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President Bert S. Cross of the 3M Co. - nee Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing - called up a vice president to ask a question: "Say, just how many divisions do we have now?" The answer is 21, and the otherwise precise president should be forgiven for not knowing, because his company has been going and growing like sixty. Sales have tripled since 1955, and last week Cross announced that volume for this year's first nine months jumped 10%, to a record $664 million...
Profitable Leaps. This bewilderingly diversified and remarkably creative company has become a darling of Wall Street by poking inquisitively into a bunch of unlikely products that stick, slip or scratch. Founded in 1902 to mine corundum for use in abrasive wheels, 3M struggled into the manufacture of sandpaper and then into masking tape. Its big breakthrough was the familiar Scotch Tape, which 3M invented originally as industrial masking tape. Scotch Tape still accounts for 17% of the company's sales, has led to 400 other varieties of tape, the latest of which, introduced to the public in September...
...devised a method of making copies of documents by using infrared radiation which literally bakes images onto heat-sensitive paper. The company christened the process Thermo-Fax, and it has carried 3M into second place behind Xerox in the rapidly expanding copying-machine field, has led it to acquisitions of such firms as Revere Camera, Dynacolor film and, last summer, Italy's leading photographic firm, Ferrania...
Compulsive Competitor. Though it seeks to acquire products and markets from other companies, 3M is more interested in inventing its own. It supports 2,500 scientists and technicians in 44 laboratories, and each scientist can spend at least 15% of his time puttering on any project that he wishes. "If we are going to live within our philosophy," says Dr. Walton, "we have to allow for a certain degree of experimenting, authorized or not, as long as the experimenters don't blow the place up." The company gets more bright ideas than bangs. One of the most profitable currently...
...twice the speed of Xerox machines but that require special paper. American Photocopy demonstrated its new "Dial-A-Copy," which has a telephone-like dial on which the user can order from one to ten copies, and SCM (Smith Corona-Marchant) showed its similar, dial-operated Model 44. 3M displayed six specialized machines that produce by means of heat and light sensitivity; one turns out single copies on heat-sensitive paper for about 310, and another produces 40 copies a minute on ordinary paper for about 10 each...