世界500强CEO访谈 第38期:强生集团韦尔登 我们的产品丰富(2)（在线收听）

 　　Weldon: You know it’s interesting. I think there are pluses and minuses to decentralized and centralized. I think J and J is probably the reference company for being decentralized. There are challenges to it, and that is you may not have as much control as you may have in a centralized company. But the good part of it is that you have wonderful leaders, you have great people that you have a lot of confidence and faith in and they run the businesses. If you look at Japan, for example，we have the local management running the companies. They understand the consumer, they understand the people they are dealing with and they understand the government and the needs in the marketplace. Whereas it’s very hard to run it from the US and to think that we would know enough to be able to do this. And so I think it really affords us a lot of opportunities by being decentralized; what you do lose is control. But, with our credo and the value system that we work under, we feel very confident about our leadership and our management—and you have to have trust and confidence in them .I think the other thing that decentralization does is that it gives you a tremendous opportunity to develop people. You give them a lot of opportunity to work in different areas, to work in smaller companies, to make mistakes and to ultimately move to larger companies. I also think that the benefit of the cultural side that you asked about is that you do have local people running the businesses. The men and women who run our businesses around the world usually are people who grew up in those markets, understand those markets and develop themselves in those markets. They can relate to the needs of the customer, whoever that customer may be. The challenge really... I see it as a great benefit, rather than a challenge. This is because the problem with centralization is if one person makes one mistake, it can cripple the whole organization. This way, you've got wonderful people running businesses. You have to have confidence in them, but you let them run it— and you don’t have to worry about making that one big mistake.