• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, October 2, 2012

James E. Burke, a marketing guy who became chairman and CEO of Johnson & Johnson and, in “retirement,” chairman of the Partnership for a Drug-Free America, conducted his life in a way that makes strangers wish they had known them and friends and colleagues feel blessed that they did. He died Friday in New Jersey at 87.

Burke’s list of business and civic accomplishments runs long, and President Bill Clinton draped the U.S.’s highest civilian award, The Presidential Medal of Freedom, around his neck in 2000 in recognition of them. Revenue more than tripled to $9 billion, profits rose nearly fivefold and the company expanded into 54 countries annually during his stewardship -- “all while focusing on meeting significant unmet needs of patients and consumers around the world,” according to the J&J website. 

But what Burke will most be remembered for at J&J -– as well as in in business school classrooms and among crises management specialists -- is his deft handling of the company’s Tylenol crises in 1982 and 1986.

“That taught corporations a lesson about candor,” John F. Welch Jr., former chairman and CEO of General Electric tells the Wall Street Journal’s Katie Thomas. “It was a huge legacy to leave: When you have a problem, deal with it openly, up front.” 

Burke’s son, also named James, was among those who tell Thomas that his father “thrived on lively debate.” 

“Three days into the first Tylenol poisonings in 1982, he traveled to Vermont to visit his son for parents’ weekend at Middlebury College,” Thomas writes, and wound up taking eight college kids out to dinner. “He sat and he asked each one of them, ‘If you were me, what would you do?’” the younger Burke recalls. “He asked everybody he could think of what would be the right thing to do, and then took what made sense to him and his values.” 

Burke's prompt and forthright response and action “bolstered J&J's reputation among consumers and were studied by business-school students,” writes Jonathan D. Rockoff in the New York Times. It also enabled the brand to recapture its 35% market share within a year (and forever changed the face of pharmaceutical packing, to the chagrin of those with fumbling fingers). 

"I consider it to be a model of corporate crisis management,” Harvard Business School’s Stephen Greyser tells the Times. 

“He spoke the truth and that was astonishingly liberating for everyone who heard it because we have all become so accustomed to public figures telling less than the truth or lying,” Richard S. Tedlow, a Harvard business professor, wrote in Denial, a book about corporate leadership, according toBloomberg Businessweek’s Alex Nussbaum.

Burke served in the Navy in World War II, then graduated from Holy Cross and Harvard Business School. He became a sales rep for Procter & Gamble in 1949 and joined J&J as a product director in 1953. Burke devoted himself to the Partnership for a Drug Free America after he left J&J in 1989.

“Burke helped make drug abuse a high-profile national concern when the issue was just starting to gain traction after First Lady Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ campaign,” according to an AP story in the Washington Post. “At the peak, about $1 million a day worth of free ads against drug abuse were running, said Steve Dnistrian, who worked with Burke for 14 years at the partnership.”

The advertising industry also lost one of its giants, Stephen Frankfurt, on Friday. The former creative director at Young & Rubicam is credited with breakthrough campaigns such as Eastern Airlines’ "The Wings of Man," "the Excedrin headache” and Lay's "Bet you can't eat just one." He died in New York at 80. Frankfurt was “one of the real Mad Men of the ad world,” as the headline in the San Francisco Chronicle puts it.

"Possessing a strong design sensibility, he embraced Bill Bernbach’s creative ethos of using simple, emotional messages,” Noreen O’Leary writes in Adweek. Indeed, Bloomberg Businessweek’s Laurence Arnold relates a tale told in Andrew Cracknell’s  The Real Mad Men: The Renegades of Madison Avenue and the Golden Age of Advertising.

“A spot with no words at all was unheard of then, but it didn’t stop Frankfurt; for Johnson & Johnson he shot a baby in close-up from the mother’s point of view rather than the conventional posed setup, making it more personal and emotional,” Cracknell says. “He used stop-motion and borrowed from contemporary art --  he saw no barriers to where you could go to make a commercial.”

Hollywood loved him. “Rosemary’s Baby,” “Network” and “Alien” are among the 55 movies for which he created campaigns and/or titles.

Frankfurt also served as president of Y&R for a few years (1968 – 1971) and later was creative director at Bozell, Jacobs, Kenyon & Eckhardt; chairman of Frankfurt Balkind Partners; and vice chairman of Partners & Shevack. About his tenure as Y&R’s youngest-ever president, Frankfurt evidently felt that the distinction got old fast. 

“I never had a frustrating day in that company -- until I became president,” he once reflected.