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.

韦尔登：你知道，这是很有趣的。我想，权力下放和权力集中都各有利弊，强生也许是权力下放的一个典范。当然会有挑战，因为如果将权力下放的话，对公司就不会有权力集中时那么多的控制力，但是其优势在于，你可以有很多优秀的领导者，因而你就可以对这些领导者领导公司的能力给予肯定和信任。比如说，我们来看一下日本，我们的公司在那里是由当地人进行管理的，因为他们了解消费者，他们了解与他们做生意的人，他们了解当地政府和市场的需 求，而如果是我们在美国对日本的公司进行管理的话，那将会是一件很难的事情，因为我们将很难了解到当地人了解到的东西。因此我认为，尽管权力下放使我们少了些许控制力，但是那也同时给我们提供了很多机会。但是，在我们共同努力的信条和价值体系条件下，我们对于我们的领导层和企业的管理者非常有信心，我们也必须要对他们寄予信任和信心。我想，权力下放还有一个好处就是，它给我们提供了发挥人们潜力的机会。我们能够给很多人提供机会， 使他们在不同的领域工作，在小公司里面工作，经过一次次的挫折之后，他们能够不断成长并向大公司里发展。有关于你前面问到的文化利益的问题，我想那就是你可以使当地人对公司进行管理。在全世界管理我们公司的人大多都是在当地的市场环境下成长起来的，他们了解那个市场，并且是在那个环境下逐渐发展起来的。无论消费者是谁，他们都能够很好地了解到消费者的需求。我将那些挑战看作是我们所能够获得的益处，真的，我们并不把那看作是挑战。因为权力集中的问题在于，如果一个人犯了一个错误的话，那有可能会使整个组织机构都瘫痪。因此采取权力下放的方式，我们可以有很多优秀的领导者，你必须要对他们有信心，让他们来管理公司，同时你也不需要担心有人会犯一个较大的错误。