It’s been a year since the COVID pandemic took hold in the U.S. When companies of all sizes were just starting to contemplate how COVID would change their workplace and bottom line, 3M was already deeply focused on the pandemic.
3M, which most people associate with office supplies and building materials, also manufactures N95 masks, the personal protective equipment (PPE) that quickly made headlines because of massive shortages. As a result of the SARS epidemic in Asia, 3M “had developed a strategy to have idle capacity available for the next pandemic; we didn’t anticipate a global pandemic, like we’ve faced [with] COVID-19,” says Mike Roman, 3M’s chairman and CEO. “We responded and have been ramping up capacity ever since.”
Leading the company during that ramp-up also required Roman to focus on keeping the company’s employees safe, he says, to “keep executing and fight the pandemic from every angle and deliver for our customers and shareholders as we went through the uncertainty that we were facing.” In addition to increasing capacity at the company’s factories, he says that 3M had to shift from serving “traditionally industrial customers to health care workers and first responders.”
In 2020, the company increased capacity fourfold over the previous year, by “doing things in weeks that would have [in years past] taken months or even years.”
Roman joins Fortune’s Alan Murray and Ellen McGirt on this week’s episode of Leadership Next, a podcast about the changing rules of business leadership, to discuss how 3M’s leadership team and employees moved forward when faced with monumental tasks. And creating the masks was just one piece of the puzzle. Roman and his team also had to deal with some unexpected side effects of the pandemic, including fraud and price gouging in the N95 marketplace.
Also on the show is Joe Ucuzoglu, CEO of Deloitte U.S., to discuss recovery from the pandemic. “There’s still a disconnect between the daily lived experience of people, which is pretty challenging, as opposed to the economic outlook, [which a recent poll by Deloitte and Fortune] suggests is pretty positive,” he says.
Just 4% of the CEOs surveyed said that they don’t see recovery in the foreseeable future. An astonishing 58% of CEOs said their revenues either recovered or never fell.
