George Merck

George Merck Put profit second The Merck & Co. boss didn't worry about Wall Street—and grew profits 50-fold. FORTUNE Monday, July 7, 2003 By Jim Collins 

             Late one afternoon in 1978, Dr. William Campbell did what all great researchers do: He wondered at the data. While testing a new compound to battle parasites in animals, he was struck with the idea that it might be effective against another parasite—one that causes blindness and itching in humans so horrific that some victims have committed suicide. Campbell might have simply scribbled a note in the files and gone to lunch. After all, the potential "customers"—tribal people in remote tropical locations—would have no money to buy it. Undaunted, Campbell penned a memo to his employer, Merck & Co., urging pursuit of the idea. Today 30 million people a year receive Mectizan, the drug inspired by his observation, largely free of charge. 

            The most exceptional part of the story is that it wasn't an exception. "Medicine is for people, not for the profits," George Merck II declared on the cover of Time in August 1952—a rule his company observed in dispensing streptomycin to Japanese children following World War II. Yet fuzzy-headed moralistic fervor wasn't George Merck. Austere and patrician, he simply believed that the purpose of a corporation is to do something useful, and to do it very well. "And if we have remembered that, the profits have never failed to appear," he explained. "The better we remembered, the larger they have been." It's the mirror image of CEOs whose unhealthy fixations with Wall Street have served neither people nor profits: Merck served shareholders so well precisely because he served others first.