dispatches from the new world of work

Houston High

In Houston Saturday night to speak to the sales team at DePuySpine, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Wow! Seventy percent of their burgeoning sales are from products introduced in the last three years! R&D up 50 percent in the last couple of years! Moreover, their array of products are mind-boggling game-changers in the world of wonky backs—an especially big deal with 80 million bad-back Boomers as their future market. Once again, their brashness & wholesale commitment to innovation was a welcome pick-me-up after P&G&G. (NB: Anyone but me wonder if the Pats' Gillette Stadium will be renamed Charmin Field?)

J&J has made some big acquisitions, to be sure, but it remains the antithesis of P&G. Their Cultural Commitment to Decentralization, that Bob Waterman and I loved when we put the firm in In Search of Excellence, is still very much alive & well. Bravo! (And no mean feat!)

Tom Peters posted this on 02/01/05.

Comments

Tom - tell me more about your decentralization theory. I understand P&G to be run the same way. By the way, I worked for CIBA Vision for a while, a subsidiary of Novartis, a direct competitor of a division of J&J. What do you think about CIBA putting their contact lens commercial in the Super Bowl? Super mistake if you ask me. I told them that when we were planning over a year ago. Whoa..% of total spend is big..but the professionals get all geeked up, but humm? does the product move through? Teach me about J&J.

Posted by Wendy at February 1, 2005 9:52 AM

This is an aside. Tom has a notebook where he tracks good design/bad design. I have a similar one for good websites/bad websites. J&J.com (http://www.jnj.com/home.htm) makes it into the good list with high marks! The look is unified, and immediately brings to mind a J&J package. There is a great deal going on, but the front page is not cluttered. The things I look for most commonly--corporate info, contact us, products--are right at the top along with some that are not usually so prominently displayed--social responsibility, innovations, privacy policy. (Not that most sites don't have a privacy policy, but it's usually at the bottom in the fine print.) If coherent web design is an indication of coherent company thinking, then J&J is scoring high on that, too. And, putting social responsibility on top also says something significant. Good site, J&J.

Posted by cathy at February 1, 2005 12:06 PM