Before: The Gray-Area Trap. After: A Clear Moral Compass. Here’s How.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 09:00:00 -0400

Before: The Gray-Area Trap. After: A Clear Moral Compass. Here’s How.

In the autumn of 1982, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson woke up to a worst-case scenario that still keeps executives awake at night. Seven people in Chicago had died after swallowing Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. The poison wasn’t planted in J&J’s factories—it happened somewhere down the distribution chain, in some store, at the hand of a disturbed outsider nobody could have predicted. And yet the phone on James Burke’s nightstand kept ringing.

Organizational Culture on Rational America

Before: The Gray-Area Trap. After: A Clear Moral Compass. Here’s How.

Before: The Gray-Area Trap. After: A Clear Moral Compass. Here’s How.