...Tylenol crisis of 1982 John Doe Business Society September 30, 2015 Tylenol crisis of 1982 John Doe Business Society September 30, 2015 Abstract In this paper I talked about the Johnson and Johnson Tylenol case of 1832. I explained the case and defended Johnson and Johnson’s ethical decision. I learned that this case paved the way for companies to start recalling their products if there is something wrong with them. Tylenol crisis of 1982 Johnson and Johnson’s Tylenol product had become one of the most successful over the counter product in the United States. Then mysterious deaths all around the US were being linked to Tylenol. Johnson and Johnson was faced with the ethical decision whether or not they should have a recall on their product or not. Many companies have been put in the ethical decision of right and wrong before. Johnson and Johnson decided that the best decision they could make was to recall their product from the market. Even though this decision may have set Johnson and Johnson back in the short term, eventually they were able to come back even stronger in the long term. Johnson and Johnson’s Tylenol was cashing in 19 percent of its profits. Tylenol was becoming one of the most successful products ever. The fall of 1982 comes around and there are reports of deaths that doctors are relating to Tylenol. Many Tylenol bottles were reported tampered with. Somebody had replaced the pills in a Tylenol bottle with cyanide-laced capsules. These pills...
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...Running Head: TYLENOL MURDERS Johnson & Johnson: The Tylenol Crisis of 1982 Since 1887 Johnson and Johnson had been a respected member of the health care industry providing millions of customers with a diverse line of products from surgical dressings and band aids to baby powder. It had built its reputation on providing surgeons with sterile dressing to use after surgery because infection was a major cause of death after surgical procedures. The company was also a pioneer in the corporate idea of decentralizing the structure of their business so each set of products were directed by their own subsidiary and each had autonomy from the main corporate center. A family run, publicly traded business, the company had always had been aware of its responsibility towards the public and its employees as well as its shareholders. In 1959 Johnson and Johnson acquired McNeil laboratories, maker of the prescription-only drug Tylenol. By 1980, Tylenol was responsible for 37 percent of the pain reliever market and was responsible for 33 percent of the company’s profit growth (Tifft, Griggs, 1982). That type of share of the market illustrates the presence Tylenol had in the industry and there was no end in sight. On the morning of September 29th Mary Kellerman was seen by her parents as having flu symptoms so they gave her Extra Strength Tylenol to combat her fever. She became sick within hours and died later that day. On...
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...Tylenol The background In 1982, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) faced a major crisis that had the potential to send the company into financial ruin. Tylenol, the country’s most successful over-the-counter product, with over one hundred million users, was under attack. The crisis Sealed bottles were tampered with and extra-strength Tylenol capsules were replaced with cyanide-laced capsules. These bottles were then resealed and placed on shelves of pharmacies in the Chicago area. Seven people died as a result. Tylenol was called upon to explain why its product was killing people. The solutions The company first learned of the deaths from a local news reporter. A medical examiner had just given a press conference saying people were dying from poisoned Tylenol. Tylenol had to act fast. What did Tylenol do right? It is difficult to imagine how else should have Johnson and Johnson reacted at the time of the crisis except the following ways: • Recalling all the products whether contaminated or not. • Alerting all the customers by all available media including toll-free hotlines. • Appearance of the chairman of the company on the television to publicize the company’s response and action taken by it to combat the emergency. • Making public relations programmes to address the issues and concerns all the internal and external stakeholders. • J&J put customer safety first. – Company Chairman James Burke immediately formed a seven-member strategy...
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...responsibility not only describes what a company does internally, but also shows what they did externally. If a company lack this, it can cost business dearly. In order to start looking at how to improve and sustain business ethics, we must first ask what ethics itself is. In a simple definition, ethics involves learning what is right from wrong. Then taking that knowledge and acting on what is right. However, that’s not as straightforward as conveyed in a great deal of business ethics literature. Philosophers have been discussing ethics for at least 2500 years, since the time of Socrates and Aristotle. Many consider ethical beliefs to be legal matters. For example, what becomes an ethical guideline today is often translated to a law, regulation or rule tomorrow. Many companies use public relations as a diving board into the world of ethics." " " Public relations are a huge way that companies can effectively show ethics and corporate responsibility. Business ethics and corporate responsibility are a huge part of businesses and companies around the world. In the public’s eye, ethics are a reason why people do business with a specific company or not. A good way for companies to Page 2 of 7 show that they are ethically responsible for their actions is by displaying good PR. According to a 1999 article, " “Business ethics are discussed not only in board rooms, but at dinner tables, in university faculty rooms and on the floor of Congress.” (1) " Because companies are always watched by the...
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...Introduction.......................................................................................3 2. Executive Summery………………………………………………..4 3. Crisis Management………………………………………………...5 4. Effective Management of information………….…………..…6&7 4. Communication Strategy………………………………..…...…8&9 5. Effective Crisis Management…………………………….………10 6. Public Relations steps…………………………………….………11 7. Product Recall…………………………………………………….12 8. Ikea Questionnaire………………………………………………...13 9. Conclusion…………………………………………………….…..14 10. Bibliography……………………………………………………...15 11. Appendices………………………………………………………...16 Introduction This report aims to investigate that public relations is an important business function to an organization. The research will examine public relations as an essential function of crisis management. The purpose of this report is to investigate that major organizations such as Johnson and Johnson, Ford and Firestone and IKEA, would use the corrective public relations strategies, to have a positive outcome on a crisis situation. The author will examine the different public relation strategies each company used to handle their individual crisis. In examining these strategies the report will analyze the impact these strategies had on the crisis. Executive Summary The report provides a study of the crisis...
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...ethical misconduct. The issues ranged from company resources abuse to bribes and illegal political contributions. The ethical misconducts/issues can fall within Employee Mistreatment, Customer Mistreatment, Unethical Employee Behavior, Corporate Intelligence Issues, and Accounting Practices. Employee Mistreatment can also be workplace abuse which is a behavior that causes workers emotional or physical harm. Harassment, discrimination, bullying and violence are forms of workplace abuse. These behaviors aren’t always distinguishable from one another because they frequently overlap. Harassment can be discriminatory, bullying can be a form of harassment, and any of these behaviors can lead to workplace violence. Employee Mistreatment can come from coworkers mistreating each other, managers mistreating employees, sexual mistreatment, assaults, discriminations against woman with lower wages, discriminations against minorities, and corporate bulling. In my research I found that corporate bulling happens more than one thinks and it’s a complex issue. While there are a variety of reasons why bullies choose to target other people, usually their behavior is driven by the bully’s need to control the targeted individual. These employees want to call all the shots. So they often insist on having things their way and if others don’t comply they are targeted. Usually, these bullies have strong social skills and a lot of influence within the company. As a result, they use these attributes to...
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...Introduction Nestlé, founded in 1866 by Henri Nestlé, is the world’s largest food company, producing products such as chocolates, soups, coffee, cereals, baby formula, and a host of other items (Nestlé, 2006). In the late 1960’s and 1970’s, Nestlé found itself in the centre of a scandal (Krasny, 2012). It was accused of encouraging mothers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to use baby formula instead of breast milk, a healthier and less expensive alternative (Krasny, 2012). The allegations of non-ethical marketing practices led to boycotts of Nestlé products, beginning in 1977, in the United States and Europe: some boycotts continue to this day (Facebook, 2012). The criticisms, public outcry, and attention from social activists resulted in Senate Hearings in the United States and meetings by the World Health Organization (WHO, 1981). The result was a new set of marketing rules, introduced in 1981,that restricted the promotion of baby formula (WHO, 1981). These restrictions are outlined in the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes (WHO, 1981). The aim of the code is to “ensure the proper use of breast milk substitutes, when these are necessary, on the basis of adequate information and through appropriate marketing and distribution” (International Lactation Consultant Association, 2001). When you consider the corporate marketing practices uncovered in the Nestlé scandal, one can see that a corporation’s vision must go beyond profits, and consider...
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...economist Milton Friedman in his essay “deriding the idea that a business had any responsibility other than to maximise its profits within legally and ethically acceptable margins, arguing that ‘a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. A few new theories were introduced in the famous essay written by Milton Friedman. These theories suggested that the only reason a business exists is to make profit and this is done through the actions of all the executives of any business. The only reason an executive is employed is to take decisions that will have a direct affect on the profitability of a business and thus in effect it will be the consequent to the livelihoods of the employees of any corporation. It is exactly for these beliefs that the idea of a socially responsible corporation seems like a far-fetched one in the era when this philosophy was hailed as the cornerstone of the ideology required for any business operation, where the only reason a business existed was to make money and that’s all. The whole argument involves around the case of CSR, how exactly to describe the definition is where the ambiguity starts, or does it? Within the economic industry the main responsibility of any corporation has been to make money and to increase the business value for the shareholders (as mentioned above). But with time this view is nothing but the misty remnants of the past as in the last decade the viewpoint of the major corporations are...
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...equivalent of a $10 increase per barrel of oil.1 It is, in a word, staggering. And we may not have seen the end of it. Long before Enron’s collapse, a number of business ethicists and business professionals watched with concern as Wall Street analysts demanded increasingly strong corporate financial performance to support rising corporate stock prices. At the same time, the gargantuan compensation packages (including stock options) of the top executives running these companies became inextricably linked to their companies’ stock prices. In 1990, average CEO pay at major corporations was 107 times the pay of the average worker. By 2004, CEO pay had risen to 431 times the pay of the average employee. (If the pay of average workers in the United States had risen as fast as CEO pay, the lowest paid workers would be earning $23.03 an hour, not $5.15 an hour.)2 It was an “accident” waiting to happen, although everyone was making so much money in the market that no one wanted to admit that something could be fundamentally wrong. Experts warned of a bubble—even Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve, cautioned against “irrational exuberance” in the markets.3 But no one could have predicted how bad things would get. In a June 2002 interview on PBS’s Frontline, Arthur Levitt, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, explained how stock prices influence executives and their ethical decision making...
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...Dominique Turpin, IMD "No comment". Those two simple words can shatter a company's reputation and cost it millions in lost sales. So how can you turn a corporate crisis into competitive advantage? n October 2001, news of potentially harmful bacteria found in a McChicken Burger in Buenos Aires, Argentina, spread across South America via television and the internet. Although no one was proved to have been made sick or placed at risk, the incident cost McDonald's several million dollars in lost sales and damaged brand eguity {Turpin, 2002). Effective or ineffective communication during the first hours - or even minutes - of an emergency can have dramatic implications for the image of a company (Dawar and Pillutla, 2000). A study of 2,645 consumers conducted by the advertising agency DDB Needham showed that a company's handling of a crisis ranked as the third most important influence on consumer purchasing, after product quality and handling of complaints {Marketing News, 1995). issue 25. summer 2006 51 When disaster strikes: communicating in a crisis Crisis-management experts are unanimous in concluding that it is not a matter of if a company wiil be faced with a crisis, but when and how weii-prepared executives wili be to weather the storm {Albrecht, 1996). Indeed, no company is immune to a potential crisis created by flawed products, blackmail by unscrupulous consumers, dishonest acts by employees or managers, the sudden death of a senior executive, terrorist acts...
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...can be tricky, especially when it concerns not only a large population but also a well-known public figure such as Mahepmabel Gerstberger. The fact that significant negative side effects caused by a drug manufactured by QRS makes the task of addressing the public even more difficult. Traditional, electronic, and social media each have advantages and disadvantages as a means of communication. Each type of media comes with its own hazards of very easily breaching patient confidentiality. In a crisis situation, as this could become, making the public aware of the possible hazards of taking DEFGH drug, large scale, immediate, interactive forms of media are best. With regard to Mahepmabel Gerstberger, the communications coordinator will only use statements prepared by the movie star’s spokesperson and an attorney to avoid any Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) violations. Traditional Media Traditional media for means of announcement appears to be advantageous in this case that Mahepmabel Gerstberger suffered life-threatening side effects after consuming DEFGH drug for six months. HIPAA has made it difficult to broadcast any information about a specific person with regard to that person’s health information. Traditional media includes television, radio, and print, and the goal is to inform, educate, or influence the public. In 1982, seven people died from cyanide poisoning linked to the drug Tylenol. “Johnson & Johnson, Tylenol’s maker, was praised...
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...Business Review On Crisis Management ... Managing Crisis You Tried to Prevent Norman R. Augustine Originally published in November – December 1995 Reprint # 95602 A Harvard Business Review Paperback Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent Managing the Crisis You Tried to Prevent Norman R. Augustine Executive Summary NEWS REPORTS ANNOUNCING that yet another business has stumbled into a crisis—often without warning and through no direct fault of its management— seem as regular as the tide. And the spectrum of business crises is so wide that it is impossible to list each type. On a single day this year, the Washington Post reported a series of crashes suffered by American Eagle Airlines, the bankruptcy of Orange County, and Intel’s travails with its Pentium microprocessor. Other noteworthy crises have been the Challenger space shuttle explosion, the “incident” at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor, and the series of deaths resulting from cyanide adulteration of Tylenol capsules. Fortunately, argues Norman Augustine, almost every crisis contains within itself the seeds of success as well as the roots of failure. Finding, cultivating, and harvesting that potential success is the essence of crisis management. And the essence of crisis mismanagement is the propensity to take a bad situation and make it worse. Augustine has distinguished six stages of crisis management and makes recommendations for dealing with each: avoiding the crisis, preparing to ...
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...Faculty of Economics Seminar paper on the subject: English 4 Crisis management June, 2012 Crisis management is the process by which an organization deals with a major event that threatens to harm the organization, its stakeholders, or the general public. The study of crisis management originated with the large scale industrial and environmental disasters in the 1980. Three elements are common to most definitions of crisis: (a) a threat to the organization, (b) the element of surprise, and (c) a short decision time. Venette argues that "crisis is a process of transformation where the old system can no longer be maintained." Therefore the fourth defining quality is the need for change. If change is not needed, the event could more accurately be described as a failure or incident. In contrast to risk management, which involves assessing potential threats and finding the best ways to avoid those threats, crisis management involves dealing with threats before, during, and after they have occurred. That is, crisis management is proactive, not merely reactive. It is a discipline within the broader context of management consisting of skills and techniques required to identify, assess, understand, and cope with a serious situation, especially from the moment it first occurs to the point that recovery procedures start. Introduction Crisis management consists of: * Methods used to respond to both...
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...Projects 5-13-2003 Human Resources Practices in Corporate Culture Communication: A Case Study of Johnson & Johnson Flavia Xavier Follow this and additional works at: http://commons.emich.edu/theses Recommended Citation Xavier, Flavia, "Human Resources Practices in Corporate Culture Communication: A Case Study of Johnson & Johnson" (2003). Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations. Paper 4. This Open Access Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Master's Theses, and Doctoral Dissertations, and Graduate Capstone Projects at DigitalCommons@EMU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@EMU. For more information, please contact lib-ir@emich.edu. HUMAN RESOURCES PRACTICES IN CORPORATE CULTURE COMMUNICATION: A CASE STUDY OF JOHNSON & JOHNSON by Flavia Xavier Thesis Submitted to the Department of Management Eastern Michigan University In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE In Human Resources Management & Organizational Development Thesis Committee: Stephanie Newell, PhD, Chair Mary E.Vielhaber, PhD Diana Wong, PhD May 13, 2003 Ypsilanti, Michigan iii DEDICATION To God who has been a blessing my life with my beloved husband, Luis Felipe. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, my sincere gratitude goes to my family for their unconditional love and support. In particular, I thank my parents, Jorge and...
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...collaborative goal setting. A great leader is humble. They really understand that their job is to focus on the goal and not on themselves. Good leaders often compete for credit with the results in order to gain more influence or authority. "To lead people, walk beside them ... As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ... When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves!'" Great leaders don’t operate in a vacuum assuming that they always know best. They know to consider input from everyone impacted by a decision in order to get buy-in from their team, stay grounded and remain objective. Although they retain final say, they’re team will stand behind the decision knowing that they’re input was wholeheartedly weighed and considered. James C. Collins loves to tell the story of Darwin E. Smith, someone most readers have probably never heard of. As Smith was ending two decades at the helm of Kimberly-Clark, maker of Kleenex and other personal-use paper products, he was asked what had driven him, what had he done to make his company so successful over time. "I was just trying to become qualified for the job," Collins quotes Smith as saying. . Communicate as often as possible with people on your staff (one on one communication).Make sure the people that work for you understand that you value their input and contribution and that you are...
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