Center for Leadership
Studies

Mike Rechtiene was accountable for leadership, strategy and innovation for Animas Corporation and LifeScan, two of Johnson & Johnson’s companies focused on creating a world without limits for people with diabetes. When Rechtiene saw that his business was going through a transition that would require breakthrough change, he already had some familiarity with the MAOL and the breakthrough results its graduates customarily produce. Rechtiene believed that MAOL would give members of his organization the experience necessary to implement the business changes that were required for integration.

“The traditional MBA program is great in arming leaders with skills, analytics, tools and financial models but is somewhat weak on arming people with organizational and human system leadership capability,” Rechtiene notes. “MAOL’s focus on the human system and the organizational dynamics associated with change and with growing business is a differentiator.”

The application of MAOL frameworks were instrumental in the smooth acquisition of Animas by J & J, fostering integration that functioned more smoothly than the company had ever projected. Rechtiene says that post integration periods are ordinarily filled with employees’ questions about the future of the company as connected to the past and often a great degree of ambivalence. “Not so in this acquisition,” says Rechtiene. Based on this experience Rechtiene sought further involvement with the MAOL and as a result teaches at MAOL sessions as a member of the faculty, sharing with current degree candidates strategies for pattern recognition in human systems and practical application of MAOL theory.

“In this program you get significant individual leadership growth, but you’re also able to directly apply, almost in real time, the breakthrough methodologies into a project that means significant change and growth for corporations. Companies could sponsor candidates through this program specifically to deliver a necessary breakthrough change, but what they’ll get from it is something more—a leader that can integrate human system breakthrough with business breakthrough.”

Mike joined Johnson & Johnson since 1993. Prior to his last positions, Mike was General Manager for Therakos, a pioneering immune cell therapy company. Mike has also worked in commercial leadership roles at Centocor, a biopharmaceutical company, and at McNeill Consumer and Specialty Pharmaceuticals Company. Mike is an appointed lecturer in the Marketing Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Mike holds an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s in business administration from Villanova University in Pennsylvania.