Leadership Memo 2025-5
Last month, we explored how Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO) transformation has been going after one year. This time, let’s take a closer look at how DSO really works in everyday practice.
CEO Bill Anderson points to three things at the heart of bureaucracy: complexity, layers, and distance. DSO is designed to tackle all of them.
DSO cuts down on complexity by combining roles. Instead of ten specialists doing what three people could, jobs are put back together. Anderson says, “People aren’t circus animals that can only be trained to do one or two tricks.” Teams now have wider responsibilities and real ownership of results.
Layers have been slashed. Bayer used to have up to twelve levels of management. Now most areas have six or seven. Some only three. They’ve cut about half of all manager jobs. Some leaders now have over 80 people reporting to them. Still, CEO Bill Anderson is clear: this isn’t about going manager-less like Buurtzorg. Bayer still needs strong managers, but their job is to support, not command. The mission leads. Teams drive. Leaders serve. This isn’t a small shift. It’s a full-scale restructuring.
Distance from customers and products is shrinking. Bayer gives decision power to the people doing the work. They don’t start with top-down org charts anymore. They start with the customer or product and build the team from there.
Here’s where DSO gets practical.
1. Instead of annual budgets, Bayer operates on 90-day cycles.
Each team sets a clear vision, whether that’s delivering better solutions for farmers at a lower cost or advancing a specific medicine. From there, they decide on the two or three most important goals they can achieve in the next 90 days to move that vision forward.
2. There’s no predetermined budget to hide behind. No “safe number” to hit.
Teams are given a clear message: move fast, deliver better for customers, and use the fewest resources possible. This builds urgency while cutting out the bureaucratic safety nets that usually slow decisions down.
3. Traditional performance reviews are gone, replaced by peer assessment.
Anderson says it clearly: “You can fool your boss, but you can’t fool your peers.” This changes how people work. It’s not about reporting to the boss. It’s about working together and keeping each other accountable.
The results say it all. Two major product launches, Nubeqa™ and Kerendia™, each grew over 70% last year. What changed? The teams doing the work got to make the investment and prioritization decisions, not far-removed executives.
Change is never smooth. Some people are excited. Others feel confused. That’s expected. Anderson says this isn’t your typical reorg where you “cross out a few boxes and deliver bad news.” DSO is a full retraining of how big companies work. It’s not about startup vibes. It’s about startup mechanics: speed, clarity, and ownership. The goal is to help over 100,000 employees move like a startup, but with the coordination mechanics a global company needs.
Bayer is one year into a three-year transformation, with 2025 targeted as the year DSO becomes “the way work gets done everywhere.” The early results suggest Anderson’s bold prediction—”We know this will be 100% successful”—might not be mere optimism after all.
The question for other large organizations: If Bayer can systematically dismantle bureaucracy while maintaining coordination across thousands of teams, what’s stopping the rest of us?
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