Johnson & Johnson Mission Statement Analysis (2026)

Johnson & Johnson stands as one of the most consequential healthcare companies in modern history. Founded in 1886 by Robert Wood Johnson, James Wood Johnson, and Edward Mead Johnson, the company spent more than a century building a diversified empire spanning consumer health products, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. That empire underwent a radical transformation in 2023 when Johnson & Johnson spun off its consumer health division into a separate publicly traded entity called Kenvue, retaining for itself the higher-margin pharmaceutical and medical technology businesses. The Johnson & Johnson that exists in 2026 is a fundamentally different organization from the one most consumers grew up recognizing through brands like Band-Aid, Tylenol, and baby powder.

Understanding Johnson & Johnson’s mission and vision statements requires grappling with this transformation. The company’s guiding document, known as “Our Credo,” has served as its philosophical anchor since 1943. Written by Robert Wood Johnson II, the grandson of one of the founders, the Credo predates modern corporate social responsibility language by decades. It remains the central expression of the company’s purpose, functioning simultaneously as mission statement, value system, and ethical framework. For a detailed explanation of how these corporate statements differ in purpose and scope, see our guide on the difference between mission and vision statements.

This analysis examines both the Credo and Johnson & Johnson’s forward-looking vision in the context of the company’s present reality: a focused pharmaceutical and medical technology enterprise navigating the aftermath of one of the largest product liability settlements in corporate history while simultaneously pursuing ambitious innovation in oncology, immunology, and surgical robotics.

Johnson & Johnson Mission Statement — “Our Credo”

Johnson & Johnson does not maintain a conventional mission statement. Instead, the company has organized its corporate identity around a document it calls “Our Credo,” which has guided decision-making at every level of the organization since its introduction in 1943. The Credo was updated in 2018 to reflect contemporary language, but its fundamental structure and priorities remain intact.

“We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services. In meeting their needs everything we do must be of high quality. We must constantly strive to provide value, reduce our costs and maintain reasonable prices. Customers’ orders must be serviced promptly and accurately. Our business partners must have an opportunity to make a fair profit.

We are responsible to our employees and to the men and women who work with us throughout the world. Everyone must be considered as an individual. We must respect their dignity and recognize their merit. They must have a sense of security, fulfillment and purpose in their jobs. Compensation must be fair and adequate and working conditions clean, orderly and safe. We must support the health and well-being of our employees and help them fulfill their family and other personal responsibilities. Employees must feel free to make suggestions and complaints. There must be equal opportunity for employment, development and advancement for those qualified. We must provide highly capable leaders whose actions are just and ethical.

We are responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well. We must help people be healthier by supporting better access and care in more places around the world. We must be good citizens — support good works and charities, better health and education, and bear our fair share of taxes. We must maintain in good order the property we are privileged to use, protecting the environment and natural resources.

Our final responsibility is to our stockholders. Business must make a sound profit. We must experiment with new ideas. Research must be carried on, innovative programs developed, investments made for the future and mistakes paid for. New equipment must be purchased, new facilities provided and new products launched. Reserves must be created to provide for adverse times. When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return.”

The Credo is notable for its explicit hierarchy of stakeholders. Patients and customers come first. Employees come second. Communities come third. Stockholders come last. This ordering was radical when Robert Wood Johnson II wrote it in 1943 — a full year before the company went public — and it remains unusual among Fortune 500 companies in 2026. Most publicly traded corporations place shareholder value at the center of their stated purpose. Johnson & Johnson places it at the end, framing profit as the natural outcome of fulfilling obligations to every other stakeholder first.

Strengths of the Mission Statement

Explicit stakeholder hierarchy. The Credo does something that almost no other corporate mission document does: it ranks its obligations. By placing patients and customers above employees, communities, and stockholders — in that order — Johnson & Johnson establishes a clear decision-making framework. When interests conflict, the Credo provides guidance on which obligation takes precedence. This is not merely symbolic. During the 1982 Tylenol tampering crisis, then-CEO James Burke cited the Credo as the reason the company immediately pulled 31 million bottles from shelves at a cost of over $100 million, prioritizing consumer safety over short-term financial impact. That decision is still studied in business schools as a case study in values-driven leadership.

Operational specificity. Unlike many corporate mission statements that trade in vague aspirations, the Credo descends into operational detail. It addresses pricing (“maintain reasonable prices”), supply chain execution (“orders must be serviced promptly and accurately”), workplace conditions (“clean, orderly and safe”), and even tax obligations (“bear our fair share of taxes”). This granularity transforms the Credo from an abstract declaration into something resembling a code of conduct. Employees at every level of the organization can find specific guidance relevant to their daily work.

Long historical continuity. The Credo has been in continuous use for more than 80 years. While it was updated in 2018, the changes were largely cosmetic — modernizing language rather than altering substance. This continuity gives the document a weight that newer mission statements simply cannot match. When Johnson & Johnson invokes the Credo, it invokes a tradition that predates the modern pharmaceutical industry as we know it. That historical depth provides institutional stability and a sense of purpose that extends beyond any single product cycle, CEO tenure, or market trend.

Balance of idealism and pragmatism. The Credo does not pretend that profit is irrelevant. Its final section addresses stockholders directly and acknowledges the necessity of sound financial management, investment in research, and creation of reserves for difficult periods. By including these practical concerns alongside its ethical commitments, the Credo avoids the hollow idealism that undermines many corporate mission statements. It reads as a document written by someone who understood the demands of running a business, not merely the aspirations of founding one.

Weaknesses of the Mission Statement

Credibility gap with actual corporate behavior. The most significant weakness of the Credo is not textual but contextual. Johnson & Johnson spent decades fighting allegations that its talcum powder products contained asbestos and caused ovarian cancer, employing aggressive legal strategies that many observers found difficult to reconcile with a document placing patients first. The company’s use of a controversial bankruptcy maneuver — the so-called “Texas two-step” — to manage talc liabilities drew particular criticism, as it appeared to prioritize financial engineering over direct accountability to harmed individuals. When a mission statement’s most prominent real-world test results in behavior that contradicts its stated values, the document’s authority is materially diminished.

Absence of innovation language. While the stockholder section mentions “new ideas” and “research,” the Credo contains no substantive language about scientific discovery, medical advancement, or the role of innovation in improving human health. For a company that now derives the majority of its revenue from pharmaceutical research and medical technology, this omission is conspicuous. The Credo reads more like a document for a manufacturing and distribution company — which Johnson & Johnson was in 1943 — than for a cutting-edge biopharmaceutical enterprise.

No acknowledgment of the post-Kenvue identity. The Credo was written for a diversified company that served consumers, healthcare professionals, and patients simultaneously. Following the Kenvue spinoff, Johnson & Johnson no longer sells baby powder, Band-Aids, or Listerine. The “mothers and fathers” language in the opening paragraph, while still technically applicable to parents who are patients, carries a strong association with the consumer health business that no longer exists within the company. The Credo has not been updated to reflect this fundamental change in corporate scope.

Passive construction weakens accountability. Much of the Credo is written in passive or obligatory language: “must be considered,” “must be serviced,” “must be fair.” While this construction creates a sense of obligation, it also creates distance between the statement and any specific actor. Who, precisely, bears these responsibilities? The Credo does not assign ownership to leadership, management, or any defined function within the organization. This diffusion of accountability can allow individual actors to treat the Credo as an institutional aspiration rather than a personal obligation.

Johnson & Johnson Vision Statement

Johnson & Johnson’s vision statement reflects its post-separation identity as a focused healthcare innovation company. The company has articulated its forward-looking purpose as follows:

“We blend heart, science and ingenuity to profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity.”

This statement is a marked departure from the Credo’s detailed, stakeholder-by-stakeholder approach. Where the Credo is expansive and operational, the vision statement is compressed and aspirational. It attempts to capture the emotional dimension of healthcare (“heart”), the scientific foundation of the company’s work (“science”), and the creative problem-solving required to advance medicine (“ingenuity”) in a single sentence.

Strengths of the Vision Statement

Ambitious scope without empty grandiosity. The phrase “profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity” sets an enormous target, but it does so in language that connects to measurable outcomes. Changing a “trajectory” implies a shift in direction — a sustained, systemic improvement rather than a single product or breakthrough. This framing aligns well with the company’s actual portfolio, which spans treatments for conditions ranging from multiple myeloma to pulmonary arterial hypertension, as well as surgical technologies that aim to improve outcomes across millions of procedures annually.

Reflects the post-Kenvue company. Unlike the Credo, the vision statement speaks directly to the company Johnson & Johnson has become. The emphasis on science and ingenuity positions the organization as a research-driven enterprise, not a consumer goods manufacturer. This alignment between stated vision and actual business operations is essential for internal coherence. Employees working in pharmaceutical research or medical device engineering can see themselves in this statement in a way they may not in the more broadly worded Credo.

Emotional resonance without sentimentality. The inclusion of “heart” at the beginning of the statement introduces an emotional dimension that is absent from many pharmaceutical company vision statements. This word choice acknowledges that healthcare is not purely a technical or commercial enterprise — it involves human suffering, hope, and relationships between caregivers and patients. By placing “heart” first, the vision statement signals that empathy is foundational rather than supplementary to the company’s work.

Weaknesses of the Vision Statement

Generic applicability. The vision statement could belong to virtually any healthcare or pharmaceutical company. There is nothing in its language that distinguishes Johnson & Johnson from Pfizer, Merck, AbbVie, or any other large-cap pharmaceutical enterprise. A vision statement should ideally convey something distinctive about the organization — its particular approach, heritage, or competitive philosophy. This statement does not achieve that differentiation. It reads as a well-crafted but interchangeable declaration of purpose.

Lacks measurable benchmarks. “Profoundly change the trajectory of health for humanity” provides no indication of how success would be measured. What does a changed trajectory look like? How many patients must benefit? What diseases must be addressed? The absence of any measurable dimension — even in broad terms — makes the vision statement difficult to use as an accountability tool. It functions better as a marketing tagline than as a strategic north star.

Tension between “heart” and corporate litigation history. The word “heart” invites scrutiny of the company’s demonstrated compassion in practice. For plaintiffs in talc litigation and their families, the invocation of “heart” may ring hollow. Vision statements do not exist in a vacuum; they exist in the context of a company’s full behavioral record. When that record includes prolonged legal battles against cancer patients, aspirational language about empathy creates a credibility risk rather than an emotional connection.

No reference to accessibility or equity. The Credo mentions “supporting better access and care in more places around the world.” The vision statement drops this language entirely. For a company that sells treatments costing tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year, the absence of any reference to equitable access is a notable omission. Health equity has become a central concern in global healthcare policy, and the vision statement’s silence on this topic positions Johnson & Johnson behind peers who have incorporated access language into their forward-looking commitments.

The Kenvue Separation and the Redefinition of Johnson & Johnson

To understand what the Credo and vision statement mean in 2026, it is necessary to understand the magnitude of the Kenvue spinoff. In August 2023, Johnson & Johnson completed the separation of its consumer health division into Kenvue Inc., which began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker KVUE. The transaction transferred ownership of brands that had defined Johnson & Johnson’s public identity for generations: Tylenol, Motrin, Zyrtec, Listerine, Neutrogena, Aveeno, and Johnson’s Baby products, among others.

The strategic rationale was straightforward. Consumer health products generated reliable but modest revenue growth, while pharmaceutical and medical technology businesses offered higher margins, stronger growth potential, and greater opportunities for differentiation through innovation. By separating the two, Johnson & Johnson could focus capital allocation, research investment, and management attention on the businesses with the highest potential returns. The market largely validated this logic; Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical pipeline and MedTech portfolio commanded premium valuations that had been diluted by the slower-growth consumer segment.

The implications for the company’s mission and vision are profound. The Credo was written for a company that touched the lives of ordinary consumers through everyday products. A mother applying Johnson’s Baby Lotion, a runner reaching for a Band-Aid, a headache sufferer taking Tylenol — these were the stakeholders the Credo’s first paragraph most directly addressed. With those products now belonging to Kenvue, the “patients, doctors and nurses, mothers and fathers” language in the Credo requires reinterpretation. The patients Johnson & Johnson now serves are not buying over-the-counter products at a pharmacy; they are receiving immunotherapy infusions, undergoing robotic-assisted surgery, or managing serious chronic conditions with specialty pharmaceuticals.

This shift does not invalidate the Credo, but it does change its practical meaning. The obligation to “maintain reasonable prices,” for instance, carries a different weight when applied to a cancer drug with an annual cost exceeding $150,000 than when applied to a bottle of mouthwash. The Credo’s operational specificity, once a strength, becomes a source of tension when the business model has fundamentally changed but the guiding document has not been correspondingly updated.

Pharmaceutical Focus: Innovation and Pipeline Strategy

Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical segment, branded as Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies for decades before being unified under the Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine banner, now represents the core of the company’s identity and revenue. The segment’s strategic priorities in 2026 center on several therapeutic areas: oncology, immunology, neuroscience, cardiovascular and metabolism, and pulmonary hypertension.

In oncology, Johnson & Johnson has built a formidable portfolio anchored by treatments for multiple myeloma. Darzalex (daratumumab), a monoclonal antibody, has become one of the best-selling oncology drugs globally, generating tens of billions in cumulative revenue since its launch. The company has extended the franchise with subcutaneous formulations and combination regimens that have expanded its addressable patient population. Carvykti (ciltacabtagene autoleucel), a CAR-T cell therapy developed in partnership with Legend Biotech, represents the company’s entry into the cell therapy space and has shown remarkable efficacy in heavily pretreated multiple myeloma patients. The expansion of Carvykti into earlier lines of therapy has the potential to significantly increase its commercial reach.

In immunology, the company faces a complex transition. Stelara (ustekinumab), which had been one of the company’s largest revenue generators for the treatment of psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and ulcerative colitis, began facing biosimilar competition following the expiration of key exclusivity periods. Managing this transition while growing newer immunology assets is a defining strategic challenge. The pipeline includes next-generation treatments designed to offer improved efficacy and convenience over existing standards of care.

The vision statement’s emphasis on “science and ingenuity” maps directly to this pipeline-driven strategy. Johnson & Johnson’s competitive position depends on its ability to discover, develop, and commercialize novel therapeutics faster and more effectively than its peers. The company’s research and development spending, which exceeds $14 billion annually, reflects the scale of investment required to sustain this model. The Credo’s brief mention of research in its stockholder section is entirely inadequate to capture the centrality of R&D to the company’s current operations. Innovation is not a peripheral activity at Johnson & Johnson; it is the activity.

On the MedTech side, Johnson & Johnson has invested heavily in robotic-assisted surgery through its Ottava platform, designed to compete with Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci system, which has dominated the surgical robotics market for years. The Ottava system represents a multi-billion-dollar bet on the premise that the next generation of surgical robotics will integrate advanced visualization, data analytics, and machine learning to improve surgical outcomes. The development timeline has been extended, reflecting the technical complexity of the platform, but the company has maintained its commitment to bringing Ottava to market as a cornerstone of its MedTech strategy.

This pharmaceutical and MedTech focus places Johnson & Johnson in a competitive set that includes some of the most well-resourced companies in the world. Among the top companies with mission and vision statements that we have analyzed, pharmaceutical enterprises face a particular challenge: their stated purpose must reconcile the commercial imperative of generating returns on massive R&D investments with the ethical obligation to make life-saving treatments accessible to those who need them. Johnson & Johnson’s Credo attempts this reconciliation but does so with language designed for a different era and a different business model.

The Talc Litigation Legacy and Its Impact on Corporate Credibility

No analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s mission and values can be complete without a thorough examination of the talcum powder litigation that has defined the company’s public reputation for the better part of a decade. The controversy centers on allegations that Johnson & Johnson’s talc-based products, including its iconic baby powder, contained trace amounts of asbestos and contributed to ovarian cancer and mesothelioma in long-term users.

The scope of the litigation is staggering. At its peak, Johnson & Johnson faced tens of thousands of individual lawsuits filed by plaintiffs alleging that talc exposure caused their cancers. Several high-profile jury verdicts resulted in multi-billion-dollar judgments against the company, including a landmark $4.69 billion verdict in St. Louis in 2018 involving 22 women who alleged that decades of talc use caused their ovarian cancer. While Johnson & Johnson disputed these findings and pointed to decades of studies it said demonstrated the safety of its products, the sheer volume and severity of the verdicts created an existential reputational challenge.

The company’s legal strategy generated controversy of its own. Johnson & Johnson employed what became known as the “Texas two-step” bankruptcy maneuver: it created a subsidiary, transferred talc liabilities to that subsidiary, and then placed the subsidiary into bankruptcy in an attempt to resolve all claims through a single, capped settlement fund. Critics, including members of Congress and bankruptcy law scholars, argued that this strategy allowed a financially healthy corporation to use bankruptcy protections designed for genuinely insolvent entities, effectively limiting compensation available to cancer patients and their families.

The courts initially blocked this approach, with a federal appeals court ruling in 2023 that the subsidiary’s bankruptcy filing did not meet the legal standard for good faith. Johnson & Johnson subsequently pursued a revised settlement strategy, proposing a fund of approximately $8.9 billion to resolve current and future talc claims. After multiple attempts, the company sought sufficient claimant support to finalize a resolution through the bankruptcy process, a saga that has extended into 2025 and 2026 with varying degrees of claimant acceptance and judicial scrutiny.

The Credo’s opening declaration — “We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services” — stands in stark tension with this litigation history. If patients and consumers are truly the first responsibility, then the company’s response to allegations of product contamination should have prioritized swift, generous compensation for those harmed, not aggressive legal strategies designed to minimize financial exposure. The Credo does not contain an asterisk noting that its principles apply only when convenient or financially advantageous.

This is not to render a legal judgment on the merits of the talc claims themselves; the science remains contested, and Johnson & Johnson has consistently maintained the safety of its products. But the manner in which the company litigated these claims — the ferocity of its legal defense, the use of novel bankruptcy strategies, the years of delay — is difficult to reconcile with a document that places human welfare above corporate financial interests. The Credo’s credibility as a living ethical guide, rather than a historical artifact, depends on its application in precisely these kinds of difficult situations. Many observers have concluded that the company failed that test.

For the company’s leadership, the path forward requires more than legal resolution. It requires a rebuilding of trust that can only come from demonstrable, sustained behavior consistent with the Credo’s stated priorities. Every pricing decision, every clinical trial disclosure, every interaction with patients and regulators will be evaluated against the backdrop of the talc controversy. The Credo either means what it says, or it does not. The talc litigation has placed that question at the center of Johnson & Johnson’s corporate identity.

Healthcare Innovation and the Future of Johnson & Johnson

Setting aside the litigation overhang, Johnson & Johnson’s forward-looking strategy is built on several pillars of healthcare innovation that align with its vision statement’s emphasis on changing the trajectory of health.

Cell and gene therapy. The Carvykti CAR-T platform represents Johnson & Johnson’s most ambitious bet on next-generation medicine. CAR-T therapy involves extracting a patient’s own T-cells, genetically engineering them to recognize and attack cancer cells, and reinfusing them into the patient. The results in multiple myeloma have been remarkable, with deep and durable responses in patients who had exhausted all other treatment options. Johnson & Johnson’s challenge is scaling this inherently personalized therapy to reach more patients, reducing the manufacturing timeline, and managing the severe side effects that can accompany the treatment. Moving Carvykti into earlier treatment lines, where patients are healthier and more numerous, represents perhaps the single largest commercial opportunity in the company’s pipeline.

Surgical robotics and digital surgery. The Ottava robotic-assisted surgical platform is designed to address limitations in existing systems by offering a more flexible, open architecture that integrates with Johnson & Johnson’s existing portfolio of surgical instruments, sutures, and biosurgery products. The company’s vision for “digital surgery” extends beyond the robot itself to encompass pre-operative planning tools, intra-operative data analytics, and post-operative monitoring — a comprehensive ecosystem that could fundamentally change how surgeries are planned, performed, and evaluated. If successful, Ottava would position Johnson & Johnson at the intersection of medical devices and software, a convergence that is reshaping the healthcare technology landscape.

Artificial intelligence in drug discovery. Johnson & Johnson has invested in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to accelerate the drug discovery process, improve clinical trial design, and identify patient populations most likely to benefit from specific treatments. These investments are consistent with the “ingenuity” component of the vision statement and reflect a broader industry trend toward computational approaches to pharmaceutical research. The company’s data assets, generated through decades of clinical trials and real-world evidence collection, provide a foundation for AI-driven insights that newer companies cannot easily replicate.

Global health access. Despite the vision statement’s silence on equity, Johnson & Johnson has maintained global health programs focused on infectious diseases, including tuberculosis and HIV. The company’s bedaquiline, a treatment for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, has been a significant contribution to global health. Johnson & Johnson’s decision to allow generic manufacturing of bedaquiline in high-burden countries reflects an access-oriented approach that the Credo’s community responsibility section would endorse. Whether these programs are sufficient in scale and scope to match the Credo’s aspirations is a legitimate question, but their existence demonstrates that access considerations have not been entirely absent from corporate decision-making.

Strategic acquisitions. Johnson & Johnson has continued to supplement its internal pipeline through targeted acquisitions, focusing on companies and technologies that complement its existing therapeutic areas. The company’s acquisition strategy has historically favored bolt-on deals that bring specific assets into the Johnson & Johnson ecosystem rather than transformative mergers that reshape the company’s identity. This approach is consistent with the Credo’s conservative financial philosophy, which emphasizes “reserves for adverse times” and prudent investment rather than aggressive empire-building.

The Credo as a Governance Document

One dimension of the Credo that deserves specific attention is its function as a governance document. Many companies treat their mission statements as external communications — marketing tools designed to project a favorable image to customers, investors, and the public. Johnson & Johnson has historically treated the Credo as something more: an internal decision-making framework that is invoked in boardrooms, management meetings, and employee evaluations.

The company conducts periodic “Credo surveys” in which employees are asked to evaluate how well the organization is living up to the document’s principles. These surveys generate data that is shared with senior leadership and used to identify areas where the company’s behavior diverges from its stated values. This practice elevates the Credo from a static declaration to a dynamic governance tool — a feedback mechanism that theoretically holds the organization accountable to its own principles.

The effectiveness of this governance function is debatable. Critics would argue that the talc litigation demonstrates a fundamental failure of the Credo as a governance tool: if the document truly guided decision-making at the highest levels, the company would have responded to early safety signals with greater urgency and transparency. Defenders would counter that the Credo’s principles are aspirational by nature and that no governance document can prevent every failure of judgment or institutional blind spot. The truth likely lies between these positions. The Credo is a genuinely unusual and admirable document that has influenced thousands of decisions for the better, but it is not a guarantee against institutional self-interest when the stakes are sufficiently high.

Final Assessment

Johnson & Johnson’s Credo remains one of the most remarkable corporate mission documents in existence. Its explicit stakeholder hierarchy, operational specificity, and 80-year continuity distinguish it from the vast majority of corporate mission statements, which tend toward vague, interchangeable platitudes. The Credo articulates a theory of corporate responsibility that is both intellectually coherent and practically applicable: serve patients first, treat employees with dignity, contribute to communities, and trust that profit will follow.

The vision statement, by contrast, is competent but unremarkable. It captures the company’s post-Kenvue identity as a science-driven healthcare innovator, but it does so in language that could belong to any pharmaceutical company. It lacks the distinctiveness, the specificity, and the moral weight of the Credo. If the Credo did not exist, the vision statement alone would be insufficient to convey what makes Johnson & Johnson’s corporate philosophy distinctive.

The central challenge for Johnson & Johnson’s mission and vision in 2026 is not textual but behavioral. The Credo sets an extraordinarily high standard for corporate conduct. The talc litigation has exposed a gap between that standard and the company’s actual behavior when confronted with a crisis that threatened both its finances and its reputation. The Kenvue separation has rendered portions of the Credo’s language outdated. The pharmaceutical-focused business model raises questions about pricing and access that the Credo’s 1943 language was not designed to address.

None of these challenges diminish the Credo’s aspirational power. A corporate mission document that has guided an organization for eight decades, survived multiple leadership transitions, and served as the basis for at least one genuinely heroic corporate decision (the Tylenol recall) deserves respect regardless of the company’s subsequent failures. The question is whether Johnson & Johnson’s current leadership will treat the Credo as a living commitment or a historical relic — whether they will update it to reflect the company’s new identity, enforce it in moments of difficulty, and accept the financial consequences of genuine adherence to its principles.

The company’s pharmaceutical pipeline is among the strongest in the industry. Its MedTech investments position it to compete in surgical robotics and digital health. Its R&D spending reflects a serious commitment to innovation. These are the building blocks of a company that could credibly “change the trajectory of health for humanity,” as the vision statement promises. But trajectory changes require more than scientific capability; they require institutional integrity. Johnson & Johnson’s Credo provides the blueprint for that integrity. Whether the company will follow it — truly, fully, and especially when it is expensive to do so — is the question that will define its next chapter.

For investors, employees, patients, and the broader healthcare community, the answer matters. Johnson & Johnson is not merely another pharmaceutical company. It is a company that has claimed, for more than 80 years, to hold itself to a higher standard. The world is watching to see if that claim endures.