In 1968 Dr. Spencer Silver, a PhD in organic chemistry was working intently in laboratory at the 3M company. He and his team were looking to create strong adhesives that could be used in aircraft construction. One set of experiments yielded an unexpected result – it created a new compound called microspheres. These microspheres could not be used to create ultra strong adhesives but could be used to create an ultra weak one. An adhesive that was highly sticky but easy to peel. Dr. Silver started talking about microspheres and it’s possible uses but there were few takers in the company. The only thing they created was a bulletin board covered with this adhesive so that people who stick bulletins on them and remove them when they were no longer required. Dr. Silver believed that this adhesive could have more uses and so he continued to give lunch time seminars on his discovery of microspheres and its adhesive properties. People started calling him Mr. Persistent as he just wouldn’t give up. During this time in the Tape Division of the company was a person called Art Fry. During one of his golf rounds he heard about this adhesive from a colleague. Intrigued he attended one of Dr. Silver’s lunch time seminars. He filed away this information in his head. One day Art Fry had a eureka moment. Every Wednesday night while practicing with his church choir, he would use little scraps of paper to mark the hymns they were going to sing in the upcoming Sunday service. By Sunday, he’d find that the little scraps of paper had all fallen out of the hymnal. He needed a bookmark that would stick to the paper without damaging the pages. Thinking back to the seminar on microsphere he excitedly concluded that it might be his answer. The next day he got a sample of the adhesive and made a few bookmarks and tried them out at the choir practice. It worked, however when the book marks were peeled they left a bit of adhesive behind. Art Fry then worked with Dr. Silver to correct this problem. He then tried testing out the new stick-able bookmark with his colleagues. They liked the product but didn’t find it very useful One day while writing a report Art Silver cut out a bit of the book mark, wrote a question on it that he wanted his boss to answer and stuck it in the front. His boss wrote his answer on the same paper, stuck it back to the report and sent it back. This was Art Fry’s second eureka moment. He now had a real and widespread use case for his product. He made samples and sent it out across the company and the results were dramatic. He recalls that people were wading through knee-deep snow to collect replacement pads. Excited with the results, in 1977, the company launched these sticky notes under the brand name Press n Peel in four cities. The results were very disappointing. The team however believed in the product and felt that it needed wider sampling. In a project now labelled the Boise Blitz, the team undertook a massive sampling effort in a town called Boise in the state of Idaho. 95% of users who tried it said they would buy it and thus the Post-it was born. And the yellow colour? That was just a coincidence. The lab just happened to have yellow scrap paper. Business Points ( Tags ) Persistence, perseverance, collaboration, team work, #initiative
