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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’

#411

Post by mjburgess »

mind-blight wrote: post #365
_the_inflator wrote: post #127

I 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 wel…

I've of the best essays I've read explaining this kind of phenomenon is The Tyranny of Structurelessness ( https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm ). It's a critique from a feminist in the 70s account how the feminist movement's attempt to have no hierarchy created implicit hierarchies that were less accountable too the group than explicit hierarchies

Demands for non-hierarchical political forms have always scared me, and so often, how they are demanded by people whose main skill is to rabble-rouse. Of course, this is no coincidence.

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

#412

Post by eitally »

bane wrote: post #362
silvestrov wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Middle management time breaks down like this: - 40-60% trying to figure out how to turn large strategic goals into projects digestible by your staff - 20-30% coordinating up to get permission and sync with senior management, and then coordinate workshare with your peers - 20-30% coordinating with your staff - 75% of your time then gets sunk into squishy people problem stuff most people would call "HR problems" "But t…

I'm glad you called out Google in your post. I joined Google in 2015 having been a managing director of a global software engineering team at a non-tech F500, where I had teams in Brazil, India, China and Mexico, and folks scattered around the US & Scotland. I was accustomed for the prior ten years of my career, to run my org basically how you described, and I like to think I was a good manager that my team respected, and that we generally operated well. I spent a lot of my time 1) in leadership meetings trying to understand strategy and business requirements, and 2) structuring projects for my org and mentoring key individuals.

At Google, I found there to be 0 respect for management as a function. Every manager is expected to have their own personal projects and come performance review season you had better be able to point to something you did yourself, not just the outcomes you managed through your team. Perhaps this worked when it was a startup, but as an enterprise with roughly 350,000 workers, it's disrespectful to leaders to run things like this. I expect Bayer to experience similar disillusionment among their experienced management team. Overall they will probably see tactical acceleration in some areas but breakdowns in many others that will be more systemic and harder to recover from.

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

#413

Post by mrguyorama »

agent86 wrote: post #43

Valve - 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_NewE...

Don't they infamously have a shitload of fiefdoms and informal structure?

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

#414

Post by mostlysimilar »

joenot443 wrote: post #321
KaiserPro wrote: post #261

Using 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 h…

Do 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 s…

> 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.

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

#415

Post by paulddraper »

eitally wrote: post #400
paulddraper wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is 100% the first question asked by any management interview.

Yeah, no. Well, perhaps if the role is just to manage it becomes somewhat relevant, but I have personally never experienced this in any interview (and have been in people manager roles for the past twenty years, at companies including F500 industrial, FAANG, and consulting).

I have had management roles and been interviewed for management roles many times.

There hasn't been single interview where "what is the largest headcount you've managed" wasn't conspicuously asked.

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

#416

Post by _heimdall »

eitally wrote: post #402
_heimdall wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm been really frustrated by OKRs specifically. The whole system does a great job of appearing to empower a bottom up approach while actually being implemented as a top down, authoritarian system. It sounds great to be metric and goal driven, allowing employees to decide for themselves how to best reach those business goals. I've never seem it implemented this way though. Instead, I've seen leaders define goals and…

I always found it really interesting at Google that OKRs generally seemed to make sense at the CEO & PA level, but massively broke down somewhere between VP->Dir->Team level, to the extent that for the majority of teams it was nearly impossible to identify clear OKRs for themselves that trickled down (or flowed up) to the OKRs that should have been inheritable by their management chain. Some orgs manage to get to the…

I always wanted OKRs to be flipped to a bottom up approach. Let every employee or manager define what's most important to them, or their team, and how they'll measure success. As it goes up the chain, managers and ultimately the CEO are responsible for taking all those goals rolling up to them and craft it into a plan or business direction.

Effectively crowd sourcing your business from all of your employees. Of course you have to actually trust and respect a majority of your employees which really makes it a non-starter for most high level leadership.

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

#417

Post by eropple »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #163
FLT8 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them, which often will require changing the way the organisation works. If you don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally a li…

First: > so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them ... is in my opinion basic management 101. --- Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never managed such people). For example, at a former job, I worked under such people; they really liked me, because I was one of the few people who were actually capable of "understanding" their vi…

> ... is in my opinion basic management 101.

Ever heard the one about how uncommon "common sense" often is? ;)

Were it a world where you were correct, but I am unsure how often that actually shows up.

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

#418

Post by incrudible »

_zamorano_ wrote: post #353
incrudible wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 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 Le…

What? Aren't those games Valve orginals since the beggining?

In the sense that these games were conceived by teams working at Valve, using this management structure, the answer is: No, none of them are.

Most of them have their origin in community mods, some already having gained substantial traction on their own.

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

#419

Post by organsnyder »

marcosdumay wrote: post #408
organsnyder wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see repeated 1:1 sessions as micromanagement, like being treated as a kid that needs their hand held. There's space between viewing employees as children needing to be coddled on the one side and viewing them as completely rational automatons on the other. I worked for three years for a "flat" company where we were all expected to independently define our own goals, schedules, and get support when needed. When ev…

> Without a reporting chain—or official support structure of any kind—I didn't know where to turn I really don't know where you are coming from. The OP stated a clear hierarchy where you'd have a single and well known manager that you can just go and talk to.

A manager with 22 direct reports isn't going to have the bandwidth to be available when each employee needs them (unless that's all they do).

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

#420

Post by treespace8 »

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…

Has any company ever tried having a bonus pool divided equally between all employees?

Ie 5% of gross revenue / employees. So every time you add someone you reduce the bonus unless that person adds more to gross revenue?

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