For the most part, Weldon confined himself to fostering better communication and more frequent collaboration among Johnson disparate operation. But the company had to take care that these attempts to achieve synergy though collaboration among the business units did not quash the entrepreneurial spirit that has spearheaded most of the firm’s growth to date. Jerry Caccott, managing director of consulting those alliances group, emphasized that cultivating those alliances “would be challenging in any organization, but particularly in an organization that has been so successful because of its decentralized culture ”