Comments on: Should J&J Replace The McNeil Management Team?

By: Tired

Tired — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:58:58 +0000

The orders to cut corners come from the powers that be. Working for a Johnson and Johnson company that now relies on LEAN Manufacturing Practices, they believe that quality will prevail with less headcount and more responsibility. “More with less” is what we constantly hear in meetings. I can honestly say that our plant is on a downward spiral and guess what? We don’t make Tylenol or Motrin. We are in suture and needles.

By: mavnick

mavnick — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:20:27 +0000

Yes, it is time to throw Weldon under the bus, back up and drive over him again. It is typical in the pharma/med device industry to see this behavior. They go on and become CEO of other companies and plead ignorance.

By: Can't tell

Can't tell — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:19:01 +0000

This was all conspired by Weldon and Goggins and they should be thrown to the lions. There are 300 employees waiting to talk to you and I am one them. All of the management positions at this plant were on a rotation basis. You did your time and moved on. That’s how they wanted it. That’s why nothing ever got done. I am one of the unfortunate ones that lost my job because of politics, money and greed. They had it coming to them. We basically have been running on a shoe string for years in this cesspool. If you spoke up you payed dearly in the long run. This was nothing more than a conspiracy to shut this plant down. We lost our jobs and all the managers were relocated to other companies, pat them on the back, here’s a promotion. Glad I can finally sleep at night. CEO Weldon, You are nothing but an invertebrate. When are you going to come out from underneath your desk and face the music? You never asked us how are backs were, after slaving for you idiots for the last 25 years, you wimp. I hope all that oil in the gulf washes up on your 8.5 million waterfront property.

By: Leo

Leo — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 23:23:27 +0000

Re: pharmavet’s comment on why no whistleblowers?
I work for one of J&Js competitors and I can tell you we are no better. Quality is #1 until someone finds a problem then the only answer is tell the Superexecs what they want to hear or else face career suicide. It is easy to say someone should stand up just because it is the right thing to do but WB lawsuits take years and if you follow the most recent ones companies are not shy about trying to smear the reputation of the WB. Maybe you are independently wealthy but for anyone not situated facing an extended period of unemployment is a powerful incentive to remain silent. I have chosen to stand up for patient safety but I have suffered in my career growth because of it. That said I will not stop and hold faith for a better company when the market turns around. I will not cast stones at those who are quite because I live the consequences. I hope the Park doctrine is invoked because it is one of two ways this will begin to change. As with the J&J memos released I can tell you the execs knew, they always do. We are told by execs during meetings to discuss serious quality issues, “no minutes will be published” . No record = plausible deniability intact. This is in a right to work state where tape recordings are inadmissible unless announced prior. What would you have these people do?

My answer - Park Doctrine because fines are now a part of doing business and second, vote with you wallet as so many American’s have now figured out. The honeymoon may be over for big pharma/device. People are abandoning prescriptions in record numbers, postponing surgeries and generally becoming picky about who gets their $$$. If the trend continues it will be more powerful than any legal consequence. Unfortunately honest hardworking people will still pay the consequence for the bad exec decisions. Doing nothing does not make it better though.

By: likeitis

likeitis — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 06:56:51 +0000

Zipper:
You are pressing all the right buttons.
You should be working for a consulting company that does not shirk its duty to tell its client *like it is* whether they want to hear it or not.
Big pharma has a choice: clean up the act or continue to pay $$$BBB in fines to the US Gov.
Any bets on J&J breaking Pfizers record on this one?

By: Zipper

Zipper — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 22:36:04 +0000

Pharmavet, I’ve been in the J&J plants long enough and saw failures tossed routinely. Common practice is not acceptable. Your perspective betrays these regulations and is symptomatic of the QM style which brought J&J to where they are now.

By: pharmavet

pharmavet — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 14:56:27 +0000

Maddie i agree with you. I think that the problem is also redundancy of effort. let’s say for example that your manager pre-approved 10 trips to a particular site at an average cost of $2000/trip at the beginning of the budget cycle, for a total of $20,000 for the cycle. The important number here is 20,000, not 10. Now lets say that due to unusual circumstances you have to make 12 trips, but are able to keep the total cost at under $20,00. This change does not need to be approved through 12 layers of management. They only person who needs to approve this is the Finance guy, and is really just a heads up rahther than a sign-off because you’re staying under budget.

Also, if you happen to go over budget, the Finance guy can make cuts in other areas that don’t require senior management approval. This is all very transparent if the bosses know how to work with spreadheets. Unfortunately, for many of them if you mention “Excel”, they think that you’re referring to a performance metric.

By: Maddie

Maddie — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:52:17 +0000

I was a sales rep in another company and would say the Pharma industry has too many managers at all levels. As they say, “there are too many chefs in the kitchen”. Although, you do need to hire “effective and successful” managers at the top that are credible. The way to do that is to train them to be successful leaders and managers. I read a book on “the future of management” and the successful companies now have less managers and more efficient ways to manage companies. Not knowing all of the info on J&J, it appears from comments made from previous employees,employees were not able to freely communicate their contributions to meetings which shows management problems exisited.

By: M. Black

M. Black — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:54:34 +0000

I do agree with you about TQM. What needs to be in place is a holistic approach. But when the upper eschalon speaks to the entire gaggle of shareholders whose strategy is keep J&J for the long term, as a top 10 (m guessing)

In terms of the other point, I also feel for the 300 laid off. I myself am not working. It’s trying to implement, and takes pure employees that genuinely care what they supposed to, especially when something goes wrong, and the company tries to blame it on you. Don’t eff up. You can’t use CEPA to cover your heiny when you eff up. Document it, investigate it, propose CEPA to your manager

What I really meant was the ones that did no wrong, or did wrong and ammended the situation through the proper cGMP channels, including finding a root cause, presenting and put a CAPA (fixes it). Then monitoring the siituation over a reasonable time period and eventually, the puzzle is ammended. Most companies so a relatively good job, but the most serious problems are swept under the rug .

It’s not easy, especially when there are absurdley high unemployment

~ M. Black

By: pharmavet

pharmavet — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 19:11:30 +0000

There must have been a lot of deadwood at Ft. Wasshington since the plant was shut down and 300 workers were fired. Seriously, I believe in the Quality approach by Peter Drucker. Some of his quotes:

-”Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality”.

-”The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said”.

-”There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all”.

-”Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information”.

I also happen to believe that companies should practice Total Quality Management, per Deming and Drucker, acording to principle that everyone has a stake in the quality outcome of a process. That also means that anyone down to the lowest grade technician can (and in my judgement should) report violations when they are spotted. In Japanese TQM model (pre-Toyata), any assembly line worker had the power to shut down production if he/she spotted a potential problem. This was the implicit, if not explicit responsibility of every McNeil employee, down to the last worker. Instead, to paraphrase Drucker, there was a conspiracy of silence.

Feel free to disagree, but I feel little sympathy for those at Ft. Washington who lost their jobs. They simply shirked their reponsibilities, from top to bottom.