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Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
301–310 of 497 posts
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#302> 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…
> 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”. I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 %…
You don't think having 4 people do the work of 20 people is going to backfire at some point? Nevermind the looming Bus factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Is it possible for the manager to be given insufficient resources by their manager? Such as insufficient pay to hire sufficiently skilled people, or insufficient budget to hire sufficient people? Whose fault is the failure then?
It's a responsibility of management to ensure that the work is understood and proper resources are negotiated for and allocated to perform it.
When a manager doesn't understand the scope of the work or has not made the case for adequate resources, to the project's jeopardy or their team's, it's typically referred to as mismanagement.
If this culture of under-serving itself for no apparent benefit except to appear too busy to be assigned more work extends elsewhere, it could be an organizational issue. If it's a SNAFU principle situation, management needs to be brought in alignment and trust with leadership, or leadership needs to be replaced. I've encountered both at the same place at the same time, and thankfully the board agreed.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#304> 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…
Lol… reminds me of a place I worked at where there were 2 developers on the project but 4 project managers. When the project was running late -> they hired 2 more managers!!
This is my current workplace. Projects have 1 developer and 2 project managers. The project managers are in meetings all day every day, doing what? And the developer is constantly being demanded to work impossibly tight deadlines, and deal with the project managers backtracking on the requirements. :/
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#305I 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"?
No, because self-organizing does not imply ownership of the means of production.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#306Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management tasks, even if you pretend there aren’t any managers.
I'm here at Bayer right now and that is pretty much what is happening. The RIFs are finishing up and my team leader is now my peer. Our boss now has 10x the reports. Even a 30 minute 1:1 with everyone would take his entire week. And some people just need (or want ) to be told what to do. You can't have everyone be a Steve Jobs and dream up things with nothing concrete getting done. I believe this is just a smokescree…
I think you're right that it's a smokescreen, but not for Wall Street.
I think he's found what Bayer is: a deeply conservative slow monolith of an organisation, with lots of under-performing, busy-working, but long-serving employees protected by German employment law. In turn, I suspect a good proportion of those are 'middle management', and so this is a path that allows a rational removal of lots of those folks, without it looking like that's the primary goal.
You're probably right that the new low-hierarchy, self-organised model won't work... but that's maybe fine in the short term. I'd expect another model (or a partial reintroduction of hierarcy) once the smoke has settled on the firings.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#307In 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 bott…
> 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?
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#308Earlier 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…
Depends on if you are managing people or you are micromanaging people. It should be possible to manage 22 employees if you are good at setting directions and explaining why those directions have been chosen. You can have 22 people in one room and do functional group discussions, this is like a good size for a school class. 1 CEO -> 22 level A managers each level A manager -> 22 level B = 22 * 22 = 484 level B each le…
22 is so many direct reports. If my supervisor had 22 direct reports. I'd just check out mentally because I know I wouldn't get any real face time with them to discuss issues. Skip manager attention? Forget it. With 22 direct reports, you're not there to add your expertise and make the process better, but to be a cog in the machine.
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#309> 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…
This is called Parkinson's Law: https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law
"To comprehend Factor I, we must picture a civil servant called A who finds himself overworked. Whether this overwork is real or imaginary is immaterial; but we should observe, in passing, that A’s sensation (or illusion) might easily result from his own decreasing energy—a normal symptom of middle-age. For this real or imagined overwork there are, broadly speaking, three possible remedies
(1) He may resign.
(2) He may ask to halve the work with a colleague called B.
(3) He may demand the assistance of two subordinates, to be called C and D.
There is probably no instance in civil service history of A choosing any but the third alternative. By resignation he would lose his pension rights. By having B appointed, on his own level in the hierarchy, he would merely bring in a rival for promotion to W’s vacancy when W (at long last) retires. So A would rather have C and D, junior men, below him. They will add to his consequence; and, by dividing the work into two categories, as between C and D, he will have the merit of being the only man who comprehends them both."
Re: Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to ‘self-organize’
#310> 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?
This 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.