing.“?

Anyway, back to ABNKKBSNPLAko?!.  The title, “Aba, nakakabasa na pala ako?!” with vowels omitted (Translation: “Wow, I can read now?!”), couldn’t be any better — because that’s where it all starts.

Now the story (supposedly autobiographical) is about a Filipino public school student who eventually gets to go to college to study Computer Science, only to lose focus and drop out. But he is able to muster the courage to enroll for a 2-year computer course at a technical school instead.  In the end, he becomes, of all things — a TEACHER.

I am proud of this Filipino author.  I believe in his writing as much as I do the World Classics.  Even with all the colonial influences of the Philippines, why wouldn’t there be significant things that one could learn from literature in Filipino?