Bayer’s New Chief Executive Bill Anderson Will Give Scientists and Practitioners More Voice in Making the 159-Year-Old Aspirin-Glyphosate Conglomerate More Innovative and Efficient Aiming to achieve this, they are preparing a drastic crackdown on bureaucracy within the company.
Anderson joined Bayer in April and officially became CEO this month. His appointment comes after pressure from shareholders to split the group amid the ongoing fallout from Monsanto’s $63 billion purchase of the rice crop group in 2016.
Days after joining, Anderson said he would consider all options. Two weeks after taking over as CEO, the former head of Roche’s pharmaceutical division and former chief executive of US biotechnology group Genentech said he would elaborate on potential structural changes in the multi-headed group. refused. “I hate to say more than I know,” he told the Financial Times.
Instead, at the company’s headquarters in Leverkusen, in northwestern Germany, he laid out a plan to give staff a “fundamentally different approach to how work is done, how resources are allocated, and how budgets are determined.”
Anderson said he wants to ensure that “every Bayer employee has the same level of impact, fulfillment and accomplishment as a sole proprietorship” without the hassle of internal paperwork.
To achieve this, he wants to eliminate internal bureaucracy and give individual employees more responsibility. He added that this is not a cutback, but a better way to organize work.
With 101,000 employees and sales of EUR 50.7 billion, Bayer is one of Europe’s largest corporate giants with 354 consolidated companies in 83 countries. The company manufactures prescription drugs for cancer, heart disease and other ailments, over-the-counter health care products such as bepanten cream, seeds and herbicides for farmers.
The company is reeling from billions of dollars in debt it took to buy Monsanto and mounting costs over a crop company’s glyphosate herbicide lawsuit. Bayer shares, which trade at around €52, are now half what they were in 2016, just before rumors of a deal began circulating, while the German stock market as a whole is up a quarter.
Anderson wants managers to overcome traditional top-down approaches and enable teams to develop their own lives.
He likes to compare the senior management situation to that of the astronauts in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In sci-fi movies, scientists aboard a spaceship gradually discover that computers have taken over their duties.
During one of his first meetings with Bayer managers, Anderson played a clip of the film. His message was that ‘we are the astronauts and we are no longer in control’, but that the system was ‘often fundamentally flawed’.
He said it’s common for studies to show that employees at large companies are only performing 30 to 50 percent of their potential because they’re hampered by cumbersome rules and decision-making processes. .
“Bayer isn’t special in this regard in a large company, but the people making the decisions are often not the people at the level of decision making that you would like,” said Anderson. “The world can pretty much get away with it, but . . . it’s not so good.”
He also wants to spend corporate resources responsibly so that scientists and team leaders can “drive medical innovation, delight customers and make better use of corporate resources” to “reduce budgets.” I believe.
A successful implementation, led by Genentech, eliminated the months-long process of allocating budgets and freed up funds for innovation. “I’ve seen it before. It’s basically unstoppable once it starts moving.”
In the first year after the budget was eliminated at Genentech, spending “actually decreased,” he said, arguing that bad incentives to spend unnecessary resources at the end of the year to secure next year’s budget had been eliminated. . At Roche, we were able to spend about $3 billion a year on innovation.
Noting that an approval process exists, Anderson dismisses the notion that abolishing traditional budgets would create “free for all.” A staff member is accountable for justifying his spending and resource needs in front of other teams and his leader.
“They are all the same pals, they all know each other, so they can have completely different conversations.” That’s when colleagues start exaggerating their accomplishments and needs, he says. “You can fool his boss, but you can’t fool his colleagues,” he said, adding that senior executives often allocate budgets based on “subjective factors such as how well a person is persuading.” .
Current Genentech CEO Alexander Hardy, who worked with Anderson in the biotech group, describes Anderson as “a breakthrough visionary and a tenacious problem solver.”
Anderson’s key idea is that ‘decisions are made by the people in the best positions, not the bosses’.
He stressed that there was no single “silver bullet” and that change required “experimentation” and the input of many different employees. “I’m not going to come here and tell everybody we’re going to do this. We’re going to do it differently, but it’s not going to be ‘Bill Shaw.'”
