I ever met. He’d been a prosecuting attorney, and he acted like
one. What it came down to was that if we were absolutely
straight with them, we’d do fine. And we did. After the show,
we did some research, and the people who saw it were five
times more apt to buy our products than those who didn’t see
it. I did ‘Donahue,’ too. He was very supportive, very helpful.
“I think it all worked because I was convinced that we had
tremendous strengths as a company that we’d never used be-
fore. And there wasn’t a doctor in the country we didn’t call to
ask about Tylenol. And we had everything we needed inter-
nally, including the moral strength. We put together the new
packaging overnight practically, when it would have normally
taken two years. But most important was the fact that we put
the public first. We never hid anything from them and were as
honest as we knew how to be. It just confirmed my belief that if
you play it straight, it works.
“I lived on junk foods and about three or four hours’ sleep a
night, but it never seemed to bother me. I think it’s true that
the body creates the chemistries it needs to deal with emergen-
cies. I also think I was sustained by the fact that I knew we were
doing well. I was convinced we were going to save the brand,
and we did.”
Burke appeared on the cover of Fortune in June 1988, as part
of a story on innovators—a highly deserved tribute.
Our leaders transform experience into wisdom and, in turn,
transform the cultures of their organizations. In this way, soci-
ety as a whole is transformed. It is neither a tidy nor necessarily
logical process, but it’s the only one we have.
Lynn Harrell, one of our great cellists and a former USC fac-
ulty member, once wrote in Ovation magazine: “It is, alas, al-
most impossible to teach magic. In my class at USC, twelve
Moving Through Chaos