Rebecca Teeters, President of Chemical Operations, 3M: Your Best Benchmark Isn't in Your Industry
On this episode of People Solve Problems, host Jamie Flinchbaugh welcomes Dr. Rebecca Teeters, Senior Vice President of Business Supply Chain and President of Chemical Operations at 3M. Over more than three decades at 3M, Rebecca has led plants, global operations, enterprise strategy, and business transformation. The conversation, something of a reunion for two people who go back a long way, shows how a self-described systems thinker keeps a very complex organization pointed in the right direction.
Rebecca began with the sheer volume of problems that surface every day across her two roles. Rather than sorting them one at a time, she relies on connected systems: supply chain design tied to value stream improvement plans, change management practices, and a daily management system that runs from the shop floor to the top floor. When something new appears, it moves through that same system, and the team decides deliberately whether it deserves attention now or can wait.
She described a framework introduced by Paul Gallagher, who leads 3M's Enterprise Supply Chain, that sorts work into three categories: Run, Improve, and Transform. Run gets a fifteen-minute standing meeting every Friday. Improve is reviewed monthly against a twelve-month horizon, and transform follows a monthly and quarterly rhythm. Rebecca sees a clear role for AI here, not as a decision maker but as a way to digest large amounts of information and spot early warning signs across dozens of projects.
Asked how she divides her own attention, Rebecca explained that her business supply chain team should spend about ninety percent of its effort on improving and transforming, with clear lines drawn about which processes the team belongs in. Personally, she is working to flip a balance that historically tilted toward keeping the business running. A well-designed daily management system makes that possible, she said, because she can trust that decisions happen at the right level and that problems are raised before they require a recovery effort.
On competing priorities, Rebecca pointed to operational excellence principles, noting that a flow problem deserves attention because the rest of the organization feels its waste quickly. She admitted that gut instinct still plays too large a role in trade-off decisions, so her team is building a capital allocation model that frames options in clear financial terms. She uses AI to challenge her own assumptions rather than to make the choice for her.
On blind spots, Rebecca believes the best defense is inviting outside perspective on a regular schedule, chosen with intent. Her team recently spent a day with Amazon and AWS. To cut down on fires, she has sent teams to learn from NASA. To understand flow, she points them to quick service restaurants. The lesson, she said, is to study the principles behind how others design their systems rather than dismissing them because their products look nothing like yours, and then to be humble enough to act on what you see.
Reflecting on her career, Rebecca shared that she never plans for the next role. She focuses on doing today's job as well as she can, keeps learning, and lets opportunities come, including a period leading environmental stewardship that she counts among the most educational of her career. She and her son share a phrase about being humble enough to be bad at something long enough to become good at it. And for all her senior responsibilities, she admitted she still misses being a plant manager.
You can learn more about 3M at https://www.3m.com/ and connect with Rebecca on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-teeters-8870b917/.
