In 1902, five businessmen in Two Harbors, Minnesota, put their money into a mining operation. The plan was straightforward: dig up corundum, the hard mineral used in grinding wheels, and sell it to manufacturers. They called the company Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. The deposit turned out to be anorthosite, a soft, low-grade rock that was worthless for the purpose, and the company had spent its founding capital before anyone figured that out.

A more sensible group would have closed the books. Instead, the founders decided that if they couldn’t sell the mineral, they’d sell the thing the mineral was supposed to be used for, and moved into making sandpaper. It did not go well. The product was inconsistent, the equipment was bad, and for the better part of a decade the company lost money on nearly everything it shipped. A local investor named Lucius Ordway kept it alive with his own funds, largely because he’d already put in so much that walking away felt worse than continuing.

What turned it around wasn’t a single product but a change in how the company paid attention. A young bookkeeper turned sales manager, William McKnight, started sending salesmen past the purchasing office and onto the factory floor, to watch how the sandpaper was actually being used and where it failed. That produced the company’s first real success, an abrasive that held up under heavy use, and then a waterproof sandpaper that let auto body shops sand without filling the air with dust. Then a lab technician named Richard Drew, visiting a body shop to test that sandpaper, noticed painters struggling to mask two-tone paint jobs, and went back and invented masking tape. Scotch tape followed a few years later. The mining company had become 3M.

None of the products that made the company were in the original plan. All of them came from the same habit: go to where the customer is using the thing and watch what goes wrong. The mine was a total loss. The willingness to keep looking was the asset.