Transformational Thinking: Innovating for the Future

By George R. Pilcher

First things first. I would like to remind my readers of the dictum of PPG’s late, great director of research, Dr. Marco Wismer, who stated on numerous occasions during the last 30 years of the past century, that the Six Strategic Goals of the coatings industry could be easily and quickly enumerated¹:

1. Corrosion Protection
2. Elimination of Solvents
3. Conservation of Energy
4. Reduction of Toxic Wastes
5. Cost Reduction
6. Improved Durability

The French critic, journalist, and novelist, Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, is famed for his aphorism,“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,”² which is generally translated into English as, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Those words are as true today as they were when Karr wrote them in 1849. There have been many, many changes in the global paint and coatings industry over the past 40 years, including the fact that, “More and more companies from the coatings industry have been shifting production from mature markets to developing countries of late.

The majority are turning to Asia-Pacific, which is currently the largest paint market in the world.”³ In spite of many technological, processing, application, and geographical changes that have occurred in the coatings industry over these years, however, nothing has changed in the coatings industry in the past 40 years with respect to “Wismer’s Six Strategic Goals.” The challenges that we face today are the same challenges that we faced 40 years ago, when I first joined the coatings industry, and they will continue to be challenges long after I retire.

Even today, “it is clear that the various global coatings marketplaces, both industrial and consumer, are seeking (in some case, struggling) to provide positive, proactive, and economically viable realizations for each of these goals.”⁴
The only way in which we can deal with them—the only way in which we can make continuous strides toward these six strategic goals-is through a process that I refer to as “transformational thinking.”