I couldn’t believe what I was in the middle of. I hadn’t even been on staff long enough to go through formal training yet. I was twenty-one years old, three months on the job, thrust into a situation that now required me to interact with people in senior leadership positions, with the presidents of huge food, drug, and mass merchandising companies that supplied local retailers with our products, and working as part of a team that was fielding daily calls from those seeking information for how we were going to deal with this crisis of epic business and societal proportions.
So I remember it all. Frighteningly well. If the panic of the general public was enough to significantly affect their buying habits, making some of them want to empty the shelves in their bathroom medicine cabinets, the intensity raging around those of us at the epicenter of the ordeal was seriously all-consuming. It’s all we did. For weeks. For months.
But the memory of those days that has left the most lasting impression on me—as well as on generations of business observers who now consider J&J’s successful handling of the situation a case study in how companies respond to catastrophic events—were the actions of James Burke, its president and CEO.
And it all began with the company’s values.
Walk into Johnson & Johnson corporate headquarters in Brunswick, New Jersey, and one of the first things you’ll see in the lobby is a large stone display, almost like a national monument, etched with the words of a vision statement that’s been around since the company’s inception. It speaks of a four-pronged responsibility to (a) their customers, (b) their employees, (c) their communities, and (d) their shareholders—in that order. And in case that’s too much to remember, they boil it all down into a simple and memorable credo that cuts across everything they do as an organization: We put the needs and well-being of the people we serve first.
So while the crisis facing the Johnson & Johnson brand, and certainly Tylenol’s market share, held the potential to set back either one’s sustainability for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever . . . and while the decisions required of the corporate leadership were the kind that can spell doom to entire careers, even if undertaken with the full agreement and support of their team of advisors . . . the man in charge of leading his company through this unprecedented emergency felt as though the hardest calls were actually quite easy to make. Because in many ways, they’d already been made. By the power of a plan. By the strength and clarity of the company’s values and vision. For if Johnson & Johnson’s stated purpose—as the motto said—was to treat people’s needs and well-being as primary, then the choice of what to do next was fairly clear. Difficult to implement, to be sure, but not to decide on.
Like the Covid-19 crisis of today, decisions that could change the trajectory of the organization had to be made. The decision to recall 31 million bottles of Tylenol in circulation; the issuing of store credits to outlets who carried the product; the retooling of machinery in order to switch production from capsules to solid caplets, as well as the industry’s first-ever rollout of safety-seal, tamper-proof packaging; not to mention legal and publicity and other damage control costs had to be made on some foundation. But the financial answer wasn’t up for discussion that day, only the short answer, which went something like this: “I don’t ever want to hear the money question coming up again. This is not a money issue; it’s an issue of doing the right thing and putting people first.”
Values drove the decision.
And your values can do the same thing. They can serve the same purpose during this time of a medical crisis. They can help you steer the spiritual, relational, and missional direction of your business as well as your family, while also giving your spouse and kids a GPS for keeping their personal lives on target, helping them stay balanced and aligned along a consistent standard. Values form the nonnegotiable foundation underneath your family that determines who you are, what you want to do, and how you intend to go about doing it.
So . . . what are they? . . . your family values . . .are they worth your consideration?
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