Lew Lehr used to come home with an assortment of new tapes and adhesives to stick to his four kids. He’d tell them to go running or swimming and see what stayed on.
For the 3M engineer, who became the head of the company, it was just another chance to tinker.
“He wanted new ideas,” said Don Lehr, his son and occasional test subject, “from whoever could come up with them, all the time.”
Lew Lehr, a former 3M chief executive and prominent Minnesota business leader, died July 30 in Phoenix. He was 95.
His friends, family and colleagues remembered him as straightforward and gentle — stern when he needed to be, always friendly and never afraid to make a mistake in service of innovation.
Born in Elgin, Neb., in 1921, Lehr studied chemical engineering at the University of Nebraska. That’s where he met his wife, Doris Stauder.
After serving as a lieutenant in the Army during World War II, he took a job at what one of his chemistry professors called “a little company up in St. Paul” that made the tape he used in one class. A friend was already there. In a 2006 interview with the Minnesota Historical Society, Lehr remembered him saying: “If you can get a job, take it. Because then every Saturday you and I can go fishing.”
That was good enough for Lehr, who moved to St. Paul with Doris in 1947. His first job was to test adhesives.
His career got a jolt when a group of doctors came to the company seeking a better way to keep wounds isolated and sterile during surgery. Lehr and a colleague, Bert Auger, set to work developing what would become self-adhesive surgical drapes, now ubiquitous in operating rooms.
It was a slog of a process by 3M’s speedy standards, requiring FDA approval. After plenty of time and money spent on what Lehr thought was initially “a real loser,” a manager told him they were shutting it down.
Lehr and Auger, seeing its potential, turned around and offered to buy the branch of the business themselves. That turned heads in upper management, who instead channeled their enthusiasm into a new division that blossomed into 3M’s medical products division. For Lehr, that was probably for the best since “we didn’t have any money to buy it anyway.”
His responsibilities grew from there, to head of the new division to president to chief executive by 1979 to chairman not long after that. He wasn’t shy about making his mark, reorganizing the increasingly sprawling Maplewood-based company while keeping an eye on the bottom-up freedom to experiment and stumble into new products that he believed was critical.
His tenure was marked by the advent of one such happy accident: the Post-it Note, a failed attempt at a super-strength adhesive that meandered into fruition over more than a decade and came into mainstream production in 1980. In a form of top-down guerrilla marketing, 3M’s marketers had Lehr’s secretary slip Post-it Notes into letters to Fortune 500 chief executives.
Lehr also tapped into that network of fellow executives to advance education reforms he saw as key to developing a prepared workforce. He joined the Minnesota Business Partnership, a group of CEOs from the state’s biggest companies, and quickly took on a leadership role, spearheading an independent study on the state’s education system and getting then-Gov. Rudy Perpich — in many other respects a political foil to Lehr — to push for them.
“He wanted excellence, he wanted improvement,” said Chuck Slocum, a business consultant who worked with Lehr at the time. “He was understated, he was not loud and boisterous, but very convincing.”
Lehr wanted many of the same things in schools that he wanted at 3M: autonomy and freedom to pursue results without impediment from a bureaucracy. He once summed up his management philosophy: “If you put people out to pasture and surround them with fences, you get sheep.”
And as he saw it, “we can afford to make almost any mistake once.”
Quiet or otherwise, Slocum said, Lehr’s voice carried more weight than most.
“Many people would say, well, where’s 3M on this?,” he said, “and if 3M is OK with it, then we’re OK with it.”
He rubbed elbows with figures befitting of that stature. One of Mikhail Gorbachev’s bureaucrats once blew him off at a party to keep up appearances with his Russian colleagues. He watched Margaret Thatcher strong-arm two reporters into submission over dinner.
“Lew Lehr was a visionary who helped build 3M into the enterprise we are today,” Inge G. Thulin, 3M’s current chairman, president and chief executive officer, said in a statement Wednesday. “Lew pioneered 3M’s move into the health care industry, strengthened our R&D capabilities and accelerated our expansion into international markets.”
Thulin said Lehr’s volunteer work also set an example for all 3Mers to follow.
After retiring from 3M in 1986, Lehr went on to serve on boards on companies ranging from Shell Oil to General Mills. That kept him on the road, his son Don said — and conveniently in the path of the Augusta National, Firestone Country Club and other prestigious golf destinations.
There was another hobby that wasn’t quite so kind to him. Lehr was a lifelong music lover — Doris studied it in college — but “he wasn’t good at it,” Don said. Of standing next to his father as they sang in church, he recalled: “He would try” — willing, at least in that instance, to make a mistake more than once.
Lehr is survived by his sons, Don, William and John; his daughter, Mary Makin; his grandchildren, Patrick Makin, Evan, Trevor, Alexandra, Anthony, Luke and Nicholas; and four great-grandchildren.
His funeral will be Friday at Pinnacle Presbyterian Church in Scottsdale, Ariz., at 11 a.m. local time. His family is asking that memorial contributions be directed to the Wounded Warrior Project.
