Johnson & Johnson Brazil

In January 2000, Juan Antonio Justino received the responsibility of performing a very tough task: Improving the performance of Johnson & Johnson Brazil, which had regressed from being a highly profitable business region of the world, to be underperforming and losing market share and leadership in the region.
This opportunity represented several challenges for Justino, it was not just aboutimproving the sales of the company or the bottom line, it had a lot to do with restructuring the whole company, change the culture and at the same time achieve the financial success the business required.
To start analyzing how Justino approached this problem, first we have to understand how the culture of Johnson & Johnson is. This company, founded in 1886 in the United States, is aworldwide leader in the manufacturing and distribution of consumer goods. Since the beginning, it has had a good reputation with the population in general, with a prestige for good corporate practices and the creation of its famous credo, which is a statement to the responsibilities that the company has to its customers, employees, communities and shareholders. This commitment to its stakeholders producedseveral recognitions for being one of the countries’ most admired companies.
While implementing his turnaround plan, Justino has to take into account the corporate DNA of Johnson & Johnson. It could not be a slash and burn approach (Hall & Khurana, 2003), which consists on performing massive firings and restructuring of a corporation. This approach was popularised by Al Dunlap in the1990’s, and contrasted directly with the Johnson & Johnson credo of having a responsibility to every stakeholder. Dunlap would despise that term and would focus only on profit maximisation and stockholder value creation (Hall & Khurana, 2003), neglecting the interest of the employees or the communities where the company was located.
Following its company philosophy, Justino took an organicapproach to change, carefully planning every move before firing employees and only doing so when a restructuring of the sales force or other fundamental business unit needed a change.
To promote transformation in this institution, we could hypothesise that Justino could have implemented a series of catalytic mechanisms. To do this, we can propose a series of possible BHAG (Big Hairy, AudaciousGoals) [ (Collins, 1999) ]:
1. Achieve a level of waste reduction comparable to Toyota.
2. Customer satisfaction at any cost.
3. Sustained sales growth of 20% per year.
Justino also seems to recognize the following factors that lend to producing sustainable revitalization:
1. Employee Engagement. Johnson & Johnson linked employees fully into the process of owning businesschallenges.
2. Leading from a Different Place. Justino gave ownership to employees to maintain involvement.
3. Instilling Mental Disciplines. To do this, Justino changed the way people behave and sustained that behavior
It seems that while planning on how to solve the situation of Johnson and Johnson Brazil, Justino inadvertently or perhaps with full knowledge, applied several of the conceptsof Kottler’s eight step model:
1. Establish a sense of urgency. Justino fully knew that he was under time constraints. He had been appointed at the beginning of April to his new position in Brazil and had to deliver a turnaround business plan in May, expecting to start delivering results by the end of that year. He transmitted this. To create a climate for change he created several clear keyprinciples for the leaders of the organization to follow:

a) Bring people to the centre of decisions.
b) Reorganise the price strategy.
c) Recover the advertising investment.
d) Reorganise processes.
e) Review the organisation structure.

2. Build guiding teams. To achieve change in the organisation, Justino needed the help of the people already working in J&J...