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The name James Burke belongs in the highest echelon of leadership and corporate ethics.
One of the most respected senior executives in America, Burke was chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson in 1982, when seven people died from ingesting Tylenol Extra-Strength capsules laced with cyanide. (The culprit was never caught.) Burke's decisive leadership included absolute honesty with the media, an executive team devoted full time to the situation, and the unprecedented step of removing every bottle of Tylenol from sale during the crisis. Because J&J had a solid reputation as a company responsive to its constituencies, it weathered the calamityand another poisoning incident in 1986. The Tylenol saga went on to become a crisis-management legend and the textbook stuff of business school case studies.
Burke retired from J&J in 1989, and became chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and The Business Enterprise Trust (BET), two associations committed to high-profile issues: the eradication of illegal drugs in America and the fostering of corporate ethics and social responsibility. (See "Building Corporate Loyalty... While Rebuilding the Community," on page 17, an excerpt from "Aiming Higher" [AMACOM, 1996], a compilation of the 25 Business Enterprise Trust award winners.)
Burke himself rarely grants interviews beyond BET or Partnership matters. But when he does, he is candid and energetic. He spoke recently at the Partnership headquarters in New York with Barbara Ettorre, Management Review senior editor.
Q. Have the Partnership for a DrugFree America and The Business Enterprise Trust met the goals you set for them?
BURKE: Yes and no. I can't answer that 100 percent. Both organizations function the way we'd like them to function, in terms of the impact. It's hard to answer in the same breath because they're very different. We set a goal for the Partnership to get a million dollars a day in pro bono advertising over a three-year period-over three years or over a billion dollars. I promised that to President Bush if he would support the idea in a major speech to the nation in 1989, which he did, and we got it.
We had 105 advertising agencies working on the creative and we didn't pay for that. It's really a miracle as it relates to what this country is...