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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’

#281

Post by carom »

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.

* Understands what every person on their team is doing

* Coordinates actions between team members

* Actively removes things blocking their team

* Navigates the organizational bureaucracy for their team

* Technical enough to pitch in when things are running smoothly

* Personal enough relationship that you can be honest

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

#282

Post by jimvin »

7thaccount wrote: post #100
bjornsing wrote: post #34

> 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 th…

It's called "empire building" and is also part of the principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price - although I think this just makes management short sighted). I was…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRqXYsksFg

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

#283

Post by physicsguy »

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…

It depends on the type of company I think.

There's a big difference between for e.g. Twitter where ultimately you have thousands of people working on a single product, and a conglomerate like Siemens or GE where you have very different, almost totally independent, business units doing totally different things.

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

#285

Post by hnbad »

082349872349872 wrote: post #258
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"?

The 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.

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

#286

Post by hnbad »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #173
mvkel wrote: post #168

This 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 "wanti…

Tribal 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 tha…

By 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.

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

#287

Post by zyklu5 »

throwaway984393 wrote: post #173
mvkel wrote: post #168

This 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 "wanti…

Tribal 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 tha…

There is no general statement to be made here -- some tribal organisations are hierarchical other's aren't (including the ancestors from my fathers side as recent as 100 years ago). For decades now western ethnographers and cultural anthropologists seem to have projected their dissatisfactions of their own world onto their subjects -- which is something more insidious than the frank judgements you get to read in first-hand encounters during the early modern period. This has reached a certain pitch in current years by the overt activism of modern X-studies.

> today's hierarchy was invented by the modern Christian church.

On the contrary, the Church was responsible for destroying the hierarchical structure of my father's people via colonialism. Just to repeat: I am trying to point at a strange phenomenon that one notices in modern western academia: it is precisely the unaddressed universalising, really, Christian beliefs of, say, a current professor of cultural studies coupled with a dissatisfaction with her own culture that leads her to attribute what is considered good under her ideological commitments onto the natives and the other way round. For example, the idea that all men are equal would be flat out 'devilish' to my father's people even 100 years ago.

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

#288

Post by whazor »

Brajeshwar wrote: post #11

I 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

Cutting into middle management does not have to mean they are going for holacracy. The amount of hierarchy is on a scale and is also cultural. If you have too many layers inside a company and feel like nothing gets done, then it certainly makes sense to cut down.

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

#290

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

op00to wrote: post #207
bjornsing wrote: post #34

> 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 th…

Managers want to hire more people because teams are way under-staffed. I’ve never worked on a team that had enough people to do the important things with leeway for sickness vacation and turnover. Maybe there is empire building going on, but I think it’s deeper than that.

Well managed BigCorps are overstaffed 2x. Badly managed BigCorps are overstaffed 3x (or more).

If there is insufficient manpower, it is often because they are building things they shouldn't. At least this was my experience.

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