https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bayer-ceo-bill-anderson-war-114126478.html
Good morning. Shortly after he became CEO of Bayer AG in 2023, CEO Bill Anderson began waging war against bureaucracy to make the life science giant more nimble, more customer-focused, and more efficient. In this week’s Leadership Next podcast, he talks about how it’s going.
“If I had arrived 10 years earlier, I don't know that we could have made these changes,” says Anderson. “When I arrived, what I found was a company where there was a really nice culture but people were burdened by the rules … so many rules that nobody can even keep track of them.”
So how do you redesign a 161-year-old, 100,000-person company without unleashing chaos? He focused on changing the mechanics: Get rid of rules, org charts, annual plans and the decision-making hierarchy. Anderson flattened the structure. He created thousands of teams, each of which has a vision—and goals to achieve that vision—on a 90-day cycle. “The clock's ticking every 90 days,” he says. “There’s no safe place to hide behind a budget target. Do it, go fast, deliver better for customers, use the least resources. And we'll talk about how you did four times a year. And, by the way, your peers are going to rate you.”
“It helped that I've been doing this work for about seven years before I arrived at Bayer,” says Anderson, who was previously CEO of Roche’s Pharmaceuticals division after being CEO of Genentech.
“What I found was that the bigger the organization, the more it prevented people from just doing what they needed to do. After 20 years, I said, ‘Hey, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm either going to find a very different way to organize, or I'm done. I can't live with myself just turning the corporate crank one more year.”
You can listen to the full podcast here.