Kilmer House

A Chairman and CEO is writing a book.  Having led his company through The Great Depression, he’s concerned with improving living standards to decrease what he sees as a consistent state of scarcity for large parts of the population.  He realizes that his concern about providing goods, services and wages to alleviate scarcity, and in fact the entire future of business itself, depend on something that most people weren’t even thinking about yet:  conserving and sustaining the natural resources of the planet.  The year?  1947.  The business leader:  Robert Wood

One of Our Early Employee Volunteers Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies employees all over the world have a long tradition of volunteering in the community.  It reflects their feelings of responsibility to the communities in which they live and work, and it forms the basis of the third paragraph of Our Credo.  One thing that very few people know is that our tradition of employees volunteering in the community goes back over 100 years…and our earliest records show that it was started by women employees.  So, how did it start? Another Early Employee Volunteer E

High school students taking over Johnson & Johnson for a day?  A seventeen-year old Chairman and CEO sitting at General Robert Wood Johnson’s desk?  What on earth was going on at Johnson & Johnson in the late 1940s and the 1950s?  It was all part of a program called A Day in Modern Industry…an early cousin to today’s Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work events. High School students at Johnson & Johnson for the A Day in Modern Industry Program Johnson & Johnson started the A Day in Modern Industry program in 1947 and, like the invention of BAND-AID® Brand Adhesive Bandages, it wa

With this week being National Public Health Week and April being National Volunteer Month, it’s a perfect opportunity to go back in time and let an early Johnson & Johnson employee who was on the front lines of public health improvement talk about some of his volunteer efforts in that area.  How can we do that?  We don’t have a time machine (despite a Six Degrees of Separation connection to H. G. Wells!), but we do have a first-hand account from one of our employees who spent many years volunteering to improve public health, starting at a time when the field was in its infancy.  That emplo

More than a hundred years ago, Johnson & Johnson founder Robert Wood Johnson and Director of Scientific Affairs Fred Kilmer spent a lot of time getting out and talking to a lot of people -- mothers, fathers and families who used our products, members of the medical profession, and the retail pharmacists who sold Johnson & Johnson products before the age of supermarkets.  Those conversations led to some pretty significant milestones in Johnson & Johnson history – such as JOHNSON’S® Baby Powder in 1894, maternity kits to make childbirth safer in the 1890s, and the first commercial f

Johnson & Johnson has just launched a new global giving platform called Care Grows.  Care Grows is a website that allows visitors to pick causes that are close to their hearts and donate to them, and Johnson & Johnson will match their donations.  Since everyone has at least one cause that has special meaning and motivation to them, Care Grows will enable people to make a very personal choice in how they give.  The Care Grows platform is a very high tech, modern way to help make the world a better place.  And although it uses the latest technology, it continues and broadens a legacy of

This year marks a very significant anniversary at Johnson & Johnson:  the 70th anniversary of Our Credo, the business philosophy that guides Johnson & Johnson.  Written in 1943 by General Robert Wood Johnson and presented to the Board of Directors in December of that year, Our Credo is one of the earliest statements of corporate social responsibility, drafted almost three quarters of a century ago. But the origins of Our Credo actually go back much further than December of 1943.  In fact, they go back to 1935 -- and back even further to the founding of Johnson & Johnson. The firs

Our public call for artifacts for our Museum restoration is a few weeks old and, so far, Kilmer House readers have seen two of the coolest items – a Zonweiss clock and a Lister’s Fumigator – that have come back to Johnson & Johnson from employees and members of the public.  Thanks to everyone who has answered the call so far!  The artifacts and stories keep coming in, and they continue to amaze.  Here are some more cool things from our artifacts drive. 1.  A brick!  But not just any brick – this one is from Kilmer House, an historical Johnson & Johnson building that shares a name wit

It’s hard to believe that December is here!  In celebration of the 12th month of the year and the colder weather it brings, here are 12 cool things from Johnson & Johnson history. 1.  Ken Burns’ latest documentary, Laurel Club to attend a national meeting of women employee clubs.  They attended a special reception with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.  Johnson & Johnson’s first female scientist, Edith von K---, was among the Johnson & Johnson delegates, as was Elizabeth P----, who was depicted in one of the Company’s stained glass windows.   Personal letter from P

Giving back to the community is one of the oldest traditions at Johnson & Johnson.  It began in the company’s hometown of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and spread throughout the world as Johnson & Johnson expanded globally.  Our earliest records of helping the community previously have dated back to the 1898 donation of dressings to treat wounded soldiers, disaster relief after the Galveston Flood of 1900 and help for the citizens of San Francisco after the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.  But now that legacy of giving can be traced back much further:  to the spring of 1887 when Johnson