3/27/2007
Have you ever been asked this question, or tried to answer it… fully? Your “story” is about you – where you’ve come from, where you are now, where you’re going. It can be about a person or a business. It can be in the past, the present, and the future. But it is more than where you were born, where you went to school, or what your job is today. It is more than a resume, which is a series of individual stories unique to each person. It’s much more.
Your story is about your soul – who you are, what you stand for, what’s important, what you care about. It’s about the values that are important to you as a person. It’s about having successes, having failures, and about events in your life. However, it’s not about the events defining you as a person – rather, it’s how you define the events and put them in the context of your story.
Do you have life goals? Places you want to go or things you want to accomplish or experience? People you want to experience them with? Companies have business goals and objectives that they want to reach every quarter or year. As individuals, we should have life goals too, and ask ourselves if what I am doing today will help reach a life goal.
Companies have stories too. They succeed and fail every day. There are winners and losers. There are those who struggle through difficult times and, with perseverance and hard work, manage to improve and thrive.
The NAMSA story is one of those successes. Started in 1967 by a scientist who turned in to an entrepreneur, NAMSA was the first independent company in the world to focus solely on testing medical device materials and pharmaceutical containers for safety. In fact, NAMSA started testing medical devices before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration starting regulating such products in 1976. It could be legitimately said that NAMSA created an industry that did not exist before it. At the time, medical device regulations were few and test methods were being adopted from the pharmaceutical industry and other compendia. The 1980s and 1990s brought increased regulations in the form of Good Laboratory Practices and ISO standards for worldwide acceptance of test methods for biocompatibility and sterilization. Today, regulations abound in the U.S., Europe, Japan and other industrialized nations with differing levels of sophistication and product approval processes. But the values that defined NAMSA in the 1960s and today remain unchanged... do high quality, honest work for our clients, sell them only what they need and no more, deliver timely results and services, fulfill our regulatory obligations, respect our Associates by paying them a fair wage and providing opportunities for personal development and advancement, grow and manage financial resources judiciously for the continuity of the business, and above all conduct ourselves with integrity. It’s wanting to make a scientific contribution to every medical device in the world.
It’s these latter values that are the NAMSA story – the ones that stand the test of time. The ones that, despite challenges here or there, are the reason we’ve been around more than 40 years and why we’ll be here 40 more. It’s what I tell people when they ask me what the NAMSA story is.
So the next time someone asks you, “What’s your story,” what will you tell them?
John Gorski
President and CEO
