LGF

I offer this remembrance in honor of Lawrence G. Foster, the man who hired me at Johnson & Johnson, and who passed away on October 17, 2013.

The carpet was a deep green, the desk a rich wood, and the man behind it was tall and imposing.  He stuck out his hand and said two words to me that I would never hear again in my Johnson & Johnson career:

“You’re early.”

His name was Lawrence G. Foster, and he was director of Public Relations, the man who built the PR function at Johnson & Johnson and influenced generations of PR professionals both inside and outside of J&J.

He fired off questions and I must have answered them well enough, because he practically offered me a job on the spot.  Instead, he told me to make an appointment with what was then called Personnel, where I had a formal interview and a job offer.  It was May, 1972.  He hired me on a Monday and I started the next day.  I was 21 years old, wearing the only dress I owned and I had no idea I would be taking a job working for the preeminent PR practitioner of his generation at the best company in the world. 

Larry Foster – or Mr. Foster, as we all called him, in much the same way Mary Richards called Lou Grant Mr. Grant – was, at his core, an editor.  There wasn’t a piece of copy he couldn’t make better, more concise, more to the point.  In fact, he’d think that sentence was redundant.  Whether in his distinctive script (we all learned to forge his full signature and his initials after a while) or whether he called you in to tell you how to make it better, he always improved what you’d done.

He was also a true leader.  You knew exactly who was in charge the minute he walked into the room.  He had an amazing eye for talent (of course I say that since, after all, he hired me!).  The core of people he hired before I started and during my tenure at Johnson & Johnson all stayed together for about 25 years.  He had a knack for identifying people who could match his standards.  Perfection was not an aspiration if you worked for Larry Foster.  It was an expectation.  And the people he hired worked diligently, often behind the scenes, to meet that standard.

I fear that compromises in corporate offices around the US have led to the lowering of standards, and those lower standards have become acceptable.  Frankly, that’s one of the reasons I retired.  I couldn’t lower the standards instilled in me by my parents, my education and my first boss.  The world needs more people like Larry Foster, imposing their will, raising the level of performance and making the right decisions for the right reasons.  In doing so, they also enhance the reputation of companies like Johnson & Johnson.  By every measurable standard – polls in The Wall Street Journal, surveys in Fortune magazine -- Johnson & Johnson remains one of the most admired and beloved companies in the US, in no small measure because of the reputation built by its senior leaders during that era. 

Mr. Foster was on a sabbatical in 1982, finishing his book on the legendary Chairman of Johnson & Johnson, the late General Robert Wood Johnson, when the TYLENOL crisis hit.  Seven people in the Chicago area had purchased the analgesic in local stores and died from cyanide poisoning.  Was it a manufacturing issue?  A tampering incident?  No one had ever seen anything like this event, and it became the number one news story of the year.  Larry Foster came back to the office to help guide the company through what became a textbook example of crisis management and corporate social responsibility.  The case now is taught in graduate school in places like Harvard, but to be there during the crisis was probably the defining moment of my career – witnessing history, and the confluence of doing what’s right for the public and for the shareholders.  Needless to say, Johnson & Johnson survived, its reputation not only in tact, but enhanced, thanks to the work of CEO James E. Burke and his right hand man, Larry Foster.  Years later, people still talk about the incident and Mr. Foster’s inspiring influence on the decisions the company made.

Not that it was all serious.  Our group, despite the late hours, the huge meetings for which we handled everything literally from soup to the nuts who showed up, worked hard and laughed often.  And there were times you could just tell he got a kick out of all of us, a cohesive group, each working away at our jobs, trying to live up to his expectations of us and hopes for us.  

He could be kind and paternal—or intimidating and tough.  All these many years later, the “girls” he hired are still friends, and we still refer to ourselves as the “Foster Children.”  We couldn’t wear pants to work (this was not, as you would imagine, applicable to the men in the department), and you were expected to show up and work until the job was done.  Once, when I broke my leg badly and had a cast on it for 8 weeks, I had to go to his office.  He wasn’t happy with the boat anchor that might slow me down.  In fact, the only thing he said to me was, “Don’t put your foot on my coffee table,” as if I had the temerity to even consider it.

Another time we were engaged in rehearsals for a worldwide management conference at the Park Lane Hotel in New York.  I worked with each executive on his presentation, running through speeches and rehearsals all day and noting changes needed for each one, until about 4:00, when I finally had to take a bathroom break.  Mr. Foster glared at me as if I had committed some unforgivable transgression.  The show must go on, I agreed, but I had to go first.  He had no choice but to wait, since I was the only one who knew every slide in every speech, and I was responsible for every change.  He was a tough and demanding boss¸ and his work ethic rubbed off on every one of us who worked for him, making us better at what we did.  I’m convinced it made us the best department in the company.

Every day at lunch he would take what we now call a “power nap.”  He would have his lunch delivered by the Executive Dining Room and then lie on his couch until 1:30.  God forbid you were on “phone duty” and someone important was looking for him.  Occasionally, one of the women would have to go and wake him, either to take a call or because his internal alarm clock failed to go off.  No one did it without considerable trepidation. 

My interest in photography developed when LGF (as we referred to him) stuck me in a dark room with a couple of thousand slides to try to make a presentation on all of Johnson & Johnson’s facilities around the world.  He would later tease me that, because I could readily identify each facility, I could memorize the numbers on boxcars as trains passed by.

When I was with Johnson & Johnson for just a year, Mr. Foster appointed me editor of a management publication that, ironically, I was too junior to receive.  Later, he trusted me to build the company’s worldwide video network and direct video programs.  Luckily, I learned fast.  One of our first productions in our new studio was a video with his good friend, Joe Paterno.  I recall a life-sized cardboard cutout of Jo Pa standing in his office.  Scared the hell out of me when I walked in there one day.  LGF was a long-standing supporter and served as president of the Alumni Association at his beloved Penn State.  See the influence he had on me?  I figured if he could uphold the Credo in spirit and action with his volunteer work and financial support, I could do the same for my alma mater.  Today, following his example, I serve as president of the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College.

Between Larry Foster and his successor, Bill Nielsen, I was given opportunities to do things no one had done before.  There was a lot of on the job training since I had no role models to follow.  But I always appreciated their faith in me.

I’d get called into Mr. Foster’s office often, and I never knew precisely what he wanted when I would arrive, so I was prepared for anything.  Sometimes when we’d finish he’d say to me, “Are there any more like you at home?”  That’s when I figured out I must have done something right. 

Sometimes being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference in the world.  I was lucky enough to have had that experience in May of 1972, when I met the man who would hire me and change my life.  His retirement marked the end of one era, and his passing marks another. 

His faithful assistant, Karen Kier, was kind enough to let me know that Mr. Foster was not doing well and would probably appreciate hearing from me.  I sat down and wrote to him immediately, thanking him for getting my career started and telling him how much he meant to me – among other things.  She also told me that she had been cleaning his old files and had just found a letter that I wrote to him when I retired.  I wasn’t surprised that he had kept it, because I also have every note he ever wrote to me.

Thanks, Mr. Foster.