Does 3M still have a presence in Austin? I know they sold the old campus and Austin plant and were moving to a new leased spot at the Domain before Covid. They also sold CMD and I know EEBG merged with another BG. Anybody left at the Austin center?
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Yes, g-yle is down there pretending to understand sustainability
Thanks for the update on Austin. I remember a lot of people wanting to escape the more stodgy 3M Center in maplewood for the change and fresh air feeling of a new age in Austin. Plus, other than July and August, Austin was superior in most regards to the twin cities.
Lehr certainly was one of the greats, even though part of his rationale to move to Austin was out of spite for the tax and regulatory policies of minn gov rudy perpich. He also did see computers and the info age as a place to grow 3M into and deserves credit for this investment.
I think mcnerney (once again that name) didn't like having in effect two HQs so he started the initial deinvestment of Austin.
And yes Monahan was future 3M CEO material. Though he had a lot of challenges at imation beyond his control. Mainly not enough capital to move from disks to other storage media and into the digital projection space. He would most certainly have been an excellent choice to replace Desi when he retired in 2000. Instead, the board went full GE and brought in mcnerney. And this company is dying off as a successful conglomerate as we see.
EMD and EMSD have operations and lab space at the leased facility east of I-35. I was one of the many who retired rather than make the move across town in 2019. There were 500 or 600 employees working there before the move, but I'd imagine far fewer today. Inge was big on selling assets and real estate holdings and moving into leased properties. While that might make sense for some sales and admin operations, what's the value in putting labs in leased buildings? On top of that, the buildings they moved into are glorified tilt wall warehouses.
Austin is another classic 3M bungling. Lew Lehr had the insight to move several key businesses to Austin in the early '80s because he saw how semiconductors and computers were changing everything. But Jake then Desi both lacked the back bone to invest in adjacent businesses that could have exploded had someone had the vision to nurture them. Larry Eaton slapped a 3M transparency sheet on top of a 3M overhead projector--two classic Visual Systems products--during an all employee presentation in the late '80s showing the massive growth of a young software company called Microsoft then turned to the other c-suite executives on the panel and implored them to not settle for just selling the floppy disks and magnetic media, but to acquire businesses that created the software that needed the media storage!
Good ol' conservative 3M did nothing of the sort. The magnetic media business was sold off as Imation in the mid '90s (losing Bill Monahan as CEO to that spinoff was another massive blunder). Visual Systems--where Mike Vale cut his teeth--died about a decade later because they didn't see the emerging world of digital projection until it was far too late. As Austin exploded into a global technology breeding ground, 3M withered. Residents who lived in nearby River Place and Steiner Ranch took to calling the massive, dated limestone and brick campus "the Prison" that it so aptly resembled. Now that campus is being reinvented by a developer while 3M continues to decay.