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is about taking risk. Keep doing it. Don’t ever make these mistakes again,” warned Johnson, “but please make many other mistakes. That’s what we’re paying you for.”
    Burke moved up in the company, initially focusing on marketing and advertising. In 1961, Johnson & Johnson formed a new division called the Robert Wood Johnson Company. Burke was put in charge of this new division, which handled the marketing of Johnson & Johnson’s baby products and many of its proprietary products, including Tylenol.
    Burke began running Tylenol ads on television in the 1960s. In the 1970s, he suggested to senior J&J executives that Tylenol, originally available only from physicians and hospitals, should be sold as a consumer product. At that time, Tylenol was tremendously successful in the hospital setting, but that success had not translated to the OTC market, primarily because the product was more expensive than other OTC analgesics.
    In 1975, while Burke was President of Johnson & Johnson, he got his chance to take Tylenol into the mass market with the full backing of Johnson & Johnson’s vast resources. Bristol Myers had just introduced Datril with a series of advertisements promoting that drug as being much less expensive than Tylenol while having the same ingredients. Burke convinced J&J Chairman, Richard Sellars , that they should meet the new competition head-on. Burke then began aggressively marketing Tylenol directly to consumers. A large annual Tylenol advertising budget, which grew to $85 million by 1982, helped the company increase its share of the OTC pain-reliever market from 4% in 1976 to 37% in 1982.
    In 1976, Burke was appointed the chief executive officer (CEO) of Johnson & Johnson and chairman of the company’s Board of Directors, positions he held until his retirement in 1989. Six years into Burke’s tenure as CEO, the Tylenol crisis erupted, spawning his legacy as the master of crisis management. Tylenol was bringing in $450 million in annual revenue at the time, and the brand accounted for 15% to 20% of Johnson & Johnson’s profits. No other J&J product generated anywhere near the revenue and profit that Tylenol did. Following Donoghue’s Thursday morning news conference at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office in Chicago; J&J executives acted quickly to protect that revenue stream. Within hours of learning about the Tylenol poisonings, James Burke already had his men in place at the scene of the crime.

 
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All of Burke’s Men
     
    While J&J executives put a crisis management team in place at corporate headquarters in New Jersey on Thursday morning, police cruisers in Arlington Heights and Elk Grove Village roamed the streets with loudspeakers blaring warnings of unexplained deaths possibly attributed to Tylenol. Some Chicago-based grocers had already removed Tylenol products from their shelves. Jewel Companies ordered their stores to pull the products on Thursday morning. Walgreens ordered its stores in the Midwest to remove Tylenol from their shelves at 9:15 a.m. and expanded the order nationwide at 11:15 a.m. Most retailers nationwide stopped selling only the Tylenol from Lot MC2880, which was the lot number on both the Janus and Kellerman Tylenol bottles, the only ones known to contain cyanide at the time.
    Initially, Johnson & Johnson did not recall any Tylenol capsules. Instead, the company faxed mailgrams to retailers and wholesalers, assuring them that the problem rested in Chicago and was limited to Extra Strength Tylenol capsules from just one lot. By noon Thursday, J&J had faxed nearly half-a-million of these mailgrams to physicians, hospitals and wholesalers.
    Buddy Willis, the owner of a distribution business in Virginia that sold about $35,000 to $40,000 worth of Tylenol products per year received one of the mailgrams from McNeil, stating that only Extra Strength Tylenol capsules in the Chicago area from Lot MC2880 were affected. The mailgram read in part, “We