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Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
- JohnClark1337 2y ago[dead]
- ranger_danger 2y agoThis certainly won't end in disaster.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Vaslo 2y agoThe WSJ article mentions that the CEO mapped out his plan at a cafe with a McKinsey consultant. No matter how badly this goes, sounds like McKinsey will make out again…
- roughly 2y agoAh yes, McKinsey, notable experts in decentralized organization and anarchist decision-making practices - although I suppose they make it up as they go along with everything else, so why not this, too.
- b112 2y agoalthough I suppose they make it up as they go along Well, that sort of fits with a lack of organization.
- candiddevmike 2y agoWhat under if McKinsey will start pushing this at other orgs?
- refurb 2y agoIt's basically what tech has been doing for a while. Or at least a derivation of it. Agile, self-managed team, "retrospectives", "scrums". At least that's how it was sold to my employer when they had the same change not long ago. "This is what Google does and they are innovative. Don't you want to be innovative like Google?" Checks all the boxes a CEO wants to hear.
- MForster 2y agoThis is not at all what Google does, though.
- Voultapher 2y agoOne could also argue that Google by and large doesn't innovate, they mostly acquire the innovative stuff.
- CalChris 2y agoIt is, however, what Google tried. https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-managers-30f73e862ff4 https://medium.com/illumination/google-once-fired-all-manage...
- al_borland 2y agoMy company just called the managers, “product owners”, and the project managers, “scrum masters”, and said we were now Agile and doing Scrum. Nothing about it was self-managed. We haven’t had a retrospective in 3 years, despite my insistence that we desperately need them.
- refurb 2y agoHuh, my company pushed the Agile/scrum/retrospective thing at the same time as talking about "fit for purpose" teams that would be formed based on need/skills, not the old structure (this team works on this only). Since specific teams were now gone, less need for managers. The idea was agile/scrum/retros was a way to manage the "fluidity".
- al_borland 2y agoMcKinsey had to pay a settlement for their role in the opioid crisis. It’s very possible this will lead to some kind of tragedy related to Bayer medications which will also find McKinsey at fault for their horrible advice.
- HDThoreaun 2y agoTheres nothing criminal about bad advice. McKinsey's problem with the opioid crisis was that they were advising Purdue to commit crimes.
- ekianjo 2y agoMcKinsey is just a group that will rationalize any decision you want to make in the first place. It's management decision laundering, by consultants.
- joezydeco 2y agoI wonder if it's the same consultant he hired into the company as the organizational coach for this shuffle.
- deleted 2y ago
- KpopUser 2y ago[flagged]
- coretx 2y agoIt's the same as this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben Known for producing Zyklon-B. That's what they gassed Jews with during WW2.
- itsdrewmiller 2y agohttps://archive.ph/hAmMx https://archive.ph/hAmMx
- neonate 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20240421090533/https://fortune.com/europe/2024/04/11/pharmaceutical-giant-bayer-ceo-bill-anderson-rid-bosses-staff-self-organize-save-2-billion/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240421090533/https://fortune.c...
- CoastalCoder 2y agoI've been in one self-organizing department, and it was one of the worst experiences of my career. I expect they're going to regret this.
- victor9000 2y agoWhat problems did you encounter?
- CoastalCoder 2y agoShort summary: biggest asshole gets his way.
- throwaway74432 2y agoSo just like a non-self-organizing department then?
- boznz 2y agoor "best friends with the big boss" gets his way, this is an organization problem and the start of the slippery slide for a good company to become a bad company and is the point where most CEO's fail to do their duty.
- listenallyall 2y agoSelf-organizing = Lord of the Flies
- candiddevmike 2y agoA self organizing department within a sea of non-self organizing departments sounds terrible. Thankfully this is being implemented company wide.
- lolive 2y agoI personally say no to my boss 70% of the time, and do things my own way. Usually my n+2 likes the results I deliver, so I am reasonably covered by him, politically. [that will probably not last long, anyway]
- Brajeshwar 2y agoI have forgotten the name of another big company that tried this and kinda failed. I hope something comes out of this for Bayer. I remember this because I liked the idea in general and the term stuck with me -- Holacracy (I think I read a book too). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
- deodar 2y agoZappos, I believe. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zappos-quietly-backed-away-holacracy-090102533.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zappos-quietly-backed-away-ho...
- lunfardl 2y agoI worked for a company that claimed to use this system. Got fired after arguing with my totally no boss.
- b112 2y agoYou mean your 'advisor'?
- Barrin92 2y agoOver half a century old but as relevant as ever, The Tyranny of Structurelessness https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm This means that to strive for a structureless group is as useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.
- mcbishop 2y agoThere's strong structure with holacracy. There's a hierarchy of roles / responsibilities. It seeks to mitigate parallel informal power dynamics. Consider reading the book.
- smcleod 2y agoI’ve worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4 1/2 years and it’s been fantastic. Here’s to getting rid of them in most (but certainly not all!) places.
- huytersd 2y agoWho checks on if you’ve completed your assigned work. This can only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
- smcleod 2y agoMy team meets every morning for 15 mins to discuss our progress and any blockers. Then we meet every week or two to pick up work. It works well.
- anon7725 2y agoThere are multiple dimensions in the latent space that is contemporary white collar management. One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the needs and wants of others. Another is doing administrative things like who has done this compliance course or who needs a security authorization. A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka compensation). A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track (aka technical leadership). A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other stakeholders are honored. If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they probably won’t feel much like what you’d call a “manager” today. This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
- fourfun 2y agoYour stakeholders?
- csnover 2y agoBy the time someone has entered the workforce it should not be necessary to be ‘checked on’ by some surrogate parental figure. In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work because it is part of the social contract of working on a team. They don’t need to be told what to do. If someone is falling behind, they’ll talk to other team members and work together to get back on track. You are there to help your coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn’t have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly; everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it’s something they’re interested in doing and are competent in that role. It’s only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea arises that you’ll just hire untrustworthy people and then beat them into submission by making a workplace into a prison.
- b112 2y agoThere seems to be a bit of over-correct going on here: When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and Peace. and “It’s just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen.” So sure, makes sense that there needs to be some correction. Yet basically it seems that they're just tossing everything into the bin. Perhaps an actual review of that entire rule book would have been more prudent? I expect they'll have some sort of disaster, then turn around an start writing that rule book from scratch. I wonder if something crazy will happen. They'll end up with the equivalent of tenured professors, with unlimited grants, working on all sorts of pet projects, yet the result being an explosion of research.
- braiamp 2y agoIf you continue to read further down you will read this: > Employees of Bayer’s consumer health division have already gotten a taste of this new structure—they’re being shown how to practically sign off on one another’s ideas without a manager in sight. This worked in a limited fashion and showed corporate the results they wanted. Now they will do this company wide.
- leverknudel_tw 2y agoIt was a case study in some vitamin packaging. Radically different than introducing a new chemotherapy molecule.
- hilux 2y agoIt's "holacracy" all over again! How soon they forget.
- titanomachy 2y agoYeah this immediately made me think of that “reinventing organizations” (by the holacracy guy) which I read (skimmed) I think 10 years ago. I kind of liked the ideas, although he made up some weird terminology which I didn’t think would ever catch on. Were those ideas debunked or something?
- azinman2 2y agoBut how would this really work? Someone wants to create a new drug, but it’ll cost millions of euros and years of trials to bring to the market. Who approves and commits?
- p1esk 2y agoThey are only firing 40% of the managers. There will be plenty left.
- m3m3tic 2y agoJust another run-of-the-mill post-ZIRP bloated org chart cleanup with a nice PR spin. Spend more time innovating on your products, it's a mistake to innovate on company hierarchy, despite what PR departments like to suggest.
- lazide 2y agoNot that they’ll be able to talk to anyone in their org with those types of setups.
- naasking 2y agoBuild a coalition of people who work in various departments, legal, marketing, research, etc. with enough momentum that could be enough to earn the credibility required. Another possibility is straight up democratic voting. These large investments place the company in financial peril, so maybe everyone should have a day. There are many ways to organize, hierarchical top-down control is useful but overused.
- lkrubner 2y agoI've seen a similar idea implemented with a lot of tech teams. In particular, I've seen companies try to be "flat," meaning that the software developers don't have managers, but instead, the software developers are expected to self-organize. But all of the normal tasks of a manager still exist: someone has to coordinate the work of multiple teams when those teams have zones of concern that overlap, and someone needs to be able to assign a budget, spend a budget, and take full responsibility from both the good and the bad that arises from spending that budget. If money is spent poorly, someone has to take the blame. If money is invested wisely, someone has to get the credit. What tends to happen (in "flat" organizations) is that a lot of the coordination work gets pushed down to the individual software engineers, so that they now need to spend more of their time on coordination activities, and they spend less time actually writing code. I've seen "flat" organizations where senior engineers spend as much as 25 hours a week in meetings, because they've taken over all of the coordination work that would have previously been handled by an engineering manager. Decisions about budget are rarely extended down to individual software engineers, so instead those decisions go up the hierarchy: you've now got the CEO making small-scale spending decisions that should have been passed down to some middle manager. For instance, at Futurestay.com, the CEO was dragged into an argument about what managed hosting service to use for MongoDB, a decision where the difference was maybe $200 a month. Obviously the CEO should not get dragged into spending decisions of that scale (unless you're talking about a 5 person startup that is just getting started). If it was possible to wave a magic wand and make all management work cease to be necessary, then every company in the world would do that. But instead, many companies will make the managers cease to exist, while the management work is still there. And the overall result tends to be a loss of productivity, either because essential coordination activities are left undone, or because talented specialists are forced to do management work for which they have no training. Also, if I might comment on a controversial issue, so-called "flat" organizations tend to be especially weak at enforcing discipline. If a worker is lazy, or if a worker does poor work, then they would normally run the risk of being fired, but in a "flat" organization they can often get away with poor performance for a long time, because fewer people are tracking their performance. But I do think Bayer has a grasp on a thread of at least one important idea: they claim they are doing this to save $2.5 billion. That implies they think the management work can be done by other employees who are paid less money than the managers. And that implies that the managers were overpaid, relative to the value they delivered. While I think Bayer is making a mistake by getting rid of its managers, I also think that managers are probably overpaid relative to the value they deliver. When I was at ShermansTravel.com we had a very competent project manager who oversaw the tech team. She did a fantastic job of estimating tickets, prioritizing tickets, and keeping engineers focused on the right tickets. But she was paid less than any of the software engineers. And I think that is the right model for most companies, including Bayer. The default assumption, everywhere, is that managers need to be paid more than the people they manage, but why is that? I think there are many cases where the managers should be paid less than the people they manage.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoHolocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
- lolive 2y agoThe question is whether most middle-managers are able to take impactful decisions. My personal experience is that 80% of them are [Steve Jobs quote:] « bozos ».
- al_borland 2y agoMost middle managers aren’t there to be impactful, they are there to remove the busy work from whoever is above them. Mediate conflict within the team, approve vacation requests, do the paperwork, and clarify direction for the team as set by the person above them, so the team isn’t bothering the bigger boss with silly things like, “what is my priority?”
- em-bee 2y agothe problem is that in order to do that they are given authority over the team when they should be seen as a teams assistant or secretary. the manager should report to the team and not the reverse.
- aitchnyu 2y agoIs there an example of manager who has lots of reports, organized into teams which have secretaries?
- em-bee 2y agonot that i know of. maybe project managers compare most closely. if they exists then they may not be visible from the outside. i also expect the salary to be lower than the senior developers, which means it is not a job a senior would be promoted to.
- refurb 2y agoThey actually learned it from tech. The whole Agile, self-organizing teams and flat structure was sold by HR consultants to tech, and years later (because pharma doesn't move very fast and because "innovative" tech did it) they adopted it. Bayer is actually one of the last ones. It's just the flavor of the month. Matrix organizations were a decade ago. Something new will come along later. The structure makes some problems better (less bureaucracy because fewer decision makers - no need to get 6 levels of middle management to approve) but creates new problems (lack of visibility across organizations so dumb decisions get made because of a lack of information). The workers basically have to keep doing the same job with fewer resources. I can't wait until we come full circle and go back to a pyramid org chart structure a la 1950's. It'll be fun to see how the HR consultants sell it.
- leosanchez 2y agoThey just won Bundesliga :).
- bjornsing 2y ago> Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He noted on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast in late May that when there’s no real constraint on hiring, “you hire someone, and the first thing that person wants to do is hire other people.” The reason is that “the more people who report to you, the higher your prestige, the more your power in the organization…So every budgeting process is, ‘I really want to hire,’ and that to me is the root of all the excess.” I’ve seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course it went totally out of control. But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask you “How big was your team?”, and they won’t be impressed when you say “I managed to keep it down to four people”. It’s just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive side of our brains (“You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?”).
- bertmuthalaly 2y agoThis is the thesis of Bullshit Jobs!
- boznz 2y agoBullshit jobs infect the whole stack from the board of management down, but "middle-managers" are probably the most over-represented.
- jjav 2y agoYes, this is frustrating when one cares about efficiency (I do). Whether number of people or amount of budget overall, you're seen as better the more you have. When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I be seen as a loser.
- 35mm 2y agoSame with marketing and other budgets. The question is always ‘what ad budget did you manage?’. Not ‘what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?’.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoOfficial post from them on this in January: https://www.bayer.com/media/en-us/bayer-aims-to-sustainably-improve-performance-with-new-organization/ https://www.bayer.com/media/en-us/bayer-aims-to-sustainably-...
- agent86 2y agoValve - the PC gaming giant and owner of Steam - is very famously a flat organization. Their Handbook for New Employees[1] that goes into detail about how they operate has made its way out into the world a few times as well. [1] - https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewE...
- kqr2 2y agoThat handbook is from 2012 so 12 years old now. Are there any updates?
- mucle6 2y agoI interviewed there, and took a tour of their office. From what everyone said and what I saw, I don't think the handbook is outdated.
- incrudible 2y agoIs there any evidence that this approach outperforms? If you rest on a cash cow, basically any methodology that doesn't literally slaughter the cow is going to work out.
- Draiken 2y agoIsn't the fact that they're the market leader in what they do proof enough? Would they have created/found this cash cow if they were a traditional company? People try to poke holes in their ways, yet they have made legendary games, amazing hardware and absolutely dominate the game distribution market. Basically all of their competitors use the traditional management style. What other evidence would you expect?
- incrudible 2y agoA sample of one isn't enough, and in any event their success is not reproducible. They had a major title in Half Life 2, convincing people to install Steam, but that was their last major title and it is not clear that they used this process at the time. Going forward: Someone else created Counter Strike, someone else created DoTA, someone else created Portal, someone else created Team Fortress, someone else create Left 4 Dead. Valve took these projects on and polished them, but they didn't really create something new until Artifact - which failed in the market. What you also don't see is all the unannounced projects that went nowhere, because that's what you get when people just get to play around on their own, indefinitely.
- ekianjo 2y agoFor Bayer's it's less about getting rid of bosses, but just getting rid of the huge amount of fat they have accumulated over the years, making any kind of decision a battle between layers and layers of mid-managers.
- hilbert42 2y ago"Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut:..." More accurately that should read: "Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin and co-inventing then widely commercializing heroin (diacetylmorphine), has been stuck in a rut:..." Bayer's chemist Felix Hoffmann synthesised heroin just short of two weeks after that of aspirin in 1897. Bayer thought it 'heroic' and thus called it heroin then the company had the audacity to market it as a non-addictive substitute for morphine. The rest is history. When discussing Bayer we should never forget this.
- salad-tycoon 2y agoIt’s even worse than that. Bayer is infamous for its letters that survived of it negotiating to buy 150 Jewish women for experiments. They were on good condition, they all died from the experimental sleeping pill. They also tested vaccines. Also its parent company made zyklon B. Example of the letter: “Received the order for 150 women. Despite their macerated condition they were considered satisfactory. We will keep you informed of the developments regarding the experiments,” “The experiments were performed. All test persons died. We will contact you shortly about a new shipment.” https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ca73-the-dark-history-of-bayer-chemicals-1 https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ca73-the-dark-history-of-b...
- hilbert42 2y agoYou're damn right, its record has been terrible.
- aubanel 2y agoWow that's disgusting. We generally agree after some criminal decisions that decision-makers should be punished, and political parties should be forbidden. Why not apply this to companies ? I see the benefits (punishing stakeholders and deleting an institution that did terrible use of its power), and the downside (losing jobs) does not seem that terrible.
- throwaway74432 2y agoAnd people are flabbergasted at the healthy skepticism towards pharmaceutical companies, when they literally treat people like expendable cattle at every chance they get.
- andsoitis 2y agoyou might get rid of managers, but you will still need leaders.
- imwillofficial 2y agoThis will end hilariously
- pvaldes 2y agoSoon a lot of workers will need to start buying Aspirins by Kilograms. Bayer wins again.
- hasoleju 2y agoThe problem with too many layers of management is mainly that they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions. The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone, otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs to be made because they are too far away from the actual impact. The result is that the decision is not made at all. Instead they procrastinate by asking for more details about the decision and the options. If you have only one layer you get a decision very fast.
- SoftTalker 2y agoThe layers above do likely understand the actual business goals better, and want to be sure that this thing you are asking for is actually going to support achieving those goals. Ideally that is the case, anyway.
- michaelt 2y agoTo an extent, sure. If you've got the CEO, and you've got front-line workers doing the actual value-producing business, you can have two layers in between, sure. Maybe three layers. But once you get to four or five layers? I hope your culture and productivity and ways of working were exactly where they need to be, because they're now impossible for anyone to consciously change.
- seb1204 2y agoI work in an org with 5 layers of management. I do think CEO and top management have good strategies and big picture thinking etc. It is the bottom two layers where is see the biggest issues and challenges. We are not a software company but as an engineering/technology company most of our work happens in systems and software. Lowest level management needs to know, really know the software and concept to support workers. Else it is just smooth talking and buzz words.
- fizx 2y agoHi, sometime middle-manager here. The goal isn't to have me make decisions, its to let people around me make decisions quickly and well enough that most of the time it works out, and when it doesn't, we can roll back easily. If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last resort.
- incrudible 2y ago> In the coming years, Bayer’s workforce will consist of constantly evolving “5,000 to 6,000 self-directed teams” that work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project. That's how you produce nothing, but a lot of it.
- ChainOfFools 2y agoI seem to recall that the central takeaway from the essay tyranny of structurelessness is that when one affects to dispose of an official, formal and acknowledged power hierarchy, it simply reappears as an unofficial, informal, actively disavowed, and even more paranoid version of its former self.
- TulliusCicero 2y agoYeah, the issue with social power is that it can't really be created or destroyed, just reorganized. Similar to how if governments get too weak, you end up with warlords/gangs just taking their place, power abhors a vacuum and all that.
- cyanydeez 2y agoYou mean businesses, not warlords.
- Drakim 2y agopotato, potahto
- TulliusCicero 2y agoNo, I was talking about when governments lose even basic ability to control the peace, when they can no longer keep the monopoly on violence expected of sovereign states. Haiti, for instance.
- 082349872349872 2y agoThe first thing I thought of when reading the title about self-organising workers was: didn't we used to call that a "soviet"?
- hnbad 2y agoThe difference is that in soviets (in the original sense) the workers held actual power. Bayer still wants full control over their workers, they just want to offload all the responsibility normally held by middle management to them as well. They're trying to get rid of "hierarchies" without getting rid of the power structure. I don't see how this benefits the workers at all.
- ThinkBeat 2y ago"Well hello there. It is I Bill Anderson" "How good to see you all". "A year ago we got rid of middle management, and it is a huge success" "Sadly, we need to cut another 1000 jobs, but we all understand that." "my private jet needs to be replaced and I need a bigger bonus" "Now you need to self-organize and pick the 1000 coworkers who wont be co-workers anymore. "You will have 30 minutes or organize and remember this is a flat structure". "Also what do you think the severance package should be?" "It will be financed directly from the remaning workers' wages." "We wont have anyone like evil HR make these decisions anymore now you can do it yourself". "BTW this (carnage) will all be streamed live on Hulu where watchers are already placing bets"
- _the_inflator 2y agoI am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and most likely some sort of agile model. There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people. Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the process. What sounds great is more or less success theatre as well as inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report. Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear. Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for example. I’ve seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide. People will regret QBRs. Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also companies want to include younger folks, because they are on average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective. Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide between them. Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the hidden layer. I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review is rampant when you need to report all the time results. Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn’t. It means even more being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee and most successful under different circumstances? Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way. QBRs don’t help if there is a clear product strategy missing. There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.
- andrekandre 2y agonoob question: what does qbr stand for in this context? i thought maybe quarterly business review, but not sure after reading several descriptions around...
- QuantumGood 2y agoYou're correct, QBR = quarterly business review in this context
- giantg2 2y agoSelf-organizing still leads to bosses, but they just get paid like regular workers. My company does this sort of thing but with dev chapter leads. The chapter leads have no management training and no authority. They don't even really know what you're doing since they're on a separate team and have their own coding work. They're senior devs that have added management responsibilities and are just paid as senior devs. Fuck that.
- arwhatever 2y agoReminds me a bit of that Tyranny of Structurelessness essay, well worth a read.
- throwaway2037 2y agoI never heard of it before this discussion. Here is a link that I found on Google: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- selimthegrim 2y agoI had this job except I didn’t even get paid as a senior dev.
- sokoloff 2y agoImplicit in this is that managers should get paid more than senior devs. Why? Perhaps senior devs should get paid the same as similar-level managers, principal devs the same as similar-level managers, etc.
- doktrin 2y agoAt my current company, management is an entry level position that recruits fresh grads. It’s essentially secretarial work under a different name. So certainly in our case there’s no justification for a manager out earning any individual contributors (but they still do, because manager).
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- ofslidingfeet 2y agoThat doesn't sound like they have a big lawsuit/investigation on the radar or anything.
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- kemiller 2y agoThese types of move are sold as empowering workers but they are really about kicking the ladder so there’s no pathway to the executive class. It’s always hard to find leaders who aren’t empire builders, but this makes it impossible.
- AlbertCory 2y agoState prison "inmates who are really managers" is certainly a danger. Or "All employees are equal, but some are more equal than others." However, this is worth a try. HR can devote itself to slapping down anyone who tries to become the toughest convict in the yard. Or the meanest girl in the cheerleading squad. Middle managers are invariably the source of all corporate problems. So postulating "we're not going to have any" is a good start, but then you have to control the problems that inevitably arise from that.
- esel2k 2y ago« It is just lots of noise » thats what people told me who know him/worked for him. The reality is that Bayer is in deep mud with their lawsuit and laying off lots of people in Germany is difficulty. If you pack it under a nice « we are modern, amazing shift » package, then he will get more support and also shareholders will be pleased (for a while). That’s my theory.
- Quarrel 2y agoThis was absolutely my first thought. In Germany he'll need to get buy-in from the board, which will include employee representatives (I've not looked at Bayer specifically, but either directly, or through a supervisory board that has real power), while also convincing shareholders that he's going to either goose the share price short-term, or actually add value long-term. While the hope for the German corporate model is that it delivers on long-term value for both employees & shareholders, it has not held up to much long term scrutiny unfortunately (which isn't to say it is bad, just that it hasn't necessarily shown itself to be better than most other corporate governance models). What it has done is make for innovative CEOs, and not necessarily in the US model, as they try and negotiate the pitfalls.
- gverrilla 2y agoI work close to Bayer, and it seems they are reorganizing deeply here in LatAm. Doesn't seem to be only about layoffs at all. And I'm talking about Sales departments, so that's directly correlated to bottom-line...
- stephc_int13 2y agoMiddle management is a plague. I am convinced that hierarchical structures and strong leadership are necessary, but some layers are often superfluous.
- stephc_int13 2y agoThe bad kind of middle managers want to hire more people to increase its power, regardless of the true interest of the company he is working for. Apply this logic recursively, if there is enough cash, and you can easily imagine where it goes. And it is also extremely difficult to unwind, they usually are pretty smart and cunning individuals who know how to make it look like all of this is necessary.
- mvkel 2y agoThis is going to crash and burn. Humans are tribal. We need hierarchy, whether it's defined or not. We need to know where we fit among a collection of people. At work, bureaucracy gets a bad rap because we like to cite the -bad- examples of it being executed. It's actually a very efficient way to explain someone's purpose, expectations, and tools to succeed. Ripping it out is just taking a c-level mentality of "wanting to be the leader" and applying it to people who don't necessarily want/need/have the capacity for such a role. As for de-layering, a person can really only properly handle 7 direct reports before things get dysfunctional. Delayering just means more people reporting to fewer managers. Expenses are saved, but dysfunction grows, along with opportunity cost.
- throwaway984393 2y agoTribal organization is different than hierarchy. Hierarchy is actually fairly recent; forms of it existed in terms of social class structure and rule for a few thousand years, but today's hierarchy was invented by the modern Christian church. Humans are social animals, so we absolutely need some form of social structure to function. But how that structure must work isn't rigidly defined. What is clear, though, is that since we aren't innately rational creatures, we do need a simplistic form of governance (typically a power structure of leaders).
- mvkel 2y agoThanks for this etymology. I went down a deep wiki hole!
- hnbad 2y agoBy saying "power structure of leaders" you're conflating leadership with power (and governance does not make us any more rational). For example, tribal "war chiefs" in indigenous groups were often seen as analogous to monarchs because that was our Western frame of reference at the time, but in practice their leadership was entirely consensual: if they were no longer needed, they abandoned their role and if their leadership was not considered satisfactory (i.e. poor performance, erosion of trust or abusive behavior) they were readily replaced. Human groups are first and foremost consent seeking. In order to override consent, you need violence. Any governance that is not consent-based (not consensus-based, those are different things) requires a threat of violence to persist itself. Whether it's the direct threat of the king's men burning down your cottage and killing your family or the state sending armed law enforcement officers to take away your things and incarcerate you or the indirect threat of your employer firing you and taking away your source of income that enables you to have a roof over your head and food on your table. It's worth remembering that most still widespread beliefs about animal hierarchies are likewise tainted by the power structures in which they were first described. I think the most infamous example is the myth of "alpha wolves" that even its author now regrets ever having published because it was based on a bad interpretation of the behavior of wolves in captivity (i.e. a man-made artificial environment), not the natural group dynamics of wild wolves.
- throwaway984393 2y ago[dead]
- throwaway918274 2y agoI wish I could get rid of my boss because I actually get shit done when I can just "self-organize" with my colleagues.
- andrekandre 2y ago> work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project. am i crazy or does intuitively this sounds like a recipe for disaster? how do you provide long-term value (never mind complete a new drug?) if everything changes every 90 days?
- hifromwork 2y agoThis sounds great for research. Anecdotally, my most productive and innovative years were in companies where I was just kinda left to my own devices, and was just expected to work on vaguely work-related things I like, together with my teammates, with zero direct input from my manager.
- fuzzfactor 2y ago>how do you provide long-term value You don't. Once you get to the point where a single financial quarter is in the same order-of-magnitude ballpark as the number of remaining quarters that could be sustained without re-capitalization, it kind of makes sense to operate everything with the same 90-day degree of granularity. It might help to better track the ratio of expected remaining quarters to actual remaining quarters if it really gets down to it. Of course, the shorter-term your outlook, the more likelihood that the most value-added embellishments will suffer the most, and in an inflationary environment when costs are rising unbearably, the long-term bottom line can have more downward pressure for this reason than the numerical inflation rate is imposing. Eventually you get to the point where anything that takes more than 5 minutes just isn't going to get accomplished by anyone on any team, and there's nothing anybody can do about it. Remember what it was like at GM when only the very top executives knew the company was heading straight for bankruptcy without some kind of a bailout? There was no more reason to continue to build cars as well as they were before. Everything on the vehicle doesn't have to last as long as a 5-year warranty if the company is not going to be around in 5 years anyway.
- anticensor 2y ago> Everything on the vehicle doesn't have to last as long as a 5-year warranty if the company is not going to be around in 5 years anyway. In product warranties, there is usually a chain of liability. It is not just the producer.
- GuB-42 2y agoA boss-less company seems ridiculous to me. Too many bosses is a problem, but so is too few. People don't seem to understand that good bosses are partners, not tyrants. Their job is to ensure that you can do yours efficiently. Remove the boss and you will spend way too much time trying to find things to do, only to realize the other guy is doing them too, or do things you are no good at instead of doing the things you do best. I think there has been experiments by communists of boss-less organizations, as it fits the ideology, but it didn't work well. Communism in practice becomes even more "bossy" than capitalism.
- siliconc0w 2y agoI do sometimes think a self organized hierarchy is better than one organized by fiat. Everyone always will say, "Ah - but then you just get an implicit hierarchy rather than an explicit one" with these types of systems but this isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, There shouldn't necessarily be one escalation channel for all types of conflict - technical decisions may get resolved differently than intra-personal conflicts. Or, if you force a team to be under an incompetent leader in a traditional structure, you get a really unhappy unproductive team but in an implicit structure that 'leader' is quickly sidelined when people figure out the quality of their decisions are poor, and if they want to get things done - which most do in a properly incentivized org- they should find another path.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alwaysbeconsing 2y ago> but in an implicit structure that 'leader' is quickly sidelined when people figure out the quality of their decisions are poor More likely to end up in turf war unless exist legible means to transition leadership. Some members will stick with old leader for various reason, some will push for new, some will be unawares and courted to choose their side. Person in leadership does not most likely give it up quietly and immediately.
- Havoc 2y agoStaff get paid by the hour for the most part. They have little reason to hustle. A startup has incentive for early employees to hustle. Bayer does not. Much like communism there is just no incentive to individually perform and “for the greater good” of the company or whatever generally isn’t persuasive
- xvilka 2y agoYou can have a performance bonus as an incentive. It is often "hacked" by people by doing only stuff that shows well in the performance review instead of the actual job/results, but that's another story.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- TaurenHunter 2y agoThat reminds me of what Ricardo Semler did at Semco: distribution of authority, employee participation in decision making, flattening of organization, rotating leadership roles, ... https://semcostyle.com/ricardo-semler-creating-organizational-change-through-employee-empowered-leadership/ https://semcostyle.com/ricardo-semler-creating-organizationa... https://mallenbaker.net/article/inspiring-people/ricardo-semler-the-radical-boss-who-proved-that-workplace-democracy-works/ https://mallenbaker.net/article/inspiring-people/ricardo-sem...
- chasd00 2y agoSelf organization works when every single person is ambitious enough to try to do something, brave enough to speak up and be heard, and humble enough to admit they could be wrong and be willing to compromise. No company is full of unicorns by definition. Self organization the scale of Bayer is doomed to fail and so obvious that I suspect it is part of some larger ulterior strategic plan.
- mynameisnoone 2y agoSort of works if you start that way. Meta sort of does this by putting the onus of creating and working on the right project on individual contributors. This is sort of product and project management evasion of division of labor by making everyone shoulder the burden of a cross-cutting concern without any help. Similar to getting rid of secretaries and personal assistants when some leaders aren't good at time management, scheduling, remembering people or events, or being the least bit organized... certain people plus the right personal assistant can comprise an immensely productive and impactful team like a superorganism. Drastically changing who holds priorities and assists with unblocking company-interfacing issues isn't leadership, it's anarchy without setting a tone or a direction. It just sounds like the leadership class doesn't have a clue what they're doing and will try a reorg and another layoff should the continued beatings not have the desired effect.
- danjl 2y agoManagers are just the symptom. Growth is the disease. There is no good solution to managers except being small enough to not need them at all. The idea that companies need to grow to survive is a myth. Staying small avoids so many problems.
- datascienced 2y agoMost companies to stay small but we hear about the big ones. Having armies of people probably does help then I imagine most of the time, unless you got that team of 10x ers (where the 10x is commutative) making an architecture that needs little maintenance and scales and marketing is built in (you are the product) etc. Selling healthcare software means you need lots of brains on different tasks. Twitter like companies could be lean but Microsofts can’t really be. Although Microsofts could be split up vertically if that is what you mean.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ClassyJacket 2y agoWell if it worked for Valve it'll obviously work for a pharmaceutical company!
- ironfootnz 2y agoI've been saying this for the last 10 years. Middle managers are Bozos. They don't let you get shit done and don't let you flush your ideas and brainstorm to products. I hope this tendency becomes the new norm.
- mediumsmart 2y agoAs a manager the key to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.
- travisgriggs 2y agoThis works ONLY if there are somewhat clear goals that people can work towards. If there's a principle or a purpose that transcends a managers personal agenda, then yeah, go for it. If not, this will be just anarchy. Open Source efforts have a been a wonderful laboratory to gather data on how different kinds of "low cost" management affect different types of efforts. I'm always surprised that given the explosion of those efforts for 20 years, businesses have never looked at them as a source of inspiration.
- ashvardanian 2y agoStartups often avoid Bio and Pharma because of how slow the big partners can be. Would be great to see other Pharma companies restructuring in similar way - reviving the sector and attracting startups and new technologies.
- lifeisstillgood 2y agoI agree that “managers” are these days mostly a legacy from Industrial Revolution. Supervisors at every few dozen people was a solution for armies and factories where the human does all the work. As those workers “do what they are told” and do not “leave the farm” you can call it feudalism if you want. But now the CPU does all the work so the coders are the new managers Yes we need fewer supervisor-managers, because we have / need fewer workers. Bauer thinks they just need a few brilliant chemists who can use AI to find that new protein. They might be right. But there is a flaw - they still Want the cash to flow upwards. They still see owning the capital as the right to get the returns to capital. They still want feudalism, but with fewer grabbing barons. Bauer seems to have missed the point that self-organising is democracy. That equal say means equal share That letting smart mission driven people organise will likely lead to better results around the mission, but also lead to them asking “why aren’t we getting better paid, and who is taking all the money?” FDR was called a traitor to his class. Or a hero for democracy.
- jongjong 2y agoThis sounds like a great time to be working at Bayer. What's going to happen though is that this will open up an internal power-grab and then whatever structure comes out of that will remain around for a while. That said, my gut tells me there is a good chance that whatever structure it ends up might be more efficient than top-down selection. My experience of top-down selection is absolutely horrible. The outcomes are worse than random. They probably already already did some internal studies to ascertain that teams of professionals could operate autonomously without management... And if they can, it makes sense that managers could only get in the way. You don't need managers if you have the right incentive structure. Most of what managers do is threaten and allocate punishment. Studies have shown that positive reinforcement is more effective at guiding behaviors than negative reinforcement. What kind of positive reinforcement can one get from a manager aside from a worthless pat on the back? Any employees today actually value that? Better cut out the managers and dangle big bonuses in front of the employees directly. The CEO at the top can save all the pats on the back for themselves!
- heisenbit 2y agoLet mr recap the article: Bayer acquired Mondanto, runs into financial trouble, middle managers are not approving things anymore [article does not try to dig deeper here] and middle managers get fired. Time honored shoot the messenger strategy.
- j45 2y agoThis sounds Management Consultanty nodding with CFO types.
- KaiserPro 2y agoUsing Meta as a source of good management is a fallacy that needs to be tackled. Meta has only managed to release one new "domestic" product since facebook advertising (threads) and only one of the features released on the main apps has stuck (reels) there is no strategic direction at meta, its a mass of noise, poor project management and bloated orgs craving for any metric of success other than what makes the user happy. Meta is only successful because it has one team that brings in >90% of all income(Ads). Not only that but its incredibly good at it. Every other department is effectively a cost center. Now Bayer might have ossified, given that it actually has a rule book (meta does not, it smears industrial quantities of docs at a wall to see what sticks)
- joenot443 2y agoDo you use Instagram much? Stories and Live have become such integral parts of the platform, for some people that's all they use it for. No posts, no reels, just ephemeral content. One sector of a company bringing in the lion's share of the revenue isn't necessarily a red flag, it's actually the case for a _lot_ of companies. G being the most obvious example. "Meta can't innovate" is a take I've been reading online since 2014. If your analysis was correct, do you really think it'd be worth nearly 10x what it was 10 years ago?
- mostlysimilar 2y ago> Stories and Live have become such integral parts of the platform, for some people that's all they use it for. No posts, no reels, just ephemeral content. And yet the entire feature is relegated to a tiny strip of horizontally-scrolled content at the top of the home tab. It's a complete failure of UI.
- pie420 2y agolook into the concept of "monopolism"
- kortilla 2y ago> If your analysis was correct, do you really think it'd be worth nearly 10x what it was 10 years ago? It’s 100% consistent with the ad platform being really good. Facebook was the best way to advertise well into 2020.
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- stakhanov 2y agoIn the context of a cost-cutting exercise, it's pretty obvious that the middle of the hierarchy is where you're going to do the cutting. You're not going to cut at the top, because there aren't enough individuals there for that to add up to a total amount of money that's actually significant in the grander scheme of things, and the political repercussions for you as a leader would be far worse. If you cut at the bottom, you cut the part of the workforce that's actually comparatively cheap on a per-head basis, and you basically give a demotion to everyone who is left who used to be a manager, because you're either cutting their team size or demoting them from manager to IC. So, the workforce you'd end up with would be more costly and less motivated than what you end up with if you cut the middle of the hierarchy instead. So, this is basically just a corporation exercising the only option it really has in this situation, and dressing it up as some kind of deep insight about organizational structure. But, even if the context was different, even in the context of a growing and successful business, "flat structure" and "self-organizing" are often euphemisms for other things. For example, it could be a euphemism for a kind of social Darwinism where, instead of appointing a manager and risking the appointment of a "weak" individual, you just wait to see who it is who ends up beating the others into submission, thus, by definition, ending up with the "strong" ones bubbling to the top of the hierarchy. It's needless to say that this process is cruel and creates a ton of collateral damage. What I've also seen in connection with "flat structure", "self-organization", and "bottom-up" rhetoric is the situation where the company is actually run by a secret cabal of people who know damned well who's on the inside and has power, and who is on the outside and does not. But the people on the outside don't know that, and are instead given the "flat structure" and "self-organization" rhetoric. This reinforces the secrecy of the power structure, and serves as a convenient gaslighting device to make it look to the outsiders like their powerlessness is their own fault, rather than the organization putting them in a place where they have no power.
- wildrhythms 2y ago> If you cut at the bottom, you cut the part of the workforce that's actually comparatively cheap on a per-head basis You mean, the people who actually do the work?
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- BogdanPetre 2y ago.. and they just won Bundesliga
- red_admiral 2y agoOther companies before them have tried the holarchy/holacracy thing. As far as I can tell, the general conclusion is that there's such a thing as too little middle management, as well as too much. See for example: Medium (https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-medium-2228cc9d93e9 https://blog.medium.com/management-and-organization-at-mediu...), Zappos (https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-you-need-a-boss_n_569fdddbe4b0fca5ba765409 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/why-you-need-a-boss_n...)
- piokoch 2y agoThis never worked like this in the history of mankind, but who will forbid very rich people to try that out.
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- rmbyrro 2y agoTime to buy Bayer shares
- bborud 2y agoThere is nothing stopping staff from choosing their own managers and coming up with a management roles and structures of their own. In large companies, people get overly hung up on standardized titles and structure that looks reasonable on paper. But this isn't necessarily the structure that is needed to get the job done. This could cut down on unnecessary headcount. I've worked in organizations that were 4-5 times as big as they needed to be - but not where we actually needed people. We had half a dozen departments, all with 2-3 managers of various kinds, but were always short on developers. The reason being that the people who built the organization had experience from mature companies, and had never built anything from scratch before. So their focus was on building the kind of organization they were used to - not the organization we needed to bootstrap the company and product.
- thesz 2y agoThe most interesting part there is that Bayer is a pharmaceutical company. They should have chains of responsibility and self-organizing these chains can be... tricky if not impossible. Mostly due to probability to be a plaintiff in a lawsuit.
- LightBug1 2y agoOn the one hand, this is interesting. On the other hand, Bayer just created an organisation of middle-managers. And what if you really need to staff up your team? Or are we just suggesting one person does everything? /s I don't mind if there is or isn't a manager involved. I like self-organzing. What I don't like is if then leads to situations of dumping work on a person in a team because ... oh fck ... there's no manager involved to identify that more resourse is needed and advocate for that resource. Hence all workers then become the advocates. And therefore, everyone is now managers. This feels like the Elonisation of the work place. Fire everyone and let's see what happens. Horseshit if you ask me, which you didn't.
- fallingfrog 2y agoI feel like this is the kind of thing that works great when employees care about the business and feel like it is theirs to some degree. But if they see themselves as just hired mercenaries or cogs in a machine that cares nothing about them, that’s when you need excessive management.
- SillyUsername 2y agoSelf organising is rarely successful in my experience. People don't like to be held accountable unless they're paid for it, so you end up with yes men and potentially the extroverts or narcissists of the group ruling the roost and making final decisions. That is basically middle management with less oversight, no salary and less micromanaging. In a company that makes pharmaceuticals that's probably not a great idea unless you're just about cutting the short term costs.
- datavirtue 2y agoI predict this will be an aspect of GE's turnaround. The last three CEOs there have complained about middle management rusting the gears.
- PaulHoule 2y agoMy understanding is that Bayer's biggest problem was that they bought a lawsuit https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/roundup-lawsuit.html https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/roundup-lawsuit.h... The question is: "Will this reform prevent them from making another disastrous acquisition?"
- lemonwaterlime 2y agoThis is just a “Tough Culture”. Things like stack ranking will come soon. Lots of churn. Without a commitment to defining the healthy culture they want and what that looks like, the only way they can “be efficient” is to continue to ruthlessly cut people. Nothing new under the sun. There’s only one conclusion.
- smm11 2y agoNazi company.
- Log_out_ 2y agoI suspect this will split the company in two. A old crowd, that informally sticks to the old world in new teams and a new career crowd that really startups and then get sabotaged or winning team joined by the old crowd. Bayer better hides tho
- kmacleod 2y agoToo late for anyone to see this, but GE/Durham, who build jet engines, do (did?) small teams (<20) with 170 employees and one manager. Fast Company: Engines of Democracy (1999) https://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy https://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy https://web.archive.org/web/20221116144415/https://www.fastcompany.com/37815/engines-democracy https://web.archive.org/web/20221116144415/https://www.fastc...
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- rulalala 2y agoI wonder is academia would work better under this scheme? Further layers of decentralisation and collective decision making would change the game?