win all of them over, make them work with me instead of
against me, and that’s what I did.
“I think the first thing one has to do [in setting out to change
a culture] is get people on one’s side and show them where you
want to take the company. Trust is vital. People trust you when
you don’t play games with them, when you put everything on
the table and speak honestly to them. Even if you aren’t very
articulate, your intellectual honesty comes through, and people
recognize that and respond positively.
“I think you have trust in a man who has vision and can make
you see that his vision is the right thing to do. I believe that this
company can be one of the dominant financial institutions in the
Pacific basin, and I want my successor, whoever he is, to have
that vision. I don’t want him to manage, I want him to lead.”
Jim Burke found much that was good at Johnson & Johnson,
but he found some gaps, too. “I had a real vision. I thought I
saw what the future was going to be, and I understood what we
needed in order to achieve that future. I began to see what was
here in terms of a value system, and what wasn’t here in terms
of understanding sophisticated marketing principles. There
was a kind of vacuum.
“The environment at Johnson & Johnson helps people learn
to lead because we have a high degree of decentralization.
General Johnson utilized a system of product managers be-
cause he saw that as institutions became larger and larger, it
was more and more important to set up smaller entities within
the whole in order to get things done. He wanted to find that
unit within the whole that would liberate creative energy by
permitting decision making.
“I’ve always operated on the assumption that creative confu-
sion and conflict are healthy. Sometimes I take the opposite
Getting People on Your Side