Experimentation Works

CHAPTER 4

Can Your Culture Handle Large-Scale Experimentation?

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

—ATTRIBUTED TO MARK TWAIN, AUTHOR AND HUMORIST

When W. James McNerney Jr. became CEO of 3M in the early 2000s, he quickly went about remaking the company into a leaner, more efficient version of itself. He tightened budgets, dismissed thousands of workers, and implemented Six Sigma, the rigorous process improvement methodology that had been originally introduced to raise manufacturing quality in the 1980s. On the surface, McNerney’s actions seemed reasonable enough. After all, such measures had worked quite well at General Electric, where he served as a senior executive for more ...