Here's
a multi-chapter story (2 parts published so far) about J&J, the
company we know (and love) for no-tears baby shampoo, Band-Aids,
Tylenol, etc. They make us feel better and healthier. But their
low-margin consumer products division is only 9% of their profits, and
their pharma/devices division is where most of the money (and
controversies) are.
I interned at a J&J acquisition
last decade, and of the 3 pharma companies I've worked at, I felt that
J&J emphasized ethics the most. This is probably due to their
"Creedo culture". Remember the 1982 Tylenol
crisis where some guy in Chicago was opening up bottles and putting
cyanide in them? That led to 7 customer deaths, and the voluntary
development of tamper-proof drug containers by J&J that became the
industry standard. That tragedy could have sunk the company (Tylenol's
market share of analgesics initially fell from 35% to 7%... haha who
were those crazy 7%, very loyal employees or people without TVs?), but
J&J's leader at the time, James Burke, held the ship together and
eventually restored their brand image. It is now a celebrated crisis
mgmt. business case, and Burke won the Medal of Freedom in 2000 (I don't
know if it was fully merited or not). Part of their brand recovery plan was the drafting of the Creedo (written in stone like the 10 Commandments, and next to the Stars & Stripes), or guiding principles for what kind of company they should be. On paper is sounds very good and even inspirational (it was for a 23 year old): their order of priorities are customers/users, business partners, employees, communities, and lastly shareholders. Of course that challenged their fiduciary duty as a publicly-owned company, but the Board must have approved it. Maybe the thinking is that these stakeholders are not zero-sum; if you are good to patients and others, the money will also flow to shareholders (Merck says something similar). They drove these points home during new hire orientation, and also recognize employees each year who are especially faithful to the Creedo.
But apparently the "thought leaders" and businessmen (corporate criminals are overwhelmingly male) in the pharma/device divisions didn't really live it out on multiple occasions. I don't know how much "Creedo compliance" actually takes place - like are employees rated and comped for how ethical they are (how Google partly evaluates employees on their "Googleyness")? Doubt it. But maybe all of this lofty Creedo stuff is just a smoke screen to get patients, employees, and gov't to believe that medical companies are somehow more trustworthy and admirable than "regular companies" that just make widgets, because their higher mission is to save lives.
The record indicates that medical companies/providers are no more ethical than the rest of us, and are in fact also responsible for millions of deaths, billions in fraud, and countless injuries over the years (some preventable or willful). Sure, their net impact is probably positive, but the J&J case could be another big example why for-profit medicine does not lead to the best outcomes for society as a whole.
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