The Tylenol Mafia Read Online Free PDF Page B

a great businessman, right? But he’s also a man of science. He’s not going to allow his company... to put on the shelf... a product that might hurt people.”
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    James Burke began his career at Johnson & Johnson in 1953 as a product director of Band-Aids. He had previously worked for three and a half years at Procter & Gamble. Burke was a graduate of the Harvard MBA class of 1949. This 1949 graduating class, celebrated as “the class the dollars fell on,” and known as the “49ers,” is famous for the CEOs it produced and the wealth it amassed. In 1989, the median net worth of the living 575 members of the original all male group of 646 was $2 million. The group included the CEO’s of Bloomingdale’s, Capital Cities/ABC, Xerox, Rohm & Haas, Bristol Myers, General Housewares , and Johnson & Johnson, to name a few.
    “HBS [Harvard Business School] had a powerful impact on me,” said Burke. “When I graduated from college, I was concerned about what I should do with my life. I knew I wanted a career in business, but it wasn’t until I was at HBS that I grasped that business could be a force for good in society. We were constantly reminded of the importance of moral values in our decision making. This attention to ethics shaped my entire career.”
    According to a friend and classmate at Harvard Business School, Burke probably skipped years of ladder climbing by making friends when he was a young man with Robert Wood Johnson’s son, Bobby Johnson. Bobby died of cancer in 1970; five years after his father fired him.
    Burke briefly interrupted his career at Johnson & Johnson after he had been with the company for just one year. Feeling constrained in his job, Burke quit so he could try his hand at entrepreneurship, launching three separate businesses. Burke brought out two new products on his own - one was a pink tablet that exploded into bubbles when dropped into a bathtub. Both products bombed, and all three of Burke’s business ventures failed.
    Burke returned to Johnson & Johnson less than a year after leaving the company, and took charge of the New Products division. He was able to lure some of the best marketers away from Procter & Gamble, but success still eluded him. His early years at Johnson & Johnson were a sequence of failures. Burke later described how his boss had taken him to task early in his career, saying, “You’re a bachelor, and you’re bright. I’ll accept that you can bring a lot to the business. I’ll even accept that maybe Bobby Johnson is right about you, that you can someday run this company. But I don’t see that in you. And I don’t see any indication that you want to pay the price to do it. Now, if you do, we’ll take it a step at a time. You have this job for a year, and this door is open. Whenever you want me I’m available.”
    Reflecting back on that conversation, Burke admitted, “He really gave it to me, and he was right.”
    With a growing list of disappointing new product launches, “General” Robert Wood Johnson II soon summoned Burke into his office. Burke thought he was in trouble for his latest failure - A combination nose drops and spray for children, aptly called “Johnson & Johnson’s Nose Drops and Spray.” The bottle could be opened from the top or bottom. A dropper attached to the top cover could be used to drop the medicine into a child’s nose, and when the bottom cover was removed, the medicine could be sprayed out by squeezing the bottle.
    At the scheduled time, Burke entered Johnson’s office, expecting the worst. “I was full of bravado,” said Burke. But he also said, “I thought I was going to get fired.”
    Johnson, who was seated behind his desk, tossed out a bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s Nose Drops and Spray. “Are you the man who launched this thing?” asked “General” Johnson. Burke nervously replied that he was. Johnson then stood up and grasped Burke’s hand. “I want to congratulate you,” Johnson said. “Business