ABSTRACT
O n a brilliant August m orning in 1994, a large crowd of officers, employees, and stockholders o f the medical device firm Medtronic, Inc., gathered outside the company headquarters in a northern suburb o f Minneapolis, M innesota, U . S. A., for an im portant ceremony. The occa sion was the retirement from the board o f directors o f Earl E. Bakken, who in 1949 had co-founded the company and had helped make it into the worlds leading m anufacturer o f cardiac pacemakers. 1 There were many speeches that morning, but the highlight o f the ceremony was the unveiling of a full-sized statue of Bakken that stood facing the main door o f the company headquarters building. Partially encircling the statue was a low stone wall engraved with the mission statement that Bakken had written in the early 1960s, which was still in force more than three decades later. W hile the words spelled out the values for which the company had become famous in the medical community, the visual symbol o f M edtronic’s corporate culture was held in the statues out stretched right hand. There, forged in bronze, was a replica of the device that Bakken had invented during the winter o f 1957-58-the worlds first wearable transistorized cardiac pacemaker. 2
The bronze replica in the statue’s hand represents the crude prototype that Bakken made at the request o f a renowned heart surgeon at the University of Minnesota. This prototype, housed in aluminum and con taining only two transistors, had been intended for tests with dogs but was used on human patients within days of its invention. Soon afterward, Bakken and his employees introduced a more refined version of the tran sistor pacemaker in a black plastic shell; about ten of these went into clinical use at the University. Later in 1958, M edtronic began manufac turing a commercial version in white plastic-the ‘5800. ’ All three ver sions were essentially identical in circuitry and other interior features. The white production model was best known to doctors in the U . S. and abroad, but it is the earliest model that seems to hold the most meaning for Earl Bakken and others at his company. 3
For M edtronic, this first pacemaker has come to embody the firms creation myth. (We use myth in the sense o f a story that gives meaning to the collective experience o f a particular group. ) D uring M edtronic’s first decade, the company had led a precarious existence as a repair service for hospital electrical equipm ent and a regional distributor for a m anufacturer o f electrocardiographs. M edtronic also customized
Figure 1. Bronze statue o f Earl E. Bakken holding a prototype o f his transistorized pacemaker, at Medtronic headquarters near Minneapolis, Minnesota. Courtesy o f Karen Larsen.
