|
|
|
Great Engagements: The Once and Future Johnson & Johnson is an attempt to take stock of where Johnson & Johnson is and where it is going. The book, written by an outside business writer for internal management audiences worldwide, is based on the premise that a candid examination of Johnson & Johnson’s cultural legacy and recent evolution will reap significant business benefits. Johnson & Johnson today is in the midst of revolutionary changes that have impacted every corner of the organization. Over the last fifteen years or so, the Company successfully made the transition from a manufacturing-based to a research-driven, knowledge-based company. Johnson & Johnson has confronted social changes that redefine standards of employee diversity, employee expectations, and the day-to-day experience of work. Enormous shifts in the design and delivery of health care around the world require new commitments. How has the Company fared in navigating these challenges? Are these challenges advanced or impeded by the Company’s commitment to management principles such as decentralization? Do the Company’s core values as represented by the Credo remain a critical unifying principle? Great Engagements: The Once and Future Johnson & Johnson attempts to apply some rigor in addressing such tough questions. The book is not meant as a definitive history of the events it describes. Rather, by assembling the candid perceptions of hundreds of people inside and outside the Company, the book creates opportunities for Johnson & Johnson managers around the world to participate in some crucial conversations.
What
was the genesis of the book? It began over two years ago and there was a certain evolution involved. From the beginning, Johnson & Johnson communications professionals determined that an external perspective would best serve the book’s purposes. I would come in as an outside observer and report the book from an external perspective. I would go in with a blank slate and allow the book to go wherever my research took me. As a result, the book itself is a product of the content that emerged. I quickly found that Johnson & Johnson is particularly rich in its corporate culture – what I call mythological property – and I began to understand that Johnson & Johnson, more than most companies, is deeply committed to an ideal represented by the stories, rituals and values that the operating companies have cultivated. What,
as you see it, is the purpose of the book? The book ought to help Johnson & Johnson people around the world pin down an understanding of the aspects of the Company that generate real meaning and purpose. As my research progressed, I began to understand that for Johnson & Johnson meaning and purpose go well beyond the specific goals that Bill Weldon sets out each year. Those goals are achievable. But the ideals embodied in the Johnson & Johnson culture and mythology are designed to be not quite achievable. It’s in their pursuit that they have real power. It’s in the striving for these ideals that motivates Johnson & Johnson to meet the stated objectives. I wanted to articulate those goals, ideals and values. This kind of book is important for a company like Johnson & Johnson, with its enormously diverse internal audience. There is a huge value in looking inward. What
was involved in the research process? I wanted to report from the grass roots up rather than the top down. I started with people closest to customers – sales people and marketing managers – and captured the story as it is lived, rather than as it is articulated by executives. No door was closed to me. Everyone was extremely candid. People understood that the stories they had to share were vital to the company. In a sense, Johnson & Johnson is so decentralized that it has a hard time getting a clear picture of itself. The complexity is immense. You
write: “The definition of business purpose is to create ever-greater
engagements.” How does this relate to the book’s title? The title, Great Engagements, came to me after many months of doing the research. It embodies two of the concepts that underlie my approach. With the word “great,” if I am right, I’ve attempted to articulate something that I saw in the Company and try to bring it out in the book. “Engagements” signifies relationships inside and outside the Company – with partners, competitors, investors, regulators, and so on. I learned a great deal about these engagements. The book looks at the dimension of all the relationships and where they are going. There may be things here that people disagree with, or struggle with, but that’s good. I hope my reporting will lead to questions that people don’t have immediate answers for. I also learned that certain tensions – between short-term opportunism and long term planning, between centralization and decentralization, for example – are key to the Company’s strength. In this sense, the book articulates the arguments for the Company’s strategic themes: broadly based, committed for the long term, and decentralized. Tell
us something about your own experience in writing this book. I had a wonderful time with this project and have a warm and wonderful feeling for everyone at Johnson & Johnson. I made a lot of friends. It wasn’t easy to remain an outside observer. Johnson & Johnson people welcomed me very warmly. It didn’t take long for me to see that the Credo serves as an organizing principle for Johnson & Johnson. That’s something I have never [quite] seen before in writing about hundreds of companies. In my experience, none live a set of values as intentionally as Johnson & Johnson. In this respect and many others, Johnson & Johnson has earned my esteem. Mythological Property and Meaning A company’s culture is the sum of the values, successes, failures, stories, legends, and rituals it has cultivated over the span of its existence. Along with the products and services it offers, every company also constructs statements about itself. These statements tell people inside and outside the organization where it stands, what it believes to be true, what it accepts as right and wrong, and, most important, who gets to claim membership in the community. Call it mythological property. Similar to the concept of intellectual property—any product of the human experience that is unique, novel, unobvious, and has some value in the marketplace—mythological property may be the company’s most valuable yet least understood asset. The value of this asset is at once immense and immeasurable. From an external perspective, it’s the reputation Johnson & Johnson cultivates. From an internal perspective, it is part of the glue that holds the company together. Every once in a while, it is useful for an organization to take stock of its mythological property, if for no other reason than to determine if particular values are working for it or against it. The central question for Johnson & Johnson today is not “How’s business?” but “What’s new?” The metrics to satisfy the former question are mature and readily available. The metrics to resolve the latter question continue to be elusive, but are a function of what can be termed the once and future Johnson & Johnson. The term “once and future” describes not only the events that shaped the Company as an organization but also informs the events yet to be. It is in this context that an examination of the Company’s cultural legacy can reap business benefit. While the nation’s business schools grapple with the best way to measure future business opportunities, the Company can attend to some issues of “What’s new?” that are very much of the moment. How are issues around health care changing? What emerging business opportunities around the world can the Company seize? How can the Company use its brand equity to advance its businesses? What is the quality of work as it is experienced by Johnson & Johnson people around the world? How can the Company best engage the events shaping Johnson & Johnson as an organization even as it measures what is not yet plotted? These are among the questions that confront the once and future Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson today is in the midst of revolutionary changes that have impacted every corner of the organization. The Company successfully made the transition from a manufacturing-based to a research-driven company. It has likewise grown from a manufacturing company to a leader in the knowledge economy. The company has confronted social changes that redefine standards of employee diversity, employee expectations, and the day-to-day experience of work. Enormous shifts in the design and delivery of health care around the world require new commitments. Today, as the credibility of the modern corporation comes into question, the company’s core values as represented by the Credo have emerged as a critical unifying principle. The challenges for the leadership of the Company at every level have been as profound as the company’s responses. Given these realities, where is Johnson & Johnson in the change process? The Credo continues to articulate and
operationalize Johnson & Johnson’s values across its business
units. It is by far the Company’s most powerful unifying force. At
Johnson & Johnson, the Credo serves as the boldest statement of how
meaning can be framed. The details of how to implement the quest for meaning
are left to the best judgment of the members of the Company who agree to be
held accountable to the organization’s transcendent values. The Company
has evolved dozens of programs and facilities to encourage people to become
engaged with the process of finding and creating meaning. These programs continue
to be refined in light of the changing expectations of employees. How can the
Company best apply Credo values across its many objectives? Sixty years after General Johnson articulated the Credo, what new opportunities for understanding can the Credo reveal in light of Twenty First Century realities? By considering such questions, the business possibilities available to Johnson & Johnson reveal themselves in new ways. The stories an organization tells about itself define the shared mission of the organization and inform every business process. Critical areas such as resource allocation, product mix and integration, knowledge management, technological innovation, customer segmentation, and employee motivation are direct functions of the Company’s estimation of its values. Change the stories, and the outcomes change, as well. The more the stewards of Johnson & Johnson across the world are able to discriminate between the values the organization actually lives by, rather than the ones people like to think it lives by, the better they can put those values to work in the service of the Company. Johnson & Johnson has always been determined to align the experience of employees with business success. What is the experience of work at Johnson & Johnson today and how has that meaning changed in the last 15 years? How have the standards of business success shifted in recent years? These questions go to the core of what it means to succeed as a member of the Johnson & Johnson family: the countless acts of service, engagement, innovation, caring, collaboration, and investment that create the value that the Company’s constituencies define as success. By framing the questions in this way, every member of the Johnson & Johnson family gets a better understanding of just what it is that holds everyone together even as they get a clearer picture of why it’s important. Many people have a word for the relationship between the experience of work and business success. “Meaning” is something that everyone at Johnson & Johnson cherishes. But no two employees value it exactly the same way. Using remarkably similar language, Johnson & Johnson people have reported that they will work hard for money, but they will give their lives for meaning. Still, is it possible for an organization to provide meaning? Is meaning something that individuals bring to the workplace? Or is it, as is likely, some unique combination of the two? Assessing Johnson & Johnson’s mythological property is an exercise in pinning down a vital part of itself. But while a company may own and control its creativity and innovation in the same way that it owns and controls its physical assets, it is far from clear that a company can own or control its mythological property. More likely, it’s the mythological property that owns and controls the organization. For the most part, the stories a company tells about itself are a blessing. Occasionally they are an obstacle. Some uplift the company; others weight it down. Perhaps it is impossible for an organization to truly distinguish between the two. But Johnson & Johnson understands that it’s vital to make the attempt. The Company has learned that it is occasionally useful to put some attention on the shared elements of its mission even as it considers what the parameters of that shared mission may be. From the
Conclusion to Great Engagements: The first two words of the Credo are
telling. Every movement happens away from something
or toward something. Movement at Johnson & Johnson is always toward
something. The best description of how it all comes together is not stated
but experienced. Great Engagements has presented a snapshot of Johnson &
Johnson at a particular point in time as seen through the lens of an
individual observer – one who has experienced Johnson & Johnson. It
is by no means the final word on any subject, as those words are yet to be
written. Perhaps the book serves its purpose by assembling particular facts,
describing specified events, and connecting certain dots in ways that suggest
new ways to think about Johnson & Johnson and its opportunities. I hope
this book catalyzes some of those high quality conversations. Patients, employees, Credo values,
strategic principles, noble aspirations . . . these all represent great
engagements to Johnson & Johnson. But what is the greatest engagement of
them all? And not necessarily just for Johnson & Johnson, but universally
for humanity? It turns out that the answers to those two questions are
exactly the same. The answer draws on the most foundational substance Johnson
& Johnson touches: life itself. This is the engagement without which
Johnson & Johnson would have no meaning; indeed, without which there
would be no stakeholders or readers of this book. The definition of business
purpose is to create ever-greater engagements. It is appropriate to end the
book by underscoring the parallels between the Company’s founding
values and the ultimate value for which it struggles: life itself.
John Kador, Author |
