Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

The Johnson & Johnson dynasty: A headache-inducing biography of the Johnson family

Aug 10th 2013 |From the print edition

Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty. By Jerry Oppenheimer. St Martin’s Press; 496 pages; $27.99 and £18.99.Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“CRAZY RICH” ought to be good. It has a bestselling author, Jerry Oppenheimer. It has a fascinating subject, the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, the company that invented Band-Aids and now peddles everything from painkillers to antipsychotics. The Johnson scions include drug addicts, a sculptor and the owner of the New York Jets football team. Yet somehow this book is unreadable. The problem is hardly the raw material. Robert Wood Johnson, the son of a poor Pennsylvania farmer, founded Johnson & Johnson with his brothers in 1886. After his death in 1910, his brother James led the company’s expansion during the first world war, creating the plasters and gauze used by soldiers at the front. Robert Wood Johnson’s son, named after his father, may have been the company’s most forceful leader. He steered it through the Depression and oversaw its initial public offering in 1944. He served in the army for a few months during the second world war and called himself “General Johnson” for the rest of his life. His son Bobby (Robert Wood Johnson III), was the firm’s president for just four years before the General helped oust him in 1965. They were the last Johnsons to be in the family business. The book’s many other characters include Evangeline, the General’s sister. She had three husbands and, if Mr Oppenheimer is to be believed, a lesbian lover. There is the strange case of J. Seward Johnson junior, whose wife shot an investigator hired to track her. There is Keith Johnson, who parked his BMW on a beach, dropped acid and then watched the tide carry away his car. The most delectable titbits involve Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, who owns the Jets and was a leading supporter of Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate last year. His public persona has been rather staid. Mr Oppenheimer paints him as a dolt. He earned poor marks at the University of Arizona, hardly a bastion of academic rigour. When drunk once, he fell off a bridge and severely injured his back. As a young man in Florida, he courted a business partner by supposedly saying, “My dad told me that I have to learn business from somebody who made their own money without inheriting it, and preferably he should be a Jew.” All this should make for juicy reading. But “Crazy Rich” is all guilt and no pleasure. The sources for this “unauthorised biography” are patchy. Mr Oppenheimer’s long sentences are packed with clichés. The narration ranges from sloppy to preposterous. Must he compare the Johnsons to a Greek tragedy twice in two pages, or to the Kennedys even more frequently? When Woody Johnson’s daughter criticised a family member in a tabloid, Mr Oppenheimer opines that she “was now considered a tabloid terrorist, and her act of vengeance their own personal 9/11”. The Johnsons have had many sad stories, including drug overdoses and fatal accidents, not to mention ugly fights over inheritance. One might think this would inspire sympathy, or at least greater interest in its subjects. Yet “Crazy Rich” arouses few feelings other than the desire for it to end. Best then not to start it in the first place.

Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Hardcover

by Jerry Oppenheimer  (Author)

From the founders of the international health-care behemoth Johnson & Johnson in the late 1800s to the contemporary Johnsons of today, such as billionaire New York Jets owner Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, all is revealed in this scrupulously researched, unauthorized biography by New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer. Often compared to the Kennedy clan because of the tragedies and scandals that had befallen both wealthy and powerful families, Crazy Rich, based on scores of exclusive, candid, on-the-record interviews, reveals how the  dynasty’s vast fortune was both intoxicating and toxic through the generations of a family that gave the world Band-Aids and Baby Oil. At the same time, they’ve been termed perhaps the most dysfunctional family in the fortune 500. Oppenheimer is the author of biographies of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Hiltons and Martha Stewart, among other American icons. Read more of this post

140-Year-Old Business Advice That Still Holds Up Today; Some work has inherent value. If you are involved with a business that produces something for the benefit of the community or society at large, you are adding something positive to the world. In return, your compensation may not be spectacular, but if you can make a living and save for the future, you’ll likely feel better about your life than if you’re involved in an occupation that takes something away from the world.

140-Year-Old Business Advice That Still Holds Up Today

LUKE LANDES, CONSUMERISM COMMENTARY AUG. 9, 2013, 4:55 PM 2,098 2

There may be only about six stories in personal finance, but those stories seem to endure the passing of time. Good storytellers can breathe new life into the same old financial advice, and great communicators can introduce world-weary concepts to those who might need to hear them for the first time. While looking for information about a town in upstate New York, I came across a gazetteer written in 1871 for Saratoga County. It’s a booklet, digitized for aiding online research, containing a business directory of several towns within that county. Like a telephone directory, the book contains names and addresses of residents, although unlike a telephone directory, there are no phone numbers. The book is more than just a directory, though. The gazetteer offers historical accounts of the towns covered as well as general information a household in 1871 might need, such as a guide to the decimal system of measures, “recipes” for home remedies for common ailments, and of course, advertisements. (See one such advertisement, for pills “to prevent female irregularities,” reproduced here.) And particularly interesting was a section titled, “How to Succeed in Business.” Several pages in the book are dedicated to help readers make good decisions with their labors, their interpersonal relationships, and the management of their money. There’s nothing particularly special about this. Financial self-help guides and business advice have been published for longer than this country has been in existence, but I enjoyed this discovery and thought it would be worth sharing. Here are some excerpts, first on being an upright citizen in business. Read more of this post

The Gorilla Lurking Where We Can’t See It; A study of radiologists shows that when we pay careful attention to one thing we become literally blind to others—even startling ones like gorillas

August 9, 2013, 8:34 p.m. ET

The Gorilla Lurking Where We Can’t See It

ALISON GOPNIK

Imagine that you are a radiologist searching through slides of lung tissue for abnormalities. On one slide, right next to a suspicious nodule, there is the image of a large, threatening gorilla. What would you do? Write to the American Medical Association? Check yourself into the schizophrenia clinic next door? Track down the practical joker among the lab technicians? In fact, you probably wouldn’t do anything. That is because, although you were staring right at the gorilla, you probably wouldn’t have seen it. That startling fact shows just how little we understand about consciousness. Read more of this post

Are Startups Too Busy to be Creative?

Are Startups Too Busy to be Creative?

Aug 7, 2013 · 700 views

Alex Mayyasi. 

When a fan asked Ernest Hemingway how to start writing a novel, he recommended cleaning the fridge.  It was not an insult. It alluded to the weird way that our best ideas seem to pop into our head unbidden when we engage in a mindless task.  In an opinion piece for the New York Times, essayist and cartoonist Tim Kreider once described what he calls “The Busy Trap.” Differentiating between people busy with multiple minimum wage jobs and those who self-impose busyness by taking on ever more responsibilities and activities, he questions what it means when people exclaim “I’m so busy!” Read more of this post

All the Presidents’ Vacation Reading; Can a modern president hope to read as much as Adams, Lincoln and Truman did?

August 9, 2013, 8:48 p.m. ET

All the Presidents’ Vacation Reading

Can a modern president hope to read as much as Adams, Lincoln and Truman did?

TEVI TROY

This month, for a fourth summer, President Barack Obama will vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. What will he read during his down time? That, too, has become something of a summer ritual. On his two most recent trips, Mr. Obama has made a pilgrimage to the Bunch of Grapes bookstore to pick up some books, the names of which, inevitably, find their way into the media, where they are dissected and debated by his allies and critics alike. Mr. Obama’s summer choices have included Daniel Woodrell’s “The Bayou Trilogy” and Ward Just’s “Rodin’s Debutante” in 2011 and Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” in 2010. For authors, the presidential imprimatur provides priceless publicity. “Freedom,” in particular, caught a wave. At the time of Mr. Obama’s visit to Martha’s Vineyard in 2010, the novel had yet to be officially released, but Mr. Obama obtained an early copy from the store, adding to the book’s cachet and, as Politico’s Karin Tanabe wrote, setting the “Web atwitter.” The book shot up the best-seller lists. Only Oprah, it seems, provides a bigger sales bump. Read more of this post

The wit and wisdom of Isaiah Berlin; How the cold war shaped the great philosopher’s thinking – and tested his integrity

August 9, 2013 7:06 pm

The wit and wisdom of Isaiah Berlin

By Duncan Kelly

How the cold war shaped Isaiah Berlin’s thought – and tested his integrity

Building: Letters 1960-1975, by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, Chatto RRP£40/Random House UK RRP$59.95, 704 pages

Isaac and Isaiah: The Covert Punishment of a Cold War Heretic, by David Caute, Yale £25/$35, 336 pages

A Mind and its Time: The Development of Isaiah Berlin’s Political Thought, by Joshua Cherniss, OUP £60/$110, 288 pages

By the 1960s Isaiah Berlin was assured in his fame, a shining star in an unusually cosmopolitan academic and cultural firmament. His professorship at All Souls in Oxford, where he held the chair in social and political theory, was only one, rather small component of his life. Berlin was globally connected, particularly in Washington, where he had worked in the British embassy during the war, and he would reap rewards from his numerous networks in the decades that followed. Friends in the Ford Foundation secured him the funding, matched by the British businessman Leonard Wolfson, for the construction of a new graduate college in Oxford in 1965, which he served as the first president. Wolfson College is a tremendous legacy and a fitting monument to a life whose achievements were recognised across continents. In Building, a new and weighty volume of letters written between 1960 and 1975, all of Berlin’s characteristic gifts are on display – as well as some of his darker moments. Already, he was looking back, drawing the threads of his intellectual preoccupations together. Writing in 1969 (after turning 60) to the painter Dorothea Head, he laments the aimless “dashing about” of the day’s secure and prosperous youth, and reflects on the pressures faced by his own generation. “We feared something: war, economic collapse, totalitarianism. But ennui is worse.” Read more of this post

Starbucks chief Howard Schultz steps into JC Penney fight, saying hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is a “destroyer of companies”; “Bill Ackman has blood on his hands for being the one who brought Ron Johnson in”

Last updated: August 9, 2013 8:19 pm

Starbucks chief steps into JC Penney fight

By Barney Jopson and Dan McCrum in New York

Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, has accused the hedge fund manager Bill Ackman of being a “destroyer of companies” as he stepped into a fight between the investor and the struggling retailer JC Penney. Mr Schultz, one of America’s best-known businessmen, spoke out after Mr Ackman, a JC Penney board member, wrote a letter urging fellow directors to find a new chief executive quickly and released it to the media. “I thought it was disgusting,” Mr Schultz told the Financial Times, accusing Mr Ackman of bypassing established governance procedures. “When I saw what happened [on Thursday] . . . I’m distraught.” Read more of this post

Simplify Your Tech Life,Thoreau-Style; Even an avowed naturalist would have a hard time totally unplugging today. Here’s how to take refuge from banal Facebook posts and incessant phone alerts without retreating to a tiny cabin in the woods

August 9, 2013, 5:49 p.m. ET

Simplify Your Tech Life,Thoreau-Style

Even an avowed naturalist would have a hard time totally unplugging today. Here’s how to take refuge from banal Facebook posts and incessant phone alerts without retreating to a tiny cabin in the woods

MICHAEL HSU

YOU MAY NEVER HAVE READ“Walden,” but you’re probably familiar with the premise: a guy with an ax builds a cabin in the woods and lives there for two years to tune out the inessential and discover himself. When Henry David Thoreau began his grand experiment, in 1845, he was about to turn 28—the age of a typical Instagram user today. Thoreau lived with his parents right before his move. During his sojourn, he returned home to do laundry.

“In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”

—Henry David Thoreau, 1854 Read more of this post

NYC parents hire toddler training experts at $450 an hour in battle for elite school places where four-year-olds must attend a playgroup where they are tested by teachers for academic ability and their social and emotional IQ

August 8, 2013 5:07 pm

The serious side of child’s play

By Emma Jacobs

Bribing toddlers can be counter-productive, according to Vanessa. Instead, the 28-year-old coaches her young charges how to play together – for $450 an hour. After all, play dates are no trivial matter. They can decide a child’s future. Vanessa, who declines to give her last name, is one of a new breed of play date experts that help children prepare for admission to New York’s elite kindergartens. As part of the admission process to these schools that charge up to $40,000 a year, four-year-olds must attend a playgroup where they are tested by teachers for academic ability and their social and emotional IQ. Read more of this post

Paul Graham: How to Convince Investors

How to Convince Investors
Paul Graham
August 2013
(This is one of a pair of essays on fundraising. The next one, on fundraising tactics, is coming soon.)
When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it’s usually because they try to lift with their back. The right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake when trying to convince investors. They try to convince with their pitch. Most would be better off if they let their startup do the work—if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors. Investors are looking for startups that will be very successful. But that test is not as simple as it sounds. In startups, as in a lot of other domains, the distribution of outcomes follows a power law, but in startups the curve is startlingly steep. The big successes are so big they dwarf the rest. And since there are only a handful each year (the conventional wisdom is 15), investors treat “big success” as if it were binary. Most are interested in you if you seem like you have a chance, however small, of being one of the 15 big successes, and otherwise not. [1]
(There are a handful of angels who’d be interested in a company with a high probability of being moderately successful. But angel investors like big successes too.)
How do you seem like you’ll be one of the big successes? You need three things: formidable founders, a promising market, and (usually) some evidence of success so far. Read more of this post

Smart Leaders Have Protégés

Smart Leaders Have Protégés

by Sylvia Ann Hewlett  |   9:00 AM August 9, 2013

Just how important protégés are to a powerful person was made clear to me by this question, told to me by a Fortune 100 CEO. When choosing his direct reports, he asks: “How many blazing talents have you developed over the years and put in top positions across the company, so that if I asked you to pull off a deal that involved liaising across seven geographies and five functions, you’d have the bench strength — the people who ‘owe you one’ — to get it done?” Read more of this post

Lee Kuan Yew: 1Malaysia campaign may be unrealistic

Lee Kuan Yew: 1Malaysia campaign may be unrealistic

Saturday, August 10, 2013 – 15:31

Isabelle Lai

The Star/Asia News Network

PETALING JAYA – Malaysians hoping that Barisan Nasional’s 1Malaysia concept can usher in a new era for race relations may be unrealistic, but those counting on the Opposition to do the same are not very much less so, said Lee Kuan Yew. The former Singapore Prime Minister said that Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak’s 1Malaysia campaign, launched in 2008 to win back support from Chinese and Indian voters, had not lived up to the excitement it created. Read more of this post

Richard Branson Explains The Most Important Thing Every Good Boss Should Do

Richard Branson Explains The Most Important Thing Every Good Boss Should Do

JULIE BORT AUG. 9, 2013, 8:57 PM 3,749

Earlier this week, Richard Branson and Elon Musk, two of the world’s most daring and successful entrepreneurs, offered advice via a Google Hangout. That was cool, but Richard Branson, founder and chairman of Virgin Group, has been offering fantastic advice to business people for years. We just found this YouTube of him from 2011 where he explains the most important thing every manager should do: praise people. He then tells an amazing story of how he almost went instantly bankrupt when his bank manager came to his house and called all his loans. Moral of the story is don’t be afraid to change banks (and it’s good to have wealthy friends). But it also underscores that in order to succeed, you have to live with the risk of failure because no matter how  successful you are, failure is always a possibility.

Jeff Bezos Will Walk Out Of A Meeting If You Don’t Get To The Point

Jeff Bezos Will Walk Out Of A Meeting If You Don’t Get To The Point

VIVIAN GIANG AUG. 9, 2013, 10:47 AM 14,307 16

Reuters

Jeff Bezos won’t waste any time in a meeting with you if he doesn’t fully understand where the conversation is going or how it will make Amazon better. Craig Timberg and Jia Lynn Yang write about Bezos’ demanding management style in The Washington Post: “In the relentlessly efficient world of Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon employees quickly learn when they have overtaxed the attention of their chief executive. He quietly pulls out his smartphone and starts replying to e-mails. In extreme cases, Bezos will walk out.” Nadia Shouraboura, formerly a part of Bezos’ senior executive team tells Timberg and Yang that you “better be ready” if you have a meeting with Bezos. “He will figure out something you haven’t thought of … If you haven’t thought through exactly how to delight our customer, that’s a bad thing.”

Jeff Bezos, The Post’s incoming owner, known for a demanding management style at Amazon

By Craig Timberg and Jia Lynn Yang, Published: August 8

In the relentlessly efficient world of Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon employees quickly learn when they have overtaxed the attention of their chief executive. He quietly pulls out his smartphone and starts replying to e-mails. In extreme cases, Bezos will walk out. Read more of this post

Cactus Needles Inspired A Super-Efficient New Way To Clean Up Oil Spills

Cactus Needles Inspired A Super-Efficient New Way To Clean Up Oil Spills

ROBERT FERRIS AUG. 9, 2013, 2:25 PM 1,187 1

Scientists may have just invented an amazing new way to clean up oil spills by mimicking the ingenious physics of cactus needles. Cactus needles are not just for warding off animals trying get a taste of the plant’s moist flesh. They also use a trick from physics to help them draw water from the air to keep the plant hydrated in its harsh desert environment. Cactus needles are shaped like cones with — as many unfortunate victims have found — a sharp tip facing outward. The spines widen as they get closer to the body of the plant. Read more of this post