pened to me, because if you can bounce back, you can learn a
great deal.”
Mathilde Krim overcame a deeper, more personal obstacle:
“I always felt I was a little different,” the distinguished scientist
and activist told me.
This brings me to what I think of as the Wallenda Factor, a
concept I described in detail in Leaders and so will recap only
briefly here. Shortly after the great aerialist Karl Wallenda fell
to his death in 1978 while doing his most dangerous walk, his
wife, also an aerialist, said, “All Karl thought about for months
before was falling. It was the first time he’d ever thought about
that, and it seemed to me that he put all his energies into not
falling rather than walking the tightrope.” If we think more
about failing at what we’re doing than about doing it, we will
not succeed.
Few other American leaders—none that I talked with—
have experienced anything like the Tylenol crisis that Jim
Burke had to deal with in the early 1980s. It was a calamity
that could have destroyed Johnson & Johnson, but both the
company and Burke emerged stronger and wiser than before.
Burke talked at length about the crisis, and it was clear to me
that at no moment did he think about not succeeding.
As you will recall, several people died from poison that had
been inserted into Tylenol capsules. The story swept across the
country like a fire storm, made more dramatic—and frighten-
ing—by the fact that no one knew who had poisoned the
Tylenol or why or how many packages had been tainted. Burke
took charge immediately. “I knew I had to and I knew I could,”
he said. “I had never been on television in my life, but I under-
stood it, and I understood the public. I had three separate or-
ganizations doing research, one looking at it from an overall
Moving Through Chaos