George Rathmann Interview (page: 5 / 9) Founding Chairman, Amgen	Print Interview

What did your parents think about your going into chemistry?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. George Rathmann: They only had one thing in mind: they wanted me to have a college degree. Neither of them had a college degree. My dad didn't get to finish high school. So that was an important thing. But they had -- at least the feeling I got, and maybe I incorporated my own ideas into these feelings -- but the feeling I got was, "Do what you love to do. Start there." And there was never any urging to say, "You should do this because you could make money," or "You should do that because it's more famous," or "You could do that because other people say do that." One thing my dad would have liked was that after I did whatever I wanted to do -- medicine, science, whatever -- that I would go to Harvard and get my MBA. That was some envy that he had, because he was a businessman. He felt that he'd had to pick up his business by osmosis, and it was a tough way to get a business career. He felt that it's a wonderful career, but somebody ought to take a running start by going to Harvard and get his MBA. He was very disappointed on that subject, that after I got my science degree, I went into science at 3M. But then, very quickly, because 3M was such a wonderful place, my dad was very proud of the whole thing, and that was the end of any discussions about going back and getting your MBA from Harvard.

Did he live to see what a great knack you had for business?

George Rathmann: No, he did not. He was clever enough to think I had a knack for business, because he wanted me to run his business, even though I was the youngest member of the family. That was his idea, that I should run his business. I was always the one he wanted to run it. It rarely endears you to your brothers and sisters when the youngest member of the family is being selected by the father. It's a dangerous track to go on. The fact that I turned him down didn't make things any better, because here I was turning him down for jobs that others would have liked very much to have been invited to do. But my dad, that's the way he felt. He may have been one of the few people in the world that had any idea that I might do something in the business realm, because I was really totally engrossed in science.

What do you think he saw in you that made him think that?

George Rathmann: I think it was probably personality.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My dad was a very, very effective salesman, and his interpersonal skills were magnificent. He was patient. He was thoughtful. He was absolutely sincere. He was extremely honest. Those were his characteristics, and I think they were -- I don't mean that I was the only one in the family that had those characteristics -- but I think kind of being in that direction might have been not exactly the criteria that you use today to select your CEO. In fact, probably the very weakness that I probably display is that I like to be the good guy, and I don't like to beat people up, and I don't imagine anything wonderful about taking control and affecting these peoples' lives. I want them to do the best they know how to do, and not tell them how they have to do it, or keep them from doing what they like to do. So I probably -- almost to a flaw -- I'm on that side of the equation where I don't fit the pattern of the corporate executive who behaves in, at least in our minds, behaves in a different way.

What attracted you to 3M initially?

George Rathmann: There were quite a number of things. I had heard about them. I had seen something on the highways that I couldn't quite understand, and that is that my headlights would cause something to come back from the center line, as if it was lit up. It was called center light. It was a 3M product, and it was a very interesting optical product, because I knew enough about optics to know that if light hits the surface, it bounces off the other way. Angled incident, angled reflection. But not that stuff. Light would hit it coming in at a steep angle, and it would come back to the source, and that just astonished me. And that, of course, is the principle behind Scotchlite.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I invited myself to 3M to interview from Princeton which, in those days, was unusual. You had courtship from DuPont and all the other companies, and you didn't try to cultivate any company, they cultivated you. Nineteen fifty-one was a very good year. So I went there to see them and said I wanted to find out what they had. Then I was really impressed, because there was stuff in every closet that was doing something very different. There was a copying process for making copies of things that was dry, and that turned out to be Thermofax. It was a big success for about three years, and then it was a failure. But it was a huge impact on me that, my gosh, somebody figured out how to do something totally different, very fast, very clever. And there was fluorochemicals that were just absolutely marvelous. They'd gotten access to fluorochemicals which had very little surface tension, very unusual behavior. I thought that this place is just bubbling over with novelty, originality, creativity. I thought this is the place I would like to work, and that did it.

Also, not that it was unimportant, but I was able to get a job that was totally unrelated to anything practical. It was a basic science job, studying light scattering, the structure of molecules.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When you come from Princeton, your motivation is to do something basic and never, never, never get corrupted by something practical. So I was looking for the job that was absolutely as close to pristine science as I could find, and they had that too. So they satisfied all my interests in terms of creativity and energy and imagination and what seemed like -- and I really couldn't have picked it up on the interview trip, and maybe this I learned much later -- but it just seemed like there was a degree of freedom in the way they did things. And that, I did learn, was deeply ingrained in the way of doing things at 3M. It was a very deep philosophy that you had a lot of freedom, and the results of your life were on your shoulders. You had to learn that policy was a point of departure. Having the time and energy to put something together yourself -- you were allowed 15 percent of your time, and sometimes it was a lot more than that. You were encouraged to be the best that you could be at all times. There were very few rigid rules about what you couldn't do, lots of opportunity to do what you might want to do, and it was a great culture. I don't think I picked it up on the interview trip, but I was thrilled when I found out that that was the way it was.

Fifteen percent of your own time to do what?

George Rathmann: To try something brand new and different outside your program. It's a little misleading, because if you've got work to do, you've got to get your work done. But...

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You could try things, and that's how Scotchgard came about. I tried some things that I thought might work. Before I was there for even four or five years, most of the programs I worked on were my own innovation, because they just sounded like they were interesting. I kept my job going and then I'd do something else, and then that would be -- I'd be encouraged to do that even if -- and that was another concept at 3M is, "Let's never get so tough on people that we don't let them fail. We would like to create a climate where people are willing to take a chance and fail," because that's the only way they will try another tough experiment. They'll never try a tough thing if they get beat up every time it doesn't work out. So as long as you learn something from the failure, put it behind you, and get on with the next thing. So there were lots of things at 3M that were very wonderful. In fact, when people from Amgen went to 3M, 20 years later, after I had left, to visit them, they said, "Well my gosh, now we know how we got the principles on which Amgen was built," which was very much that way. The freedom of the individual to make his own contribution, the feeling that the power in the organization was at the bottom of the organization, not coming down from the top. The good ideas, they were in there somewhere, not necessarily to be injected by the top. Now those are all principles of 3M that are really magnificent.

George Rathmann Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9