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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’

#441

Post by kubanczyk »

_heimdall wrote: post #416
eitally wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cours…

So, exaggerating, the CEO would be responsible to craft a business direction from this set:

    - publish more as open source,
    - migrate to novel:
      - libraries
      - frameworks
      - architectures
      - paradigms
    - small refactoring that hugely improves elegance and readability,
    - big refactoring that barely improves anything,
    - add an impressively-sounding feature, sponsored by letters C, R, D and T
    - ...in Rust

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

#442

Post by rgblambda »

maccard wrote: post #277
danielscrubs wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To piggy back on it. A good manager will shield you from other bad managers and outsourcing firms promising the moon. Quite a sad state of affairs.

I think it’s important to say that they also protect from rogue/drive by superstar IC’s. The ones who will come along and “fix” your problem, leaving a mess that nobody understands behind them that makes them look competent and your team incompetent, when in reality they’ve just half assed the job. I’ve seen managers stand up for their teams and defend against those guys successfully.

It really reveals how clueless some managers are when they sing praises of the "rockstar" IC who from day 1 trash talked their coworkers and broke everything they touched before leaving after a few months to do the same somewhere else.

It shows how managers often just base their opinions on vibes given in meetings and don't care to understand anything they're managing.

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

#443

Post by lazide »

treespace8 wrote: post #420
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?

Did you ever do a school project where yourself and maybe one other person did all the work, and everyone else (2-3 folks) mostly just tagged along on the ride because they were assigned? Or maybe even made it worse?

And everyone got the same grade?

That happens in corp land all the time too, and it’s extremely demotivating.

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

#444

Post by lazide »

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

Yup. Explicit hierarchies result in explicit accountability. Implicit ones, well, ‘I’m not their boss, I don’t know why they did that!’

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

#445

Post by eitally »

mrguyorama wrote: post #405
iteria wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

22 is a reasonable class size for childhood schooling, and every single teacher ever has a clear and everpresent understanding of which kids "get it" or are gifted, and which kids are the problem. They are usually able to get face time with the kids that need it, and they do that to nearly entirely new kids every single year. Good teachers have a strong rapport with their students, and a tangible relationship with ea…

Two reasons:

1. Large class sizes are only effective if the instructional method is rote memorization. Otherwise, the teacher ends of having all the same kinds of issues corporate managers have.

2. Teachers literally go through years of formal education on pedagogy and effective leadership. Most corporate managers adhere to the Dilbert Principle, where they had been a competent IC whose role grew too big for one person, so they were allowed to hire a helper... before they know it, they're managing a team, until they become too incompetent at the managing part.

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

#446

Post by randomdata »

tsimionescu wrote: post #435
randomdata wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that you do need explicit integration and cooperation. Obviously. Like we said, no 4-8 person team is building anything by themselves. For one, most obviously, they'd starve to death if they even tried. Integration and cooperation are literally what defines an economy. > most real companies own most of their supply chain As opposed to fake companies, that have no supply chain, with them being fake and…

> As opposed to fake companies, that have no supply chain, with them being fake and all? I should have said "companies that can afford to". > How can you know? The problems needed to be solved to see that through were stated to be unsolved. Was there some breakthrough in the past 10 hours that you haven't mentioned and the rest of us missed? Because I can look at the price of goods versus their cost. A company that o…

> Because I can look at the price of goods versus their cost. A company that owns the production chain for a sub-component is paying the cost of that component, while a company that doesn't pays the market price.

I'm not sure I follow. Let's say Acme Inc. produces a widget that is a subcomponent of their larger product. When that subcomponent is within the control of a team of four who works for Acme Inc., the company has to pay the market price (meaning a markup margin?), but when that team is joined with another team who also works for Acme Inc., then they only have to pay the cost?

1. What difference does that make? Even if a markup really was paid on paper, it's just to Acme Inc. itself. You haven't changed anything, practically speaking.

2. If an external entity is willing to pay more for the component, which is what I think you are trying to suggest with market price, Acme Inc. is paying the opportunity cost when keeping it internally and thus is still paying the market price. Are you under the impression that there is a free lunch here? There is not.

> trying to maintain an internal market of software where multiple teams build the same service and compete with each other on who has a better version is crazy

Just as it would be crazy in the macroeconomy. The idea that competition is necessary for markets to work is misguided. You don't need a second road running parallel to the first. One road is just fine. Competition only comes into being when someone thinks they can serve the customer better by doing things differently. Which is a useful property of human dynamics, to be sure, but sometimes things are already as good as anyone is able to imagine.

> they started collaborating on Linux

As individual teams, with another team headed by Linus who accepts the services of those other teams as seen fit. Another great example of the service economy in action. No need for a monolith – if such a thing were even possible, but as pointed out at the beginning of this, of which I agree, we don't actually know how to build monoliths, no matter how great they sound in theory. There are outstanding problems not yet solved.

> They are built as monoliths with large teams working to add features and collaborating relying on a hierarchy of maintainers

A monolith, but also hierarchal? Uhh...

> I don't see any proof whatsoever that building a company or a product in general out of a marketplace of dozens or hundreds of very small teams has ever worked beyond maybe some niche cases.

I suppose you can take the perspective that nothing works, but given the outstanding problems not solved to allow anything else, something that doesn't work beats nothing at all. Worse is better, perhaps.

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

#447

Post by TulliusCicero »

cyanydeez wrote: post #340
TulliusCicero wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 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.

You mean businesses, not warlords.

No, 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.

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

#448

Post by beryilma »

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.

I see here a lot of generalities about good managers helping you prioritize work, shielding you from chaos, bringing organization to the team, etc. These are necessary, but not sufficient. Any reasonably well-organized, good-intentioned, and less selfish person/manager can do that, but I wouldn't necessarily call them a good manager.

The measure of a good manager is their willingness to do something difficult for them for the benefit of their team or reports, such as saying no to various pressures from upper management, not jumping into latest trends pushed down to the teams, not saying yes to every new pivot, etc. Most people in a work situation would not do that, which is why there are no good managers.

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

#449

Post by osigurdson »

LargeWu wrote: post #364
osigurdson wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is so amazing about someone who throws themselves under the bus? Shouldn't a manager increase the probability of success?

It's about shielding the team from the consequences of failure. A good manager will say "If my team failed it's because I did not prepare them well enough/lead them well enough/manage expectations well enough". this is what ownership looks like. It is orthogonal to probability of failure.

What is the actual utility of this however? Instead of trying to determine who is to blame, why not try to identify areas of improvement?

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

#450

Post by lostlogin »

gadders wrote: post #309
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…

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…

> There is probably no instance in civil service history

I’m not sure that private firms are much better. Especially if the work they are doing has been contracted out to them.

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