Module 2-1 Responses (2 needed)

Karen Lynch assumed duties as chief executive officer (CEO) at Consumer Value Stores (CVS) and quickly earned recognition for culture leadership (IWN, 2021). Culture serves as a core component of ethics, driving organization's purpose into reality. Under Lynch, that purpose included delivering vaccines during the worst health pandemic in a century, touching on social, cultural, technological, and geopolitical fronts with her company's logistics chain. Of all the ways to serve a society suffering terrible illness, logistics hardly comes to mind, but timely delivery of vaccines to communities in demand is one way a company with a purpose can deliver. Inheriting the brand from Larry Merlo, who struggled with getting protective gear to drive-thru testing centers (The Fly, 2020), Lynch continued to work on ways to improve the logistics chain, eventually making comments to the press after a meeting at the White House (Mena Report, 2021). What this shows is that a company with fairly substantial control over the supply and demand of prescription drugs took initiative to improve nationwide health outcomes through work to make tests and drugs available. While there may be political pressures and implications considering the White House investment in the topic, there are also business stakeholders that would likely be weighing the public relations win against the shareholder value of a high-demand and high-profit relationship. Lynch, as CEO, determined that the company's mission, which includes improving lives, outweighed any business interest. This is ethics incorporated into the core mission of the business.

As for criticism, there's plenty of room to correct course on US health care. CVS is hardly an advocate for change, and the company may in fact benefit from insurance company behavior that costs customers medicine, money, and time as they navigate bureaucracies designed to reject their claims or change their prescriptions. For CVS to truly live their value system, they're going to have to choose customers over companies in the contest of health care. This means advocating for lower prices and reducing their own margins, which is a tough case to make in the board room among shareholders and bean counters. 

References

CVS CEO: Lack of protective gear slowing drive-thru testing launch, CNBC says. (2020, March 24).  The Fly.  https://go-gale-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&u=nhc_main&id=GALE%7CA618416996&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco

Karen S. Lynch, CEO of CVS Health, Selected as the Hunt Scanlon “Excellence in Culture” Award Recipient. (2021, November 20).  Investment Weekly News.  https://go-gale-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/ps/i.do?p=GBIB&u=nhc_main&id=GALE%7CA682390517&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco

United States : CVS Health President and CEO Karen Lynch comments on White House supply chain meeting, improving outlook. (2021, November 30).  Mena Report.  https://go-gale-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/ps/i.do?p=GBIB&u=nhc_main&id=GALE%7CA684291522&v=2.1&it=r&sid=ebsco

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