62 THE PARSIMONIOUS BOSS AND
THE $99 REQUISITIONS

Dick (or Richard G. if you’re being formal) Drew became a 3M research assistant, though this hadn’t been his first, or even his second, choice of career. He had wanted to be a banjo player, had taken and dropped out of a course in engineering and so instead he ended up using his limited knowledge of chemistry to start his career at 3M

At this point in its history, 3M primarily manufactured sandpaper and other abrasives, and one of Drew’s first jobs was taking samples of the company’s new Wetordry waterproof sandpaper to nearby auto body shops for testing.

One morning in 1923, as he walked into one of these shops, Drew overheard the “choicest profanity I’d ever known”. Another two-tone paint job had just been botched and the worker who had been working on it was furious.

Curious, Drew asked what the problem was.

Two-tone cars were all the rage in the roaring 20s, but the effect required workers to mask certain parts of the auto’s body while the two types of paint were being applied. The mechanics, having nothing specifically designed for the job, used either a combination of heavy adhesive tape and butcher paper or old newspapers and library pastes or even surgical adhesive tape.

After the paint dried, workers then had to remove the tape – and more often than not as they took off the paper or the tape they peeled away part of the new paint too. All their hard work was wasted.

Now Drew had he been just a salesmen and not an innovator could perhaps have seen this as an opportunity to sell more sandpaper, but instead he realized that what the customer really needed was a tape with less aggressive adhesive.

He rashly announced that he would solve their problem, believing that 3M already had several of the elements he would need to create his new tape; sandpaper required a backing, an adhesive and an abrasive mineral. Drew’s idea was simple: hold the mineral and you’ll have an adhesivetape.

Drew took his idea back to the lab. He began a long and frustrating quest for the right combination of materials to create what would become the world’s first tape specifically designed for masking.

Drew wrestled with the adhesive and, especially, the backing. After some time, then-President McKnight told Drew to drop the project and get back to work on improving sandpaper.

Drew agreed – for about 24 hours. Then he thought of a new way to handle the backings and went back to the lab. He threw himself into the task with renewed enthusiasm, ignoring McKnight’s orders.

Drew finally hit on what he believed was the right combination of materials, and asked McKnight to approve funding for a paper-making machine needed to manufacture the new tape. McKnight considered the proposal, and refused. Rather than give up, Drew simply applied his talent for improvisation to this problem. In his capacity as a researcher, he had authority to approve purchases of up to $100, so he began writing a flurry of $99 purchase orders.

Now with his machine installed he created a prototype which had adhesive along its edges but not in the middle. In its first trial run, it fell off the car and the frustrated auto painter growled at Drew: “Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to shove it!”

The painter had been using “Scotch” to mean “parsimonious”, but Drew was struck by the nickname, and like future versions of the tape, it stuck.

After adapting the prototype by adding more adhesive, Scotch Masking Tape was finally and successfully launched.

Drew finally confessed to McKnight about how he had managed to fund the machinery he had required and perhaps not surprisingly given Masking Tape’s success, McKnight didn’t fire him.¹¹

And the moral is that ideas aren’t the only problem; executing them right is crucial too. Do you have a great idea that just needs more work?

¹¹ McKnight’s decision not to fire Drew was to prove to be the right one when Drew went on to create a variant of his masking tape using DuPont’s new cellophane as its backing. This new variant was launched on 8 September 1930 and was originally called Scotch® Brand Cellulose Tape and later renamed Scotch® Transparent Tape. In the UK it is now known as Sellotape and in the US more simply as Scotch tape.