Dial M For Efficiency

With Debarati Sen’s customer focus, 3M India’s revenue and profits have soared in the last few years. Now, the global bosses at US-based 3M Company are following suit.

- Anshul Dhamija

It was a chance encounter with a college mate at a pub in Bengaluru (then Bangalore) in 1996 that got Debarati Sen to 3M India, the listed India entity of the $32 billion (by revenues), US-based diversified technology and science major 3M Company. Sen was at an office outing at the erstwhile Black Cadillac pub on Residency Road with her colleagues from advertising firm J. Walter Thompson when she met her senior from Jamshedpur’s Xavier School of Management.

“He, [then the HR manager at 3M India], asked me what I was doing in advertising when I was an engineer,” recalls 50-year-old Sen, a graduate from Maulana Azad National Institute of Technology, in Bhopal. After all, Sen was quite an accomplished student, having secured a full scholarship and a book allowance for her bachelor’s degree in electronics engineering. Given her qualifications, he informed Sen about an opening in the company’s electronics business vertical.

Within two days of meeting him, Sen interviewed for the job and got it. “Of course, everybody knows about 3M. At business school, there are many chapters referencing 3M in [books by the management expert Philip] Kotler,” says Sen. But she admits, “I didn’t know about [all] their products, but I knew about Post-it, Scotch-Brite, Scotchgard.”

Rightly so, as 3M Company is a multi-faceted enterprise with a wide range of products, both industrial and consumer focussed, that have uses across electronics, energy and healthcare, among other industries.

Two decades on, Black Cadillac is a pub of the past and Sen’s friend has long moved out of 3M India. Sen, however, is the company’s managing director, having taken charge in June 2016. She’s among a handful of women who are heading multinational companies in India, Kalpana Morparia of JP Morgan India, Rekha M Menon of Accenture and Nivruti Rai of Intel India being a few others.