Industrial Anarchy?

[Irrev-Black]

(Stop looking at "anarchy" like it's the bad thing capitalists make it out to be.)

In a bid to claw back $2.15 billion, the struggling pharmaceutical giant Bayer CEO is doing away with middle managers and 99% of the company’s 1,362-page corporate handbook, allowing nearly 100,000 employees to self-manage.

Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut: Its market cap has plunged to two-decade lows—spurred by its so-far disastrous acquisition of Monsanto—and its CEO Bill Anderson believes that flattening hierarchy and slashing corporate bureaucracy could be key to turning it around.

When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and Peace. It’s why, he says, when he listened to feedback from the firm’s workforce, the same complaints surfaced repeatedly.

“They basically said: ‘Increasingly, we can’t get anything done,'” Anderson told Business Insider. “It’s just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen.”

“We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy,” Anderson added. “Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time.”

So, the company is going boss-less, or as he calls it, moving to “dynamic shared ownership.”

Whether or not it’s a fancy metaphor for a headcount reduction, Anderson has insisted that this new way of working could be revolutionary. “We don’t have to be that good to beat the current system,” the 57-year-old chief executive told the Wall Street Journal.

In the coming years, Bayer’s workforce will consist of constantly evolving “5,000 to 6,000 self-directed teams” that work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project.

Employees of Bayer’s consumer health division have already gotten a taste of this new structure—they’re being shown how to practically sign off on one another’s ideas without a manager in sight.

“Stand up, share an idea,” a corporate trainer ordered them during a training session, according to the WSJ. “You’re going to self-organize.”

https://archive.li/hAmMx#selection-919.0-991.34

[Irrev-Black]

This chap Semler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Semler is also an interesting subject of study.