Leadership Memo 2024-7
In April, I introduced you to the most audacious corporate experiment in recent years: Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO). DSO is Bill Anderson’s answer to fighting bureaucracy. It’ll allow his company, the German pharmaceutical goliath Bayer, to get back to the most important thing: value creation.
Last month, I went into detail what DSO is and how it works. Basically, it’s self-organization. It reduces layers of management and bureaucracy and gives teams greater autonomy and decision-making power. The conventional hierarchical model is replaced with a more flexible and responsive structure that enables teams to adapt quickly.
But who is Bill Anderson? What makes him think DSO would work?
For those of you who have never come across Bill and his work as the former CEO at Roche, he is a huge advocate for agile ways of working. You can often find him speaking publicly on podcasts and YouTube channels about his beliefs in better ways of working.
While at Roche, Bill shared publicly that he was encouraging experiments across the organization to reduce unnecessary bureaucracy and make the company more responsive. In fact, I was at Roche during their corporate annual planning where Bill told his executives there would be no budget. What an experiment that was!
One of the traits I admire about him is his openness. Or it certainly comes across that way in his interviews. On the occasions I’ve seen him speak, he has never held back about the challenges that have faced teams and organizations when attempting to shift their ways of working. Especially in larger, more corporate environments.
When Bill Anderson was appointed CEO of Bayer in June 2023, it was easy to imagine that his passion for agile would eventually manifest into an organizational evolution. But I don’t think anyone could imagine it being as big as this.
Personally, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Bill encouraged shareholders to trust him in taking the organization on this journey. It’s hard enough to bring teams on the journey sometimes, let alone those whose investments are married to the success of the company.
You may assume that Bayer’s adoption of DSO is down to the passions of a CEO, but there is always more to an evolution than just playing with a trend or accommodating the desires of a leader.
When Bill Anderson was appointed CEO, Bayer was in a dire situation. He has his work cut out to turn things around and clean up the flailing pharmaceutical company. The manoeuvre to DSO aims to enhance Bayer’s agility and responsiveness, and ensure that the brand can withstand the complexities of a fast-paced market.
However, we’ve all seen companies shifting into new ways of working and failed. So, what does it take to make DSO work? That’s what we’ll explore next time.
Latest happenings:
I’m thrilled to announced a brand new podcast series from “Our Agile Tales” podcast, “The Advanced Guide to the Agile-ToC-Method (ATM) for Beginners”. In this new series, we sit down with Clarke Ching – the ‘bottleneck guy’ and explore what he said, “Just Enough Agile + Just Enough ToC = Loads of Calm + Loads of Cash.” If you’re familiar with Eli Goldratt’s ToC (Theory of Constraints), you will be surprised to discover that the trick isn’t to find your bottleneck, then manage it. That works in factories. But in knowledge work, where the flow of work is far more complex, the secret is to find your bottleneck, move it into the right place, and then keep it there.
Click here to listen or you can go to Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Stitcher.
