When Stuart McGuigan began his tenure at Johnson & Johnson, he had already been the CIO at CVS Caremark and at Liberty Mutual. A leader with a master’s degree in cognitive sciences from Yale, McGuigan thinks more than the average leader about how the mind works, and thus how to motivate people. As he notes in my interview with him, learning the culture of an organization is the first order of business for a new leader. Only then can the appropriate changes be made during the window of change afforded a new executive during the early days of his tenure.
McGuigan found that Johnson & Johnson’s culture was neatly codified, and that people truly lived the values set forth more than 70 years ago. Moreover, the focus on accountability and transparency of staff, even encouraging employees to “complain” when there are needs that are unmet worked well with McGuigan’s own leadership style, which is to have anyone, anywhere put their hands up when help is needed or where an issue has been identified so that the fastest path to resolving that issue can be identified. Although McGuigan has roughly 4,000 IT staff around the world, he has stimulated a greater degree of collaboration, and has continued to improve the operation during his tenure. He offers thoughts here on the thing she did in his first 100 days to set the stage for this success.
Peter High: Stuart, Johnson & Johnson is a behemoth of a business, with many divisions across most countries on earth. How is IT organized?
Stuart McGuigan: IT is divided into two categories. There are what we refer to as Group CIOs. These executives and their teams align with our different businesses. They are intimately knowledgeable about the strategies and needs of the divisions they align with, just as they have deep knowledge of our technology capabilities and architecture.
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We also have a shared services organization. This includes functions such as infrastructure, application development, IT Risk and support.
High: This is your third role as CIO. As a result, you have had new beginnings at multiple meaningful companies. In the first 100 days in each assignment, what have you found to be common success factors?
McGuigan: Starting out, I thought it was all about the technology. I would dig deeply into the technology that the company had, and think of ways to optimize it. I came to realize that this was not as fundamental as I had originally thought.
Next, I pursued business objectives. Surely the path to success was through a better understanding of the objectives and strategies that the company pursued. This was critical, and informed far better technology decisions, but I also learned that it should not represent the first course of action in my first 100 days.
I realized it comes down to people. Understanding a company’s culture is really the first order of business, and the most critical success factor. It is important to understand what the business holds most dear from the founders to the current leaders of the company. It is important to understand how IT is perceived by leaders of other divisions of the company. It is also important to understand IT’s culture, whether that has been formally assessed and defined or if it has emerged organically. How well placed is IT to embark on a journey to a new level of performance?
High: With each of your CIO roles, you joined major going concerns. You had predecessors as CIOs, and you inherited a team. How have you thought about respect for the past versus breaking from it?
McGuigan: It is important to acknowledge the work that has come before. A new leader can really sap an organization of its motivation by saying that everything from the past was wrong, and everything in the future will be new – new people, processes, and technologies. Therefore, a nod to good work that has come before is important.
That said, a new CIO is, by definition, a change agent. He or she has small window of opportunity to make changes that are necessary. These will cover people, processes, and technologies, no doubt. So, whereas wholesale changes to all of those are rarely the answer, some changes to each are almost always necessary. It is important to focus on the “how”. This gets to execution. How do we build a team that can execute quickly and flawlessly? This is a primary consideration for me in the early stages of my tenure.
High: I know from our past conversations that the Johnson & Johnson Credo is particularly meaningful to you, as it is to all employees. You mentioned that it serves as a cultural touchstone of sorts as you prepared to join the company. What did it mean to you?
Date: 2/25/2014