In his first eight years at 3M, Ouderkirk worked with more than a hundred different teams. Nobody handed him important projects, like multilayer optical film, with potential impact spanning an enormous array of technologies; his breadth helped him identify them. “If you’re working on well-defined and well-understood problems, specialists work very, very well,” he told me. “As ambiguity and uncertainty increases, which is the norm with systems problems, breadth becomes increasingly important.”
