Was at a presentation of Johnson & Johnson and of course, with in the first two slides came their credo.
For those of you does not what the J&J credo is - I sentence you to be deepfried in J&J baby oil 'ennai kopparai' - here is a crash course on their credo. The credo is like a mission statement for J&J and was written 130 years back by the founder. It is famous for putting their customers - doctors, nurses and patients - before shareholder.
This presenter was talking about how every action they have taken in the last 130 years ties back to the credo and that it has not changed at all. Don't get me wrong, I admire J&J as a company but I can't help thinking is it good bad to follow somethin for 130 years and more so because it is 130 years old and unchanged? Can you live by a document that was written a century back. Has not the world changed since then?
Sure we live by a lot of documents that are written a lonnnnng time back! US Constitution, ten commandments or Baghavat Gita. I do agree the people who wrote them had a lot of wisdom but should we not give to the genearations that came by since then, a chance.
what if the people who wrote them were conditioned by their biases. For workplace discrimination claims in US, 'a communist party member' is still a legal defense. (remnants from the McCarthy era). I am pretty sure a lot of Indians think the founding fathers were wrong about religion based civil codes, reservation systems or property rights in Kashmir.
How do we correct these? I dont want to correct every document that is more than ten years old. But I would be comfortable knowing there is a mechanism to correct this and that historic errors do not have to accumulate and carry over.
Post Script: To J&J's credit they did revisit their credo at least once. They included fathers as one of their customer groups - when talking about baby care - because men's involvement in baby care has become more active since it was written.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment