Today, I wrote about one of the most audacious corporate experiments in years: A $50 billion company’s plan to run with far fewer bosses and far fewer rules.
Bill Anderson, the newish CEO of Bayer, has spent years thinking about what's wrong with large companies. The sprawling bureaucracy of corporations is “spirit crushing” and a waste of human potential, he says. In an organization with layers of approval chains and meetings that bleed into more meetings, many professionals feel disconnected and tap out of the core business.
“Bureaucracy is like the wall that you can't get past,” he says.
The solution, he believes, is not to reorganize or streamline the existing bureaucracy, as many companies are now attempting. It’s to blow the whole thing up and replace it with what he calls “dynamic shared ownership,” or DSO.
In this new model, employees will operate in small, largely self-managed teams that set and work on a new task for 90 days, at which point teams regroup around a new set of goals.
To cut hierarchies, Bayer is reassigning thousands of leaders, making some of them individual contributors and letting others go. The remaining managers will have as many as 20 people reporting to them instead of a half dozen or so currently. In return, many of the managers will unload some chores to AI, including routine expense report approvals. These leaders also will be working shoulder-to-shoulder with their charges on small-team projects.
Here's our story on this new approach. What do you make of all of this? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
