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Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

fortune.com

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Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#251

Post by suzzer99 »

throwaway74432 wrote: post #81
salad-tycoon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’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…

And people are flabbergasted at the healthy skepticism towards pharmaceutical companies, when they literally treat people like expendable cattle at every chance they get.

As someone who worked in the clinical trial industry, pharmaceutical companies are horrible. Thankfully we have a robust drug approval process, with oversight and audits at every step of the way, to more or less keep them in line. It's nothing like software development where literally anything can sneak into production code.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#252

Post by PoignardAzur »

palata wrote: post #249
whoknowsidont wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I’ve been fortunate to have some very good managers. Every time I've seen this sentiment and asked for something concrete on what made them good managers I get answered with platitudes or "nice-isms." At this point in my career, the emperor has no clothes. There are no good managers, only good peers.

For years, all my managers were extremely bad to the point where I thought I was the problem. Until I had my first good manager. My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager. With bad managers, I carefully select what I share, often downright lie to them just to limit my stress level. I know a bad manager will throw me under the bus to save the…

> My definition is: if my level of stress after a meeting with a manager is lower than before, then it is a good manager.

That's a great way to put it. I've had two managers I think of as good and this is definitely something they had in common.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#253

Post by adastra22 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #240
hasoleju wrote: post #106

The 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…

There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier. If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen w…

Works for the Vatican just fine.

Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#254

Post by adastra22 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #134
fizx wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, 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.

So… the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not the person closer to the issue, thinks it’s not working?

In the same sense that a machine maintenance person’s job is to not be involved in the machinery. Their job is not to operate the machine, but to make sure the machine operates correctly all on its own without intervention. Doing this correctly does take a lot of work.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#255

Post by tsimionescu »

adastra22 wrote: post #253
tsimionescu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier. If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen w…

Works for the Vatican just fine. Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.

Well, a thousand years of refinement and a set of company values that most employees have instilled into them since birth will do that to an organization.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#256

Post by defrost »

adastra22 wrote: post #253
tsimionescu wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some limit to how many people you can manage effectively. So, in a company with, say, 10,000 employees, you can't have just one layer of management between COs and ICs. You'd either need each manager to work with 500 direct reports, or you'd need the COs to work with 500 managers. If we look at 100,000 employee orgs, this gets even sillier. If you even attempt something like this, what will actually happen w…

Works for the Vatican just fine. Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.

What works for the Vatican just fine?

It's a long way from being mostly flat, decisions are made at a crawling pace, and is convoluted enough to hide substantial theft, and shield large numbers of pedophiles .. even those rising to the Vatican C-suite level.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#257

Post by adastra22 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #255
adastra22 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for the Vatican just fine. Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.

Well, a thousand years of refinement and a set of company values that most employees have instilled into them since birth will do that to an organization.

That, and also most of the work of a church (interaction with laypeople) is self-evident, local, and easily managed. Once trained, a priest can be set loose on a community without much oversight.

Likewise, I can imagine a chain of Montessori schools being similarly organized, or a trade guild.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#258

Post by 082349872349872 »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #114

I 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.

The first thing I thought of when reading the title about self-organising workers was: didn't we used to call that a "soviet"?

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#259

Post by adastra22 »

defrost wrote: post #256
adastra22 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works for the Vatican just fine. Your point is generally good, but not universally true. Mostly-flat organizations do work in certain contexts.

What works for the Vatican just fine? It's a long way from being mostly flat, decisions are made at a crawling pace, and is convoluted enough to hide substantial theft, and shield large numbers of pedophiles .. even those rising to the Vatican C-suite level.

The catholic church is famously held up as an example of a nearly-flat organization in many business schools.

Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’

#260

Post by arkh »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #161
pyuser583 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been fortunate to have some very good managers. That’s why I find this idea so horrible. I wouldn’t be where I am now if I had to “self-organize.”

>I’ve been fortunate to have some very good managers. Every time I've seen this sentiment and asked for something concrete on what made them good managers I get answered with platitudes or "nice-isms." At this point in my career, the emperor has no clothes. There are no good managers, only good peers.

A good manager is simple to see: success is the team's, failure is their fault. If it is not the case, you have a bad manager.
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