Thread regarding 3M layoffs

Saw many casualties from the disband of A3M starting from USAC area team.

Are they going to remove the other regions team as well? Will the area LVS group get to keep their jobs?

To implement something as complex as A3M at 3M with 1000s and 1000s of SKUs and an intertwined supply chain required a comprehensive strategy, a skilled team focused on implementation only, and incentives for the implementation team to do it right and then be offered other positions in 3M post implementation.

Problems with A3M were:

1. Pi-s poor strategy and messaging. As the person said, if you can't explain A3M to a production or logistics team in less than 60 seconds, you have no real strategy and vision. A3M was what ever people wanted it to be without one compelling vision.

2. Too many people were chosen to lead who were on a high potential list or some insider list and NOT because they had the experience or skills to do the job right. This became a training ground that rewarded people based on "potential" and not on required skills. This was mcnerneys six sigma but worse.

3. I knew of people who joined the team because they were worried their job would be eliminated (during one of mikes annual layoffs) and decided this was a better place in the short term. These people, in many cases, did have the right skills to make this successful. The problem? No one except the chosen few were promised a job after A3M was successfully completed. This incentivized people to take as long as possible to implement because they had no assurance of future roles in 3M post A3M. Why not take an extra few years if 3M announces like they did in January 2020 that A3M would enable elimination of 1500 jobs? Survival is an instinct. Just plain d-mb decision making by Mike and his team.

The moral of the story here: hire the right people and give them assurances that successful completion would be rewarded with another company assignment as an incentive.

Well said by @1xcu+1l4oEpAN. In my experience, if you can’t explain a huge initiative like A3M in 60 seconds or less and get a significant number of employees to understand it, then there’s a very high chance that the initiative is doomed. That was the case with A3M from my perspective. As the explanations continued from MR, very little additional clarity was achieved.

No one I know ever had a good end to end understanding of the A3M initiative. Leadership would try to explain it in Town Halls, say more details would be forthcoming as it unfolded, and try to pacify staff asking questions. Many of us never "got it" and over time A3M fizzled out and died. All in all an utter DISASTER.

In its wake, many high performing long timers with a wealth of knowledge and expertise got the ax. A3M started its first wave of non performance related job eliminations in early 2021 but continues to this day. I guess a good way to sum up the changes: A3M annihilated employee morale, respect for leadership, motivation, and the stock price.

The three part answer above is EXCELLENT. The only thing I have to add is that A3M was do-able. Was a massive change from old 3M, but it was do-able because that's exactly how many Germany and Japanese companies are run. But we didn't go all in. We blew up the old reporting structures but didn't execute to the new model. Plants had multiple bosses - regions like EMEA were left to do as they wished - local Sales/Lab teams were blown up but then forgotten by their ostensible bosses in St Paul. My worry now is that we're going to be stuck in the middle - even with R3M ongoing we're never going to give up things like the GSCs.

Jobs are cuts in several jobs tasks that are consolidate worldwide and then some of this parts can be externalized or automatized as some translation now done by robots or done in foreign countries where fiscality is lower or where people are less paid. The consequences are cost reduction lower understanding of who does what and longer times to fulfill

Did Tireman hire an expensive consultant to discover that A3M structure didn't work for his plants?

Here were the big changes that failed:

• Individual plants used to be owned by one division. While that plant might make products for many divisions, only one owned it and was in charge. This gave the plant a clear chain of command for decision making. In A3M plants were now owned by LVS. This gave the plant manager at least two bosses, the lead division manufacturing group and the LVS leadership. In the end nobody was able to make a decent decision on how to run the plant. The theory here is that under A3M the division staff was basically supposed to place orders on the plants and let LVS figure out how to fill them at standard cost. That theory lasted roughly a week until division presidents had to push something on the plants, breaking the chain of command.

• Marketing/sales internationally was cross-eyed with too many leaders. In old 3M, international staff regardless of function reported to the country leader/MD/GM. In A3M, apart from a few HR people, everyone reported back to St. Paul. This isn't the worst thing in theory, but the St. Paul staff didn't know local well enough and international staff didn't know the global play well enough to do their part. Leaving everyone frustrated and non-productive.

• Mostly because of above, A3M shut down almost all international R&D beyond product localization. Basically only St. Paul and Neuss were left with enough critical mass to do any proper new product development.

All in all, A3M is a giant clusterfuck that left half the company with at least two bosses and nobody knowing what the actual strategy for the company was, other than cut costs at all costs.

A3M from plant perspective, it as to be the creation of POL and LVS. Pure confusion of who the plant manager to get direction from. seems like the top leaders have realised the mistake, now they are R3M, and starting to get rid of one of this layer, which looks to be the regional LVS, starting with USAC, even the area EO SVPs are not spared.

Not sure where the “digital marketing view” came from…but many divisions lost their “in house” SME’s, including digital experts, when A3M consolidated marketing and planning services at the group level. A3M was conceived by a staff group. It was intended to force local countries to adopt canned or slightly modified “global” programs and products into which their input was supposedly gathered and incorporated by the global team. Budgets were also consolidated at the group level. It was allegedly saving resources by eliminating leadership from the divisions by placing their reports into a centralized structure, supposedly streamlining the planning and execution and thereby implementing true globalization. But I believe the P&L responsibility stayed with the divisions. I could think of dozens of reasons why this wouldn’t work well - the biggest being it took a GIANT step away from 3M’s customers and the people who knew how to align 3M solutions to their needs. I pointed this out shortly before my job was eliminated. Lol.

The matrix got so complex, the poor plant manager was lost whom to listen? The regional team, the global team mfg or the LVSMS in the region or the global ones.. 1 execution guy with 4 bosses if not more …

From a digital marketing view, we had experienced SMEs in central functions who told the businesses what’s best to do next.

With A3M we now have marketers in the business with often low digital marketing skills opening tickets for GSC colleagues who need to follow predefined processes.

We got cost savings and standardisation, we lost most of the innovation and know-how.

From the business side, I would say the biggest issue was going back to silo’d culture… and the VPs of businesses no longer overseeing all functions of a business, there was no one ensuring all functions were working towards the same goal.

I'll let others share some of the technical issues and why it didn't work. But I will share that from the start, the project was doomed because instead of determining who were the BEST people to implement such a humongous and complicated project, 3M instead pre-picked people for "developmental" opportunities and future promotions who did not have the qualifications nor experience to do this right.

This is like having the new hot shot med school grad doing post doc work perform open heart surgery on the president when you have the world's best heart surgeon who's done 100s of these safely just down the street at johns Hopkins. The result is a dead patient.

Throw in McKinsey being hired for a field (SAP) that they have no expertise and the expenses went through the roof.

Our smaller plant lost 4 people to A3M in 2021 to reduce leadership. Following that, Product Managers were broken up and started becoming product managers for the plant. As a supervisor of a department with a GS and a Product Manager, both were removed from my department. I got no extra pay or promotion but I've worn 3 hats (and looked for a job everyday outside of 3M) since 2021. I got limited time on the floor with my operators to help improve their day to day lives and be there for issues. Things continue to fester and build up because Supervision is so thin. Advance 3M was the downfall of our small plant and it's never recovered.