So, in 1979, Weldon joined Cordis as a director and president-elect (Weldon became president and Sterner became vice-chairman in July of 1979). For the next two years, he, Murphy, and Sterner worked as a three-man team, allowing the transition to be made in an orderly manner. In 1981, Sterner formally retired.
Looking back now on his years at Cordis, Sterner says that he has "only one regret -- only one thing I personally would have done differently. We made all of our successes out of state-of-the-art jumps. When we got a state-of-the-art jump, we should have taken advantage of it by putting a lot of muscle into developing a line of products -- including 'me-too' products. We talked about it, but we never did it. As I look back, I should have insisted that we put more of our resources into doing it, perhaps even at the expense of our R&D budget. It wouldn't have made us a 'metoo' company, but it would have made us a more profitable company, and it probably would have accelerated our growth. That is one of the reasons I was excited about having Norm [Weldon] come in. He recognizes that, and has already shown signs of doing that. To the extent that this interferes with some of the things Bill [Murphy] wants to do, I can understand Bill being a little restive about it."
Murphy does, in fact, sound a little erestive these days, particularly when discussing his board. "I am not really fighting a battle with the directors," he says. "They just aren't quite as bold as I tend to be. They tend to be a little slower to get excited about things, and maybe that's good. . . . I tend to buck the tide a little bit. I am very much a conservative in most of my outlook, except that I think high tech requires a certain amount of boldness, a willingness to get on with something you believe in, even though it isn't very popular. If we hadn't done that in the past, we would be lost."
In the final analysis, however, it is not so much the board Murphy must convince as the company's employees, and he must do that by indirect means. Because he doesn't have a controlling interest in Cordis, he cannot simply hand down policy. Then again, Murphy has long recognized that leadership is not a matter of giving orders. "You are either technically skillful and people support you, or you aren't," he explains. "I think, at this point, my record is good enough that I don't have to worry too much."
His technical record aside, Murphy continues to work at developing a culture at Cordis conducive to "medical wisdom." Although he himsdelf does not care for open offices, he decided long ago that they could help to foster the atmosphere he wanted, and so he put his personal preferences aside. And although he is hardly a glad-hander, he holds companywide banquets each year, at which he gives Annual Service Awards to selected employees. The company cafeteria is turned into a banquet hall, complete with linen and catering. A man with a camera energetically works the room, and afterwards many attendees receive photos inscribed with a few words from the photographer. The photographer is William Murphy.
Through all this, Murphy has made believers out of the people who work for him. "When I first came here, I'd hear Bill talking about quality at the highest level, and I'd wonder whether it was economically feasible," says Frank Fischer, Cordis's operations chief. "The numbers aren't clear from a classic analysis. Two or three years later, I began to believe his obsession with excellence does pay, although I still beieve that it can't be determined from the kind of analysis taught in business schools in the United States."
Lately, Cordis has been seeing the benefits of Murphy's insistence that the company be guided by medical wisdom and concern for patients. In the early 1980s, certain pacer companies were purported to be boosting sales by offering physicians gifts of cars, boats, junkets, cash, and the like. Cordis refused to go along. As a result, says Weldon, the company earned a reputation for being "impossibly naive" about doing business in the pacer industry. Then came the kickback scandals that tarnished other pacer companies but left Cordis unscathed. Now the company is viewed as being "ahead of its time." Meanwhile, Murphy's commitment to innovation has enabled Cordis to recapture the number two spot in the industry (after Medtronic Inc. of Minneapolis) with the introduction of a new generation of pacers.
All of this is a source of considerable pride to Murphy, who is quite clear about his feelings for Cordis: "I do see my company as an expression of my personality. If you're the head of a company, of course you see it that way. You make most of the critical decisions, and, if you make a lot of dumb ones, you don't do well. The products that we're making, the way we do them is intimate with the medical world, and the reason I'm here is because I'm part of the medical world. It's a little hard to divorce myself from that.
"Somebody once said that you really shouldn't love a company, because a company isn't a lovable entity: It's a money machine. Most of the decisions you have to make are based on economic pressures. I personally make decisions that have other ground rules, and I don't believe that you should exclude an emotional attachment to a company, but I suppose I'm in the vast minority in that regard."
Then again, he could hardly feel much different, for Murphy is a man who loves his work. There is the story, for example, about the time he was seen in animated conversation with a colleague as they prepared to go out for dinner. Curious, the bystander tried to overhear the topic of their talk. On a social evening, Murphy and his associate were discussing the great hardware stores of the world.
