The CVS Caremark Corporation

The CVS Caremark Corporation is a pharmaceutical company based in the United States and it was founded in nineteen sixty three by Stanley and Sidney Goldstein and Ralph Hoagland with the intention of selling health and beauty products. Within a year of its founding, this company had a chain of seventeen stores and when it was acquired by Melville’s in nineteen sixty nine, it had a total of forty stores. After this company was acquired by Melville’s, the driving force behind its growth was its new president, Franklin Rooney. Under Rooney, CVS saw tremendous growth due to the fact that after he took over the corporation, he concentrated more on the development of the pharmaceutical side of the business. By the time of his retirement in nineteen eighty five, Rooney had turned CVS into one of the most diversified retail chains in the United States through his knack for making brilliant acquisitions during his tenure.

Stanley Goldstein succeeded Rooney in nineteen eighty five and his major task was to continue the colossal work that his predecessor had left behind. Goldstein proved to be up to the task and under him; CVS continued its expansion with some structural renovation taking place in the corporation. Some of this renovation took place in nineteen eighty nine when the corporation created a profit sharing plan and an employee stock ownership plan whose intention was to distribute six percent of the corporation’s common stock among its employees as a way of motivating them.  Despite the recessive economy of the eighties, CVS continued to grow and rake in profits throughout the period (Eder, 1999).

Currently, the corporation has stores in forty five states within America and Puerto Rico and it sells prescription drugs and a wide assortment of other goods which include beauty products, cosmetics, photography services and convenience foods. It also has healthcare clinics located within CVS stores through which it provides healthcare services and in some places, they have centers that deal specifically with people affected by diabetes. The merger between CVS and Caremark a few years ago continued to ensure that the corporation’s continued growth went on uninterrupted (Pimlott, 2006).

It can be said that it is the strong leadership style of the company from its founding to the present that has spurred its extremely fast growth throughout the recent decades even when growth was not expected at all. The strong leadership has also enabled CVS to make ventures into the selling of merchandise which was not traditionally in its preserve through the acquisition of retail chains which dealt in products other than those which it was promoting at the time. These acquisitions have made sure that the diversification of this corporation continues and because of this diversification, it is likely to survive any form of a collapse in the sales of a particular product. This is due to the fact that it does not completely rely on a single product to make a profit and instead, it has a diverse range of them to ensure its survival in the very competitive market of the world today.

The company is headed by a Chief Executive Officer who is also the president of the corporation. Directly below him are the executive vice presidents each heading a specific department within the organization namely: Finances; Health Care Strategy and Management; Operations; Pharmacy Services; Legal; and Human Resources among others.