Johnson & Johnson, a pharmaceutical powerhouse, is a company that I’ve had a soft spot for, for many years for varying reasons. I remember when I first moved to Mumbai almost 34 years ago, I used to take the bus from Andheri Station towards Mulund. Reaching Mulund, one of the sights I would look forward to, was the beautiful well-manicured lawn on a sloping hill. Right on top was the company; in the foreground on that lawn was the sign – Johnson & Johnson. I love that picture.
I also recall having a friend who had moved from Chennai to Mumbai. He had had a difficult time in Chennai. He was doing his final year in college and didn’t get through and had to re-do it. He got a break in Johnson & Johnson. In a couple of years, he had risen in the ranks and was doing exceptionally well. Finally he got married and moved to Canada and wanted to get into Johnson & Johnson there.
I remember him telling me how he had no transport and he would walk to J&J everyday and knock on their door saying, “I used to work in J&J, Mumbai and I would like to have a job here.” They gave him the job just out of sheer persistence. He kept going there – they even had a name for him. Despite not having a car, he would walk there every day and so they gave him a break. I think for 3 or 4 consecutive years, he took the Best Salesperson Award in Johnson & Johnson, Canada.
I also had another friend in Johnson & Johnson, who started as a product manager and went on to become the General Sales Manager. I remember going to his office near Grant Road to meet him and was so taken by the whole ambience of this firm.
But even closer to home; I have a couple of stents inside that have the Johnson & Johnson mark. These are the new drug-coated arterial stents. So when I say J&J is close to my heart, the pun is really intended.
But Johnson & Johnson had a crisis almost 30 years ago. They faced a terror attack that came in the form of a tampering with their Tylenol brand. They found that 7 customers died because someone had laced the Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules with cyanide. September 29th 1982 was a shocker of a day and a sad day in Chicago when 7 people died. Everybody remembers how Johnson & Johnson responded to this particular crisis. They didn’t blink. Immediately they pulled 31 million bottles of Tylenol from store shelves and replaced all of them with a safer tablet free of charge. They also came back with a tamper-proof packaging and once again told people that Tylenol was a company that they could still bank on; that integrity was in the heart of Tylenol.
Judith Rehak, in her article ‘Tylenol made a hero of Johnson & Johnson’ says, “Marketers predicted that the Tylenol brand, which accounted for 17% of the company’s net income in 1981, would never recover from the sabotage. But a year later, its share of the $1.2 billion analgesic market, which had plunged to 7% from 37% following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30%.
What set Johnson & Johnson apart? Albert Tortorella, a managing director at Burson-Marstellar Inc., the New York public relations firm that advised J&J said, “Before 1982, nobody ever recalled anything. Companies often fiddled while Rome burned.”
The CEO at that time was James Burke and he was the company’s chairman; he was widely admired for his leadership and the decision to pull Tylenol capsules off the market and for his forthrightness in dealing with the media. He looked like he was in complete control at the time of the tragedy.
But very few people know that Jim Burke, 3 years before, had pulled about 20 key executives into a room and thumped his finger on a copy of the J&J credo. Jim Collins in his article ‘The Ten Best CEOs of all Time’ has Jim Burke at #6. He says, “It was a defining moment for J&J, because when these 20 executives came into the room, Jim Burke said to each of them. “We hold to these truths,” pointing to the credo that R.W. Johnson Jr. had put in place in 1946, “to be self-evident. But we are not doing what we need to do to make it more than just an artifact. Interestingly, it’s hardly relevant to our day-to-day challenges of American capitalism. Here’s the credo. If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall. We either commit to it or get rid of it.”
Joseph Badaracco, who was there, says “The team sat there a bit stunned, wondering if Burke was serious. He was, and the room erupted into a debate that ended with a recommitment. Burke and his colleagues would conduct similar meetings around the world, restoring the credo as a living document.”
My friends, that’s the reason who, when they were hit by tragedy in 1982, they didn’t blink an eye. They didn’t wonder what to do. It didn’t need to be debated whether customer safety out-weighed short-term financial concerns, because the debating was already done.
The point I want to make here today is that we ought to have principles in place so that when circumstances come our way, we know exactly how to respond to them. When tragedies strike, when devastations occur, when faced with a crisis, what we need to help us make decisions are principles.
Principles are the non-negotiable positions that we have in our life, in the firm, in the companies that we work with. Principles are like vision statements. They tell us what’s in and what’s out and when faced with a crisis, the decisions get easier because then it’s not based on the circumstances or clouded by the circumstances, but based on the principles that have been set in place much before the tragedy struck.
So I ask you this morning. Do you have principles not only for your areas of work but for your life as well? Do you have non-negotiables that say, ‘I will not compromise, whatever and however the circumstances’? Because that is the bedrock or foundation on which integrity and honor is built in our life. Those are attributes that don’t come easily.
It didn’t come easily for James Burke or Johnson & Johnson or the Tylenol crisis. But they came out so well out of that crisis, because of the principles that they had honed.
Just a word to the wise: stick by the principles, find those principles and make them bedrock places in your life and in mine.
God Bless Us All.
I also recall having a friend who had moved from Chennai to Mumbai. He had had a difficult time in Chennai. He was doing his final year in college and didn’t get through and had to re-do it. He got a break in Johnson & Johnson. In a couple of years, he had risen in the ranks and was doing exceptionally well. Finally he got married and moved to Canada and wanted to get into Johnson & Johnson there.
I remember him telling me how he had no transport and he would walk to J&J everyday and knock on their door saying, “I used to work in J&J, Mumbai and I would like to have a job here.” They gave him the job just out of sheer persistence. He kept going there – they even had a name for him. Despite not having a car, he would walk there every day and so they gave him a break. I think for 3 or 4 consecutive years, he took the Best Salesperson Award in Johnson & Johnson, Canada.
I also had another friend in Johnson & Johnson, who started as a product manager and went on to become the General Sales Manager. I remember going to his office near Grant Road to meet him and was so taken by the whole ambience of this firm.
But even closer to home; I have a couple of stents inside that have the Johnson & Johnson mark. These are the new drug-coated arterial stents. So when I say J&J is close to my heart, the pun is really intended.
But Johnson & Johnson had a crisis almost 30 years ago. They faced a terror attack that came in the form of a tampering with their Tylenol brand. They found that 7 customers died because someone had laced the Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules with cyanide. September 29th 1982 was a shocker of a day and a sad day in Chicago when 7 people died. Everybody remembers how Johnson & Johnson responded to this particular crisis. They didn’t blink. Immediately they pulled 31 million bottles of Tylenol from store shelves and replaced all of them with a safer tablet free of charge. They also came back with a tamper-proof packaging and once again told people that Tylenol was a company that they could still bank on; that integrity was in the heart of Tylenol.
Judith Rehak, in her article ‘Tylenol made a hero of Johnson & Johnson’ says, “Marketers predicted that the Tylenol brand, which accounted for 17% of the company’s net income in 1981, would never recover from the sabotage. But a year later, its share of the $1.2 billion analgesic market, which had plunged to 7% from 37% following the poisoning, had climbed back to 30%.
What set Johnson & Johnson apart? Albert Tortorella, a managing director at Burson-Marstellar Inc., the New York public relations firm that advised J&J said, “Before 1982, nobody ever recalled anything. Companies often fiddled while Rome burned.”
The CEO at that time was James Burke and he was the company’s chairman; he was widely admired for his leadership and the decision to pull Tylenol capsules off the market and for his forthrightness in dealing with the media. He looked like he was in complete control at the time of the tragedy.
But very few people know that Jim Burke, 3 years before, had pulled about 20 key executives into a room and thumped his finger on a copy of the J&J credo. Jim Collins in his article ‘The Ten Best CEOs of all Time’ has Jim Burke at #6. He says, “It was a defining moment for J&J, because when these 20 executives came into the room, Jim Burke said to each of them. “We hold to these truths,” pointing to the credo that R.W. Johnson Jr. had put in place in 1946, “to be self-evident. But we are not doing what we need to do to make it more than just an artifact. Interestingly, it’s hardly relevant to our day-to-day challenges of American capitalism. Here’s the credo. If we’re not going to live by it, let’s tear it off the wall. We either commit to it or get rid of it.”
Joseph Badaracco, who was there, says “The team sat there a bit stunned, wondering if Burke was serious. He was, and the room erupted into a debate that ended with a recommitment. Burke and his colleagues would conduct similar meetings around the world, restoring the credo as a living document.”
My friends, that’s the reason who, when they were hit by tragedy in 1982, they didn’t blink an eye. They didn’t wonder what to do. It didn’t need to be debated whether customer safety out-weighed short-term financial concerns, because the debating was already done.
The point I want to make here today is that we ought to have principles in place so that when circumstances come our way, we know exactly how to respond to them. When tragedies strike, when devastations occur, when faced with a crisis, what we need to help us make decisions are principles.
Principles are the non-negotiable positions that we have in our life, in the firm, in the companies that we work with. Principles are like vision statements. They tell us what’s in and what’s out and when faced with a crisis, the decisions get easier because then it’s not based on the circumstances or clouded by the circumstances, but based on the principles that have been set in place much before the tragedy struck.
So I ask you this morning. Do you have principles not only for your areas of work but for your life as well? Do you have non-negotiables that say, ‘I will not compromise, whatever and however the circumstances’? Because that is the bedrock or foundation on which integrity and honor is built in our life. Those are attributes that don’t come easily.
It didn’t come easily for James Burke or Johnson & Johnson or the Tylenol crisis. But they came out so well out of that crisis, because of the principles that they had honed.
Just a word to the wise: stick by the principles, find those principles and make them bedrock places in your life and in mine.
God Bless Us All.
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