J&J’s New CEO Less than two weeks after MacMillan left his post, J&J announced Weldon

J&J’s New CEO

Less than two weeks after MacMillan left his post, J&J announced Weldon’s resignation and named Alex Gorsky as his successor. The transfer of leadership will officially take place at thecompany’s upcomingannual shareholders meeting on April 26. Weldon, 63, will remain J&J board chairman.

Gorsky, 51, is a former army captain and endurance athlete who has spent two decades at J&J, most recently leading the Medical Devices & Diagnostics Group, Global Supply Chain, Health Care Compliance & Privacy and Government Affairs & Policy. He also currently serves as vice chairman of the company’s executive committee.

“Gorsky is a conservative choice and the strongest internal candidate,” Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told Bloomberg. “That’s a big deal at a company that always taps an insider as its next CEO—even if what they need is someone from outside the team that led the company into so much trouble.”

Weldon, 63, has been blamed for much of J&J’s troubles of late. The son of a Broadway stagehand and seamstress, Weldon became CEO in 2002 after spending his entire career at the company. Critics have accused Weldon of allowing the company’s once-staunch attention to quality erode through the years, resulting in the manufacture of drugs with foul odors, adulterated ingredients and/or bad labeling as well as metal hips that wore out and failed long before they should have. J&J’s DePuy unit faces more than 4,500 lawsuits over the ASR XL Acetabular System, a hip socket used in traditional replacementsurgery, and the ASR Hip Resurfacing System, a partial hip replacement that involves placing a metal cap on the ball of the femur to preserve more bone. Both products were recalled in August 2010; to date, J&J has recalled 93,000 hips worldwide, including 37,000 in the United States, warning that more than 12 percent failed within five years.

When he assumes leadership of the company in late April, Gorsky will become only the ninth CEO in J&J’s 126-yearhistory, according to Bloomberg. He joined the firm’s Janssen Pharmacutica unit in 1988 as a sales representative and then worked in various positions in sales, marketing and management over the next 15 years. In 2001, Gorsky became president of Janssen and was promoted two years later to company group chairman of J&J’s pharmaceuticals business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Gorsky left J&J in 2004 to become head of North American pharmaceuticals for Basel, Switzerland-based Novartis AG. He returned four years later, however, as company group chairman and worldwide franchise chairman for Ethicon in the medical devices business. In 2009, Gorsky was appointed worldwide chairman of the surgical care group and to J&J’s executive committee. He became vice chairman of the committee in January 2011. As CEO, he’ll be paid $1.2 million, according to a company filing.