How storytelling can create exceptional group behaviours and build organizational purpose

How could 311 words have changed the business landscape for a leading consumer health product company from sinking to mounting towards achieving market benchmarks?

When an organization has a compelling vision, how leadership can leverage the powerful tool of storytelling to set unfathomable conviction in creating desired group behaviours and purpose to maximize and achieve business success.

One day in 1975 James Burke, president of the health care company Johnson & Johnson summoned 35 of the company’s executive leaders for an adhoc meeting. The goal of the meeting was to mull-over a 32-year-old four-paragraphed – one page document called the CREDO.

The CREDO (apportioned as an attachment in this article) was drafted in 1943 by Robert Wood Johnson, former chairman and company’s founding member.

Our Credo | Johnson & Johnson (jnj.com) To read the complete CREDO.

The CREDO described the relation of each group of stakeholders and prioritized them as:

1.????Customers

2.????Employees

3.????Community

4.????Company’s stakeholders

This document served as a gravitas to drive customer and business excellence. It was carved into a granite wall at the company’s New Jersey headquarters. The reason for the meeting stemmed from James’s recurrent observations of behaviours from employees and the young crowd who joined the company – it seemed that the CREDO was not read or valued and that it stood more of a fading decoration.

Should the CREDO matter or not piqued James’s mind? Why was the CREDO not appearing as a binding value statement to the employees? When the meeting was held to determine the role of this document, the agenda was out rightly dismissed by Dick Stellar – Chairman of the board, and it was called as “ridiculous” to question the foundational document. To this, James showed a bold front to challenge the documents premise inline with the ethos of the company – that we should challenge our views and values to see if they serve us or not.

This was a relentless pursuit by James as he organized several meetings tasking managers to write their views, thoughts about the principles of the CREDO, and that if the CREDO did not matter, it should be removed. These discussions sparked numerous ideas and views some favoring the continuity, while others found it irrelevant. By the end of these meetings that looked more like gospels of moral truth, a majority agreed to recommit to the document. ?

Over the next several years James continued these purposeful meetings with a clear forthright goal and reiterating as a story to uphold the CREDO which had a huge pay-off with the Tylenol capsule incident and how the principles of CREDO salvaged the company from a legal entanglement and business debacle.

Seven years post these meetings on September 30th, 1982, James received a shocking call about deaths in Chicago due to consumption of Tylenol capsules. This product was a potent pain reliever (analgesic). The cause was cyanide was laced on these capsules. The whole of Chicago was in a state of emergency like situation with police and other law enforcers were sounding alarm bells in peoples houses to avoid and discard these pills. The incident was equated as a national issue as severe as the assassination of JFK. In a matter of hours, the whole image and brand of the J&J was tarnished with police and health departments making frantic calls to the HO in New Jersey.

Note: J&J did not have any Public Relations department to handle this chaos and neither had a system of recalling the stock from the retailers/pharmacies. James set-up a seven-member team to investigate and wade through the issues. Four days after the incident James and the committee went to Washington to meet the FBI, FDA (Food and Drug Administration) and other agencies to seek clarity and solution. They were advised by the FBI to limit the recall of the capsules to avoid further chaos and misappropriation.

It is then James recalled the CREDO and dismissed the FBI’s advice. They recalled 31 million pills from every shelf that costed them $100 million. When Burke was asked for this tough decision, the answer came quickly. We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality.?From the CERDO.

Over the next few weeks and months J&J transformed itself from a pharmaceutical company to a public safety organization. It did all the necessary things to win back the trust and confidence of the consumers, retailers, media, law enforcement and FDA. Six weeks later J&J Tylenol’s market share started to climb-up slowly and regained its original mark after hitting an all-time low-zero. In the ensuing years, Tylenol’s response has become the gold standard for handling corporate crisis.

James Burke in his interview said that the numerous decisions which were made had robust consistency about the public being served first because they were at stake, and that the ‘CREDO ran those decisions.’

It was James Burke’s relentless pursuit in driving the stories about CREDO’s importance and that his success in gaining the commitment of the employees to action those principles in their decision making created those dynamic group behaviours.

He made the J&J team know what they stand for. The cohesion in the team was built on relentless attention from subtle signals that came from the 311-word page.

Stories create purpose that create success cultures that build high-purpose environments.