Leaders as teachers

T+D, March, 2004 by Ed Betof

In 2000, BD celebrated its 103rd birthday. The year began with our new CEO Edward J. Ludwig assuming office in a carefully planned succession. Ed Ludwig became CEO when his predecessor, Clateo Castellini, retired at the end of 1999. In January 2000, BD was, as it remains today, a proud medical technology company. BD is steeped in a rich history of progressive business growth, and is also known as a concerned and generous corporate citizen. In 2000, BD had maintained its tradition as a company with a strong values system whose associates joined the firm and typically stayed for a long time. Despite that backdrop, our company was facing difficult, uncertain times.

Like many other organizations, BD found itself competing in an external environment that looked very different from the global health-care world that it had helped shape during the previous century. Markets and regulations were changing quickly, as were customer buying patterns. Our historically strong BD brands were able to only partially fulfill what would have to be a stronger product portfolio to fuel the growth that our shareholders, Wall Street, and our own leaders and associates expected. During 2000, our stock had dropped significantly following results that hadn't met analysts' expectations. Such was the challenge faced by Ed Ludwig and his leadership team. There was much work to be done.

There was also much from which to build. A century of growth was a function of great dedication by the approximately 25,000 current BD leaders and associates throughout the world and the many thousands who preceded us. That dedication and work ethic have never waned and remain embedded in the fiber of our company. That's also true of our strong values system. During the 1990s, a worldwide process that confirmed our BD values was facilitated by BD leaders and high-potential associates involving input from every corner of the BD world. This work distilled BD's rich past and its projected future into four values that every BD associate today understands, and by which we are expected to live at work. The crystallization of these values came from deeply examining how our people interacted and worked over the past century. That information was then blended with a look towards the challenges of the future.

BD's four values:

* We accept personal responsibility.

* We treat each other with respect.

* We always seek to improve.

* We do what is right.

Defying gravity

As BD moved through 2000, the good news was that our committed, creative associates and leaders--combined with a strong corporate work ethic, rock-solid value system, and century of incremental growth through products that make a difference in human health--were the building blocks for entering the new century.

However, as is so often the case, a company's habits and history are simultaneously its blessings and its curse. Habits serve organizations, as they do individuals, by making things familiar and usually easier than they would otherwise be. There's an expression that "gravity never has a bad day." Left unchecked, organizational habits will gravitate to a comfortable steady state that rarely leads to excellence. These same organizational habits and ways of working are also hard to change, whether or not they serve you well.

The new century would call for BD to do what author Jim Collins refers to in Built to Last as "preserving the core while stimulating progress." We'd have to use the best of our past ways of working--our existing habits--while forming new and better ways to get things done. As a company, we would need to challenge ourselves to change significantly--essentially, to defy organization gravity. We'd need to change those ways of working that were inefficient and burdens to our progress. As we entered this new century, we would be tested. The ability to learn and demonstrate many new and different capabilities would be required of all of our leaders and associates. These fundamental changes in our company would need to take place within a world and competitive environment that had become more complex and more challenging than we had ever experienced.

With that realization, a clear vision and a new leadership platform for the next decade became paramount. New products and marketing platforms had to be developed and successfully launched. Our manufacturing and

transactional work processes would need to become much more efficient, leaner, and capable of continuous improvement. New skills, knowledge, much greater speed, and personal and organizational agility had become essential. In some cases, we were ready; in other cases, we were not.

The Genesis

Several examples will help illustrate the challenge we faced four years ago. Each provides insight into the enormously important, complex, and rapidly changing talent management demands on our company--whether in new work processes and products, expanded regional growth, emerging technologies, or many other growth areas.

BD leadership committed itself to the global, enterprise-wide Genesis project. This consisted of the design, installation, and adoption of new SAP-based information and work systems that would link businesses, regions, functions, and processes in our company like never before. Among other challenges, this also meant that we were essentially reinventing our supply and value chain processes. We chose to become a process-oriented organization to complement our business, regional, and functional organizational structures. That had tremendous implications for our workforce around the world and involved unprecedented resource, talent, and skill demands within our company. During this same time, BD would pioneer the use of a new generation of medical devices designed to significantly decrease both patients' and health-care workers' risk of injury and disease when using injectable products and surgical sharps.