[HN Gopher] Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to '...
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Bayer is getting rid of bosses and asking staff to 'self-organize'
Author : cwwc
Score : 156 points
Date : 2024-04-21 02:38 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (fortune.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fortune.com)
| ranger_danger wrote:
| This certainly won't end in disaster.
| Vaslo wrote:
| The WSJ article mentions that the CEO mapped out his plan at a
| cafe with a McKinsey consultant.
|
| No matter how badly this goes, sounds like McKinsey will make out
| again...
| roughly wrote:
| Ah yes, McKinsey, notable experts in decentralized organization
| and anarchist decision-making practices - although I suppose
| they make it up as they go along with everything else, so why
| not this, too.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _although I suppose they make it up as they go along_
|
| Well, that sort of fits with a lack of organization.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What under if McKinsey will start pushing this at other orgs?
| refurb wrote:
| It's basically what tech has been doing for a while. Or at
| least a derivation of it. Agile, self-managed team,
| "retrospectives", "scrums".
|
| At least that's how it was sold to my employer when they had
| the same change not long ago.
|
| "This is what Google does and they are innovative. Don't you
| want to be innovative like Google?"
|
| Checks all the boxes a CEO wants to hear.
| MForster wrote:
| This is not at all what Google does, though.
| Voultapher wrote:
| One could also argue that Google by and large doesn't
| innovate, they mostly acquire the innovative stuff.
| al_borland wrote:
| My company just called the managers, "product owners", and
| the project managers, "scrum masters", and said we were now
| Agile and doing Scrum. Nothing about it was self-managed.
| We haven't had a retrospective in 3 years, despite my
| insistence that we desperately need them.
| refurb wrote:
| Huh, my company pushed the Agile/scrum/retrospective
| thing at the same time as talking about "fit for purpose"
| teams that would be formed based on need/skills, not the
| old structure (this team works on this only). Since
| specific teams were now gone, less need for managers.
|
| The idea was agile/scrum/retros was a way to manage the
| "fluidity".
| al_borland wrote:
| McKinsey had to pay a settlement for their role in the opioid
| crisis. It's very possible this will lead to some kind of
| tragedy related to Bayer medications which will also find
| McKinsey at fault for their horrible advice.
| ekianjo wrote:
| McKinsey is just a group that will rationalize any decision you
| want to make in the first place. It's management decision
| laundering, by consultants.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I wonder if it's the same consultant he hired into the company
| as the organizational coach for this shuffle.
| [deleted]
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I've been in one self-organizing department, and it was one of
| the worst experiences of my career.
|
| I expect they're going to regret this.
| victor9000 wrote:
| What problems did you encounter?
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| Short summary: biggest asshole gets his way.
| throwaway74432 wrote:
| So just like a non-self-organizing department then?
| boznz wrote:
| or "best friends with the big boss" gets his way, this is
| an organization problem and the start of the slippery slide
| for a good company to become a bad company and is the point
| where most CEO's fail to do their duty.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| A self organizing department within a sea of non-self
| organizing departments sounds terrible. Thankfully this is
| being implemented company wide.
| lolive wrote:
| I personally say no to my boss 70% of the time, and do things
| my own way. Usually my n+2 likes the results I deliver, so I
| am reasonably covered by him, politically.
|
| [that will probably not last long, anyway]
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| Not the OP, but generally self organizing generally leads to
| the person with the most status / soft skills doing the
| organizing. (Kinda fun when you are that person)
|
| It works pretty well when there is a clear task and alignment
| on why it needs to get done. Unfortunately you still need
| someone to set expectations and resolve conflicts.
| al_borland wrote:
| I've been that person before. It was good while it lasted,
| but some organizational changes put the wrong people in
| change and moved me out of that role in favor of more
| authoritarian rule. I don't think I need to go into all the
| details, suffice to say, it left me burnt out and not too
| excited to volunteer for things.
|
| I'm in a place where the team needs to self-organize again,
| but I'm less willing to step up, and no one else is either.
| Some members of the team have also been vocal with the "X is
| not my boss, why are they talking" line when someone tries to
| control the chaos. We have 2 people whose literal job is
| organize and run the team (a boss and a scrum master), but
| they either aren't around or aren't competent. This has left
| the team in a pretty bad spot. Every team needs at least one
| person to step up, and that person needs to be reasonably
| competent. Hopefully Bayer has this, as playing fast and
| loose with medication is a bad idea. I want the companies
| producing my medication to have strong and robust processes
| in place.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, I saw the "self organizing" bit, and I thought "good
| f'ing luck". E.g. I don't see many folks touting Zappos'
| notorious "holacracy" structure these days.
|
| Reducing unnecessary levels of middle management, particularly
| in a bloated company, is usually a great idea. But I've found
| that the vast majority of people are _not_ interested in "self
| organizing". They just want to come to work, feel that they are
| supported doing great work, and have a strong sense that the
| work they are doing matters to the company.
|
| That's why as a former manager I felt like my most important
| job was to "block" for my team. I.e. there is always a bit of
| chaos and change at the upper levels reflecting to change in
| the business and competitive landscape, but as much as possible
| I tried to protect my team from this unnecessary churn. I've
| often said "coders are happiest when they're coding", so I
| tried to have product plans and priorities laid out as much as
| possible so folks could come in and do great work.
|
| This doesn't mean "hiding" the broader corporate machinations
| from folks, but most people just don't want to be affected by
| that day-to-day. I've never seen this "self organizing"
| approach work, and Ive seen lots of cases where it was deemed
| an abject failure.
| itsdrewmiller wrote:
| https://archive.ph/hAmMx
| neonate wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240421090533/https://fortune.c...
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| I have forgotten the name of another big company that tried this
| and kinda failed. I hope something comes out of this for Bayer. I
| remember this because I liked the idea in general and the term
| stuck with me -- Holacracy (I think I read a book too).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy
| deodar wrote:
| Zappos, I believe.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/zappos-quietly-backed-away-ho...
| lunfardl wrote:
| I worked for a company that claimed to use this system. Got
| fired after arguing with my totally no boss.
| bbarnett wrote:
| You mean your 'advisor'?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Over half a century old but as relevant as ever, _The Tyranny
| of Structurelessness_
| https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
|
| _This means that to strive for a structureless group is as
| useful, and as deceptive, as to aim at an "objective" news
| story, "value-free" social science, or a "free" economy. A
| "laissez faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez
| faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong
| or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.
| This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea
| of "structurelessness" does not prevent the formation of
| informal structures, only formal ones._
| mcbishop wrote:
| There's strong structure with holacracy. There's a
| hierarchy of roles / responsibilities. It seeks to mitigate
| parallel informal power dynamics. Consider reading the
| book.
| al_borland wrote:
| Valve does this, but I remember reading about it years ago and
| (probably) Gabe saying that hiring needs to be done with this
| in mind, as it requires a certain type of person to be
| successful. Taking an existing process heavy org and removing
| management will likely be a mess. I hope they have plans for
| how to deal with the bumps during the transition.
| woleium wrote:
| Zappos?
| hodgesrm wrote:
| It seems to me this move will only work if it's a step to a
| flatter org _with managers_ who efficiently ensure technology
| is connecting to business needs. Once your org is really
| broken, half measures won 't fix it.
| smcleod wrote:
| I've worked in an environment where there are no managers for 4
| 1/2 years and it's been fantastic. Here's to getting rid of them
| in most (but certainly not all!) places.
| huytersd wrote:
| Who checks on if you've completed your assigned work. This can
| only be possible in an academic/non profit environment where
| there are no deadlines or fixed client commitments.
| smcleod wrote:
| My team meets every morning for 15 mins to discuss our
| progress and any blockers. Then we meet every week or two to
| pick up work. It works well.
| fourfun wrote:
| Your stakeholders?
| csnover wrote:
| By the time someone has entered the workforce it should not
| be necessary to be 'checked on' by some surrogate parental
| figure.
|
| In a functioning workplace, everyone agrees to do their work
| because it is part of the social contract of working on a
| team. They don't need to be told what to do. If someone is
| falling behind, they'll talk to other team members and work
| together to get back on track. You are there to help your
| coworkers, and they are there to help you. Someone doesn't
| have to be your manager to make sure projects run smoothly;
| everyone can take turns in this role if they feel like it's
| something they're interested in doing and are competent in
| that role.
|
| It's only through the distorted lens of corporate ladder
| climbing and backstabbing departmental politics that the idea
| arises that you'll just hire untrustworthy people and then
| beat them into submission by making a workplace into a
| prison.
| p1esk wrote:
| And what about all the bs artists, slackers, divas, or
| assholes on the team? What if no one on the team wants to
| play "manager", especially without the title? What if no
| one on the team has the skills to be an effective manager?
| What if my colleague Bob decides to play the role of a
| manager but I don't like him? What if two people want to
| manage and disagree on things? Who exactly is supposed to
| have the authority to tell people what to do, and then hold
| them accountable?
|
| What you described smells like communism - might work on
| small scale in some isolated cases, but usually doesn't.
| mingusrude wrote:
| > In a functional workplace...
|
| This is assuming a lot. Whose responsibility is it to get
| to a "functional workplace" and whose responsibility is it
| to fix it if it's not functional?
|
| And assuming that there is a "social contract" that
| everyone that's in the workplace buys into is also assuming
| a lot.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Sounds disconnected from reality. And it's not the
| workplaces fault, it's human natures fault.
| huytersd wrote:
| This isn't realistic thinking. The above doesn't exist
| anywhere.
| detourdog wrote:
| The above definitely exists all over. The group usually
| hires based on personality. Generally these organizations
| are very centered and know what qualities they are
| looking for in a a team mate.
| boznz wrote:
| small teams generally self-organise under a single
| leader, eg sports teams and it is often the other members
| of the team who self-check as they have to take up the
| load for anyone who does not perform.
| reactordev wrote:
| >"By the time someone has entered the workforce it should
| not be necessary to be 'checked on' by some surrogate
| parental figure."
|
| Hire some recent grads and then make that statement. Not
| all require checking in on, but often entry-level, junior
| folks do. Don't ignore them and don't hold it against them.
| You, I'm sure, had someone checking in on you when you
| first started. Not in a "Are you at your desk" way but a
| "Are you able to complete the tasks? If not, how can I help
| you?"
|
| Sadly the last few years with remote work and layoffs have
| made it so companies get rid of those who are "just doing
| the job" and keeping those that are "always the job".
| Brutal.
| anon7725 wrote:
| There are multiple dimensions in the latent space that is
| contemporary white collar management.
|
| One is interfacing the work of a group of people with the
| needs and wants of others.
|
| Another is doing administrative things like who has done this
| compliance course or who needs a security authorization.
|
| A third is allocating credit and blame to group members (aka
| compensation).
|
| A fourth is ensuring that the work product itself is on track
| (aka technical leadership).
|
| A fifth is ensuring that schedule commitments to other
| stakeholders are honored.
|
| If you take out the third dimension (credit and blame), then
| even if a single person happens to do the other 4, they
| probably won't feel much like what you'd call a "manager"
| today.
|
| This is a long-winded way of saying that the various things a
| manager does can be disaggregated and either spread around
| the team, eliminated or given to a different person.
| yau8edq12i wrote:
| No deadlines or fixed commitments in academia? Surely you're
| joking.
| 01100011 wrote:
| It's no secret that small teams of experts do not need
| managers. But if the team grows, you will either have to
| sacrifice producer productivity to coordination and management
| tasks or hire someone to offload those responsibilities. Many
| orgs struggle as they undergo a "phase change" from one type of
| team to another, as it requires a different set of skills,
| strategies and expectations along with dramatically higher
| staffing requirements. There is probably a way to
| compartmentalize some larger projects so you are an aggregation
| of smaller teams but I personally haven't seen it so I can't
| comment on it.
| smcleod wrote:
| I'd argue your team really shouldn't grow too big if you want
| to remain effective. 4-8 people seems to be the sweet spot in
| my experience.
| fabianholzer wrote:
| > I've worked in an environment where there are no managers
|
| I've opened your profile and then your website just to find out
| where is this magic place is. How fitting that it turned out to
| be on other side of the globe from my place... But good for you
| :-)
| karaterobot wrote:
| I've gone the other way! I used to be strongly against
| managers. I drooled over that Valve manual describing the flat
| hierarchy, etc., and I would have honestly said that managers
| in general were a parasite that had latched on to the software
| industry. That's honestly what I felt.
|
| Now I work at a place with not enough managers to go around,
| and my team basically has 25% of a PM's time, and no dedicated
| department head (last guy quit, leadership has not decided
| whether to rehire). It's absolute chaos. No shit shield between
| us and leadership, nobody to soak up all the excess meetings
| required to understand what's going on throughout the company,
| nobody with political weight to throw around on our behalf,
| nobody to persist a long term vision for our department. We're
| working twice as hard to tread water, and creating a lot of
| technical debt while we only barely stay on top of our basic
| responsibilities.
|
| It may be that, at an organization that is set up not to have
| managers, it's better than just being the one group in an
| organization that doesn't have one. I admit that's a
| possibility.
|
| But, at another organization, I've actually had _great_
| experiences with managers, who cleared the road for me and made
| me feel like I was doing better work more easily than I was
| without them. So, on the whole I am pro manager, _so long as
| they are very very very good at it_.
| bbarnett wrote:
| There seems to be a bit of over-correct going on here:
|
| _When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the
| company's rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and
| Peace._ and _"It's just too hard to get ideas approved, or you
| have to consult with so many people to make anything happen."_
|
| So sure, makes sense that there needs to be some correction. Yet
| basically it seems that they're just tossing everything into the
| bin. Perhaps an actual review of that entire rule book would have
| been more prudent? I expect they'll have some sort of disaster,
| then turn around an start writing that rule book from scratch.
|
| I wonder if something crazy will happen. They'll end up with the
| equivalent of tenured professors, with unlimited grants, working
| on all sorts of pet projects, yet the result being an explosion
| of research.
| braiamp wrote:
| If you continue to read further down you will read this:
|
| > 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.
|
| This worked in a limited fashion and showed corporate the
| results they wanted. Now they will do this company wide.
| hilux wrote:
| It's "holacracy" all over again!
|
| How soon they forget.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Yeah this immediately made me think of that "reinventing
| organizations" (by the holacracy guy) which I read (skimmed) I
| think 10 years ago. I kind of liked the ideas, although he made
| up some weird terminology which I didn't think would ever catch
| on.
|
| Were those ideas debunked or something?
| azinman2 wrote:
| But how would this really work? Someone wants to create a new
| drug, but it'll cost millions of euros and years of trials to
| bring to the market. Who approves and commits?
| p1esk wrote:
| They are only firing 40% of the managers. There will be plenty
| left.
| m3m3tic wrote:
| Just another run-of-the-mill post-ZIRP bloated org chart
| cleanup with a nice PR spin. Spend more time innovating on
| your products, it's a mistake to innovate on company
| hierarchy, despite what PR departments like to suggest.
| lazide wrote:
| Not that they'll be able to talk to anyone in their org with
| those types of setups.
| naasking wrote:
| Build a coalition of people who work in various departments,
| legal, marketing, research, etc. with enough momentum that
| could be enough to earn the credibility required.
|
| Another possibility is straight up democratic voting. These
| large investments place the company in financial peril, so
| maybe everyone should have a day.
|
| There are many ways to organize, hierarchical top-down control
| is useful but overused.
| nradov wrote:
| Ultimately someone has to approve the expense. Who makes that
| decision?
| naasking wrote:
| Why the implicit assumption that only a singular person can
| approve an expense?
| asadotzler wrote:
| The CEO can. Not always ideal to have the CEO deciding the
| restroom soap budget, but if it's not delegated to someone
| else, it's up to the CEO. Keeping the company running is
| literally their job.
| nradov wrote:
| Obviously that's not feasible for a large enterprise.
| refurb wrote:
| It's not going to impact the people doing the day to day work
| much, if at all.
|
| It's going to hit the layers of management those people report
| to.
|
| I've been through it. It has it's benefits (fewer decision
| makers) but also drawbacks (decision makers tend not to have
| the full picture).
| lkrubner wrote:
| I've seen a similar idea implemented with a lot of tech teams. In
| particular, I've seen companies try to be "flat," meaning that
| the software developers don't have managers, but instead, the
| software developers are expected to self-organize.
|
| But all of the normal tasks of a manager still exist: someone has
| to coordinate the work of multiple teams when those teams have
| zones of concern that overlap, and someone needs to be able to
| assign a budget, spend a budget, and take full responsibility
| from both the good and the bad that arises from spending that
| budget. If money is spent poorly, someone has to take the blame.
| If money is invested wisely, someone has to get the credit.
|
| What tends to happen (in "flat" organizations) is that a lot of
| the coordination work gets pushed down to the individual software
| engineers, so that they now need to spend more of their time on
| coordination activities, and they spend less time actually
| writing code. I've seen "flat" organizations where senior
| engineers spend as much as 25 hours a week in meetings, because
| they've taken over all of the coordination work that would have
| previously been handled by an engineering manager.
|
| Decisions about budget are rarely extended down to individual
| software engineers, so instead those decisions go up the
| hierarchy: you've now got the CEO making small-scale spending
| decisions that should have been passed down to some middle
| manager. For instance, at Futurestay.com, the CEO was dragged
| into an argument about what managed hosting service to use for
| MongoDB, a decision where the difference was maybe $200 a month.
| Obviously the CEO should not get dragged into spending decisions
| of that scale (unless you're talking about a 5 person startup
| that is just getting started).
|
| If it was possible to wave a magic wand and make all management
| work cease to be necessary, then every company in the world would
| do that. But instead, many companies will make the managers cease
| to exist, while the management work is still there. And the
| overall result tends to be a loss of productivity, either because
| essential coordination activities are left undone, or because
| talented specialists are forced to do management work for which
| they have no training.
|
| Also, if I might comment on a controversial issue, so-called
| "flat" organizations tend to be especially weak at enforcing
| discipline. If a worker is lazy, or if a worker does poor work,
| then they would normally run the risk of being fired, but in a
| "flat" organization they can often get away with poor performance
| for a long time, because fewer people are tracking their
| performance.
|
| But I do think Bayer has a grasp on a thread of at least one
| important idea: they claim they are doing this to save $2.5
| billion. That implies they think the management work can be done
| by other employees who are paid less money than the managers. And
| that implies that the managers were overpaid, relative to the
| value they delivered. While I think Bayer is making a mistake by
| getting rid of its managers, I also think that managers are
| probably overpaid relative to the value they deliver.
|
| When I was at ShermansTravel.com we had a very competent project
| manager who oversaw the tech team. She did a fantastic job of
| estimating tickets, prioritizing tickets, and keeping engineers
| focused on the right tickets. But she was paid less than any of
| the software engineers. And I think that is the right model for
| most companies, including Bayer. The default assumption,
| everywhere, is that managers need to be paid more than the people
| they manage, but why is that? I think there are many cases where
| the managers should be paid less than the people they manage.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > When I was at ShermansTravel.com we had a very competent
| project manager who oversaw the tech team. She did a fantastic
| job of estimating tickets, prioritizing tickets, and keeping
| engineers focused on the right tickets. But she was paid less
| than any of the software engineers. And I think that is the
| right model for most companies, including Bayer. The default
| assumption, everywhere, is that managers need to be paid more
| than the people they manage, but why is that?
|
| I suspect you didn't actually report into this Project Manager
| in the org chart, did you? Did she make hiring/firing decisions
| for the engineering team? Was she in charge of budgeting for
| the engineering team, including raises and bonuses? Did she
| approve vacation requests?
|
| Just because she was attached to the engineering team and had
| Manager in her job title doesn't mean she was the manager of
| the team. To me, "Project Manager" is a separate role that is
| not actually higher than an IC engineer in the org chart
|
| I wouldn't expect to make more money than the person I report
| into, especially because that person generally has authority
| over me and could probably terminate my job entirely if they
| wanted to
| kelipso wrote:
| > I wouldn't expect to make more money than the person I
| report into, especially because that person generally has
| authority over me and could probably terminate my job
| entirely if they wanted to
|
| Supply and demand dictating salaries or whatever. This
| concept of your manager has to make more money than you
| because they have the ability to fire you doesn't really make
| much sense.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Also, if I might comment on a controversial issue, so-called
| "flat" organizations tend to be especially weak at enforcing
| discipline. If a worker is lazy, or if a worker does poor work,
| then they would normally run the risk of being fired, but in a
| "flat" organization they can often get away with poor
| performance for a long time, because fewer people are tracking
| their performance.
|
| I'm in this picture and I don't like it
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Holocracy has never worked. Someone has to do the management
| tasks, even if you pretend there aren't any managers.
| lolive wrote:
| The question is whether most middle-managers are able to take
| impactful decisions. My personal experience is that 80% of them
| are [Steve Jobs quote:] << bozos >>.
| al_borland wrote:
| Most middle managers aren't there to be impactful, they are
| there to remove the busy work from whoever is above them.
| Mediate conflict within the team, approve vacation requests,
| do the paperwork, and clarify direction for the team as set
| by the person above them, so the team isn't bothering the
| bigger boss with silly things like, "what is my priority?"
| em-bee wrote:
| the problem is that in order to do that they are given
| authority over the team when they should be seen as a teams
| assistant or secretary. the manager should report to the
| team and not the reverse.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| Is there an example of manager who has lots of reports,
| organized into teams which have secretaries?
| em-bee wrote:
| not that i know of. maybe project managers compare most
| closely. if they exists then they may not be visible from
| the outside. i also expect the salary to be lower than
| the senior developers, which means it is not a job a
| senior would be promoted to.
| al_borland wrote:
| For a while my company tried a "matrix organization", it
| separates the people leader from the work leader.
|
| So a person would be on a team, and the work the team did
| would be guided by the product owner and kept on track by
| the scrum master. Then a person's actual boss was someone
| else. This meant an employee would really only talk to
| their boss for HR type issues, which in practice meant
| most people never talked to their boss.
|
| During this time I was a product owner. This whole setup
| had its weaknesses. First, it was confusing and it felt a
| bit like the Office Space joke of having multiple bosses,
| although I very much tried to maintain that I was there
| to serve the team and kept it democratic, not every
| product owner took that approach. The other issue was
| when it came time for reviews. The people leaders gave
| the reviews which would impact a person's compensation.
| The people on my team reported to one of 5 different
| people leaders. Of those 5, only one of them actually
| reached out to me to ask how their employee was doing
| when it came time for reviews. People's reputations
| proceeded them, and their reviews were essentially based
| on their reputations, which sucks. Though I don't think
| anyone made any radical changes during this period. If
| they had, I likely would have made it a point to make
| sure their boss was aware. We also did have sprint
| reviews that should have been attended by each of the
| people leaders. We put a lot of effort into making those
| good and making sure everyone was able to show off what
| they had been working on, so that probably helped. Most
| teams really phoned it in, but my view was that we were
| only as good as what we should show. If we made something
| amazing, but didn't show anyone, or talked over people's
| heads, it was as good as not doing it at all.
| leverknudel_tw wrote:
| I'm here at Bayer right now and that is pretty much what is
| happening. The RIFs are finishing up and my team leader is now
| my peer. Our boss now has 10x the reports. Even a 30 minute 1:1
| with everyone would take his entire week.
|
| And some people just need (or _want_ ) to be told what to do.
| You can't have everyone be a Steve Jobs and dream up things
| with nothing concrete getting done.
|
| I believe this is just a smokescreen to make Wall Street happy
| - until they can figure out which USA politicians to buy and
| get the glyphosate lawsuits under control.
| boznz wrote:
| Ouch! holocracy is never going to work in an already toxic
| culture or one where the beauracracy (paperwork) stays the
| same.
| shinryuu wrote:
| Who thought buying Monsanto was a good idea to begin with?
|
| Lawsuits were bound to happen. Monsanto has been highprofile
| for ages, and not in a good way.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| There are alternatives that do work. From what I've seen AWS
| seems to push decision-making deep into the organizational
| hierarchy, which means that individual cloud services can make
| rapid advances. It's an effective way to deploy new technoloqy
| quickly across a broad front, but not necessary good for
| regulated industries.
| kitsune_ wrote:
| In holacracy you have lead links which partially fulfill that
| role. And of course nothing prevents you from creating roles
| that are accountable for other managerial tasks. As a lead link
| you can do relative prioritizations (X is more important than
| Y), assign / remove people from roles and other things.
| refurb wrote:
| They actually learned it from tech. The whole Agile, self-
| organizing teams and flat structure was sold by HR consultants to
| tech, and years later (because pharma doesn't move very fast and
| because "innovative" tech did it) they adopted it. Bayer is
| actually one of the last ones.
|
| It's just the flavor of the month. Matrix organizations were a
| decade ago. Something new will come along later.
|
| The structure makes some problems better (less bureaucracy
| because fewer decision makers - no need to get 6 levels of middle
| management to approve) but creates new problems (lack of
| visibility across organizations so dumb decisions get made
| because of a lack of information). The workers basically have to
| keep doing the same job with fewer resources.
|
| I can't wait until we come full circle and go back to a pyramid
| org chart structure a la 1950's. It'll be fun to see how the HR
| consultants sell it.
| leosanchez wrote:
| They just won Bundesliga :).
| bjornsing wrote:
| > Stewart Butterfield, former CEO of Slack, recently described a
| dynamic within tech companies behind much of the over-hiring. He
| noted on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast in late May that when
| there's no real constraint on hiring, "you hire someone, and the
| first thing that person wants to do is hire other people." The
| reason is that "the more people who report to you, the higher
| your prestige, the more your power in the organization...So every
| budgeting process is, 'I really want to hire,' and that to me is
| the root of all the excess."
|
| I've seen this first hand. One place where I worked HR even had a
| table of team size vs manager compensation. When I pointed out
| that it may not be the best idea to directly incentivize managers
| to hire more people they were less than understanding. Of course
| it went totally out of control.
|
| But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except perhaps mr
| Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager they will
| ask you "How big was your team?", and they won't be impressed
| when you say "I managed to keep it down to four people". It's
| just something that resonates very strongly with the primitive
| side of our brains ("You say you were the chief, how big was your
| tribe?").
| bertmuthalaly wrote:
| This is the thesis of Bullshit Jobs!
| boznz wrote:
| Bullshit jobs infect the whole stack from the board of
| management down, but "middle-managers" are probably the most
| over-represented.
| jjav wrote:
| Yes, this is frustrating when one cares about efficiency (I
| do). Whether number of people or amount of budget overall,
| you're seen as better the more you have.
|
| When shopping for vendors to achieve something, my instinct is
| to try to find a way to do more with less. But I'm told that's
| dumb, I need to spend all the budget and ask for more, lest I
| be seen as a loser.
| 35mm wrote:
| Same with marketing and other budgets.
|
| The question is always 'what ad budget did you manage?'.
|
| Not 'what return on ad spend ratio did you achieve?'.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| > "You say you were the chief, how big was your tribe?"
|
| "Big enough to hunt woolly mammoth"
| sargun wrote:
| That will be my reply whenever the next person asks how big
| the team I used to run was.
| paulddraper wrote:
| This is 100% the first question asked by any management
| interview.
| nine_zeros wrote:
| Management is an utter bullshit job that is all about headcount
| and promo documents at this point. Society and companies can
| live without this.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| It's called "empire building" and is also part of the
| principal-agent problem where the manager is the agent and is
| assumed to have the firm's best interests in mind, but in
| reality doesn't. As a result, the principal (for example an
| owner) has to come up with methods to keep their management
| honest (example... tying most compensation to stock price -
| although I think this just makes management short sighted).
|
| I was once in a meeting where an IT manager was told his group
| would have to handle the install for a piece of software that
| like 2 engineers used. The guy asked for 3 additional head
| count and my jaw dropped. If someone has ever seen the Avatar
| Airbender show, I was like Prince Zuko speaking up at his
| father's meeting. You see I was there as a courtesy and tried
| to point out that even one headcount seemed like a lot for
| something that should take less than a week of work for a
| single employee. At the time I didn't understand that the
| manager understood this, but was playing for more staff to
| build their own importance. I didn't understand the games they
| play. As part of the game...you always say your people are
| swamped no matter what...or refer to a massive backlog of work
| even though that backlog is all super low priority and existing
| employees can be reprioritized.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> the manager is the agent and is assumed to have the firm
| 's best interests in mind, but in reality doesn't._
|
| Every manager I had at every major multinational company only
| had the interest of their own career progression in mind, not
| the company's, not their team's. You as an employee under
| them were just a means to their goal, nothing more. I naively
| assumed that making them look good and doing the overtime
| when needed to achieve their idiotic deadlines would also
| guarantee my ascension later, but boy was I gullible and
| wrong.
|
| Going the extra mile for your boss might work out for you
| when everything goes smooth in the org in times of economic
| prosperity when there's room for everyone to move up, but
| when the org or economy went tits up, and things were being
| put on chopping block, those managers didn't hesitate to grab
| the only parachute for themselves and let their team sink or
| throw them under the bus to save themselves at the tune of _"
| So Long and Thanks for all the Fish"_, so I learned the
| valuable lesson to not go the extra mile for any boss unless
| I have written guarantees of a reward.
|
| It's the way the reward system is set up in these companies.
| Climb the ladder and kick it under you after you dangle the
| carrot in front of naive idiots to push you up that ladder
| for rewards they might never see. I think someone called it
| "the GE way".
| pyuser583 wrote:
| I've been fortunate to have some very good managers.
|
| That's why I find this idea so horrible. I wouldn't be
| where I am now if I had to "self-organize."
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| I never said all managers all bad or that they should be
| removed and employees should self organize instead.
| Managers are needed so that ICs can focus on the work,
| the problem is that a lot of large companies, especially
| from traditional industries, tend to create some of the
| worst kinds of managers possible because their incentives
| are the worst.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >I've been fortunate to have some very good managers.
|
| Every time I've seen this sentiment and asked for
| something concrete on what made them good managers I get
| answered with platitudes or "nice-isms."
|
| At this point in my career, the emperor has no clothes.
| There are no good managers, only good peers.
| jmspring wrote:
| Stuart describes one type of mentality. I've recently joined a
| small company as the senior person. My goal is to understand
| our deliverables, our timing, and can we do it?
|
| In enterprise companies like the one I recently left,
| management is incentivized to kiss up try and do more with
| less, but wants more people to buttress their role as well as
| help determine the role above them. My prior boss in this same
| organization had multiple teams but rather than have the teams
| talk about their work insisted on being the one to present
| upward and rarely invited his teams to join.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Most companies will have a counter force, the 'cutter'.
|
| The 'cutter's compensation is tied to how much they cut.
|
| Of course, they will also need a team, to more efficiently cut
| other teams.
|
| And they in turn will also be incentivized to grow their team,
| the manager of the cutting team isn't immune to wanting to grow
| their team.
|
| But then it gets up to CEO, who has someone reporting to them
| who's only goal is cutting. The cutter has a team, with some
| managers of teams of cutters. It's turtles all the way up, but
| it does end at CEO.
|
| Generally every big company I've worked for, yes, had empire
| building. But then also had people to cut empires.
|
| So every few years there were layoffs to trim it up.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > But sadly there just is no counteracting force (except
| perhaps mr Musk). When you apply for your next job as a manager
| they will ask you "How big was your team?", and they won't be
| impressed when you say "I managed to keep it down to four
| people".
|
| I honestly would strongly prefer 4 people who are highly smart
| (think prodigy- or genius-level) below me than 20 "somewhat
| intelligent" employees (i.e. what at least 95 % of employees
| are).
| FLT8 wrote:
| In general I agree, but Prodigy-level people can come with
| their own challenges too. Eg. They're going to be coming up
| with a million ideas for how to improve things, so you'd
| better be prepared to listen and support them, which often
| will require changing the way the organisation works. If you
| don't (or can't) support them, be prepared for them to get
| demotivated quickly and move on. The other 90% are generally
| a little less high maintenance, but I agree that they will
| never achieve as much.
|
| IMO your best bet is to pick and choose who you need based on
| the situation. Your already-in-production CRUD app may
| benefit from a few extra 50th percentile coders to help with
| the workload, but if you're building a ground breaking
| product from scratch, then a deliberately small team of top
| echelon nerds may make the difference between success and
| hard fail.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| First:
|
| > so you'd better be prepared to listen and support them
|
| ... is in my opinion basic management 101.
|
| ---
|
| Concerning your other points: I do believe that I at least
| somewhat know how to work with such people (though I never
| managed such people).
|
| For example, at a former job, I worked _under_ such people;
| they really liked me, because I was one of the few people
| who were actually capable of "understanding" their visions
| _and_ make them understandable to less intelligent (but
| still smart) colleagues.
|
| I really have a tendency to be liked by frustrated highly-
| smart people, both because I really love to learn from them
| and I think I am a decent person to talk to if you are
| really frustrated (on the other hand, much more "ordinary"
| people often reproach me for being "unapproachable",
| "having my head in the clouds", "always being so negative",
| "complicated to work with", ... :-) ).
| neilv wrote:
| > _When you apply for your next job as a manager they will ask
| you "How big was your team?", and they won't be impressed when
| you say "I managed to keep it down to four people"_
|
| I had this same interaction when applying for Staff+ software
| engineer (not manager) at two FAANGs.
|
| One of the recruiters sniffed, or maybe negged, and said they
| expected X number people under you for that role.
|
| Highly effective small teams was considered small-time, not a
| selling point. Also not-OK was leading engineering for an early
| startup. Nor was a cross-company Principal role interfacing
| with everyone.
|
| (However, both companies were still open to me doing their new-
| grad Leetcode hazing battery or Python grunting automated
| screening test. Which isn't a sign that their culture is
| otherwise good, other than the team size fixation.)
| rqtwteye wrote:
| Same for technology used. You won't get much credit for
| keeping costs down and keeping things simple. The real money
| is in developing super complex systems. That will give you
| respect.
| jurschreuder wrote:
| Yes, this is my mantra. Senior Only-Developers are
| attracted to complex problems and try to make things using
| as many language from the "advanced" book as possible.
|
| That's why I like all-round developers better, they have a
| bit less to prove by making "smart and complicated" code.
| api wrote:
| The same kind of perverse incentive exists in other forms in
| other places, like what drives complexity growth in
| engineering. With people it's called empire building. With
| systems I've heard it called "resume oriented programming."
|
| "I built a massively complex system to manage our cloud
| deployment" looks superficially more impressive than "I
| eliminated the need for a complex deployment by rearchitecting
| a bit and consolidating systems, so then I only had to manage a
| few things."
|
| The first person will have more code they can cite and more
| expertise wrangling more systems. They'll be able to talk about
| all the big sexy "hyperscale" stuff they have managed with lots
| of terabytes and Kubernetes and terraform and helm charts. Most
| people would probably hire this person.
|
| I'd hire the second person.
|
| It's basically the midwit meme, which is so popular because it
| illustrates something real.
|
| There seems to be a core conflict in society between systems as
| things we build to do things vs systems as ends in themselves.
| Morons just do things. Geniuses just do things. Midwits get
| mixed up into the process of doing things and forget the point.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official post from them on this in January:
| https://www.bayer.com/media/en-us/bayer-aims-to-sustainably-...
| agent86 wrote:
| Valve - the PC gaming giant and owner of Steam - is very famously
| a flat organization. Their Handbook for New Employees[1] that
| goes into detail about how they operate has made its way out into
| the world a few times as well.
|
| [1] -
| https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/apps/valve/Valve_NewE...
| kqr2 wrote:
| That handbook is from 2012 so 12 years old now. Are there any
| updates?
| incrudible wrote:
| Is there any evidence that this approach outperforms? If you
| rest on a cash cow, basically any methodology that doesn't
| literally slaughter the cow is going to work out.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Valve is also fairly bad at maintaining focus on smaller
| projects. High-profile green-field projects like Steam Deck are
| fine, but lower priority tasks, particularly maintenance work,
| suffer. (For example, most of Valve's first-party games -
| including major titles like Half-Life and Portal - have been
| unplayable on macOS for _nearly five years_ because there 's no
| 64-bit build.)
| jdlshore wrote:
| I'm on not saying you're wrong, but old games don't really
| count as evidence of lack of maintenance. Games generally
| don't receive maintenance unless there's an ongoing revenue
| model, which there isn't for Half-Life and Portal.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Valve did a big marketing push last November for the 25th
| anniversary of Half-Life, which included a major update for
| the Windows version. Meanwhile, the Mac version won't run.
|
| https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25/
| egypturnash wrote:
| Valve is very famously terrible at actually shipping games.
| Mostly they're good at taking 30% off of most of the PC gaming
| industry and occasionally hiring teams that made popular mods
| to polish the mods. https://www.pcgamer.com/valves-unusual-
| corporate-structure-c...
| langsoul-com wrote:
| Valve most likely doesn't use that handbook in full any longer.
| Lots of things changed.
|
| For instance, they have a round table where everyone would
| judge everyone else. So if too many people don't like you, the
| axe is coming. Sounds miserable.
| ekianjo wrote:
| For Bayer's it's less about getting rid of bosses, but just
| getting rid of the huge amount of fat they have accumulated over
| the years, making any kind of decision a battle between layers
| and layers of mid-managers.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing
| aspirin, has been stuck in a rut:..."_
|
| More accurately that should read:
|
| _" Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing
| aspirin and co-inventing then widely commercializing heroin
| (diacetylmorphine), has been stuck in a rut:..."_
|
| Bayer's chemist Felix Hoffmann synthesised heroin just short of
| two weeks after that of aspirin in 1897. Bayer thought it
| 'heroic' and thus called it heroin then the company had the
| audacity to market it as a non-addictive substitute for morphine.
| The rest is history.
|
| When discussing Bayer we should never forget this.
| salad-tycoon wrote:
| It's even worse than that.
|
| Bayer is infamous for its letters that survived of it
| negotiating to buy 150 Jewish women for experiments. They were
| on good condition, they all died from the experimental sleeping
| pill. They also tested vaccines. Also its parent company made
| zyklon B.
|
| Example of the letter:
|
| "Received the order for 150 women. Despite their macerated
| condition they were considered satisfactory. We will keep you
| informed of the developments regarding the experiments," "The
| experiments were performed. All test persons died. We will
| contact you shortly about a new shipment."
|
| https://morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ca73-the-dark-history-of-b...
| hilbert42 wrote:
| You're damn right, its record has been terrible.
| aubanel wrote:
| Wow that's disgusting.
|
| We generally agree after some criminal decisions that
| decision-makers should be punished, and political parties
| should be forbidden.
|
| Why not apply this to companies ?
|
| I see the benefits (punishing stakeholders and deleting an
| institution that did terrible use of its power), and the
| downside (losing jobs) does not seem that terrible.
| throwaway74432 wrote:
| And people are flabbergasted at the healthy skepticism
| towards pharmaceutical companies, when they literally treat
| people like expendable cattle at every chance they get.
| exe34 wrote:
| That's just corporations though. Maybe we should think
| about alignment...
| morkalork wrote:
| Apparently the author of the above letters got eight years
| imprisonment after the war. Then after release returned to
| the board of directors of multiple chemical companies.
| Unbelievable, should have been hanged.
| currymj wrote:
| this pattern continually repeats itself.
|
| at this point everyone knows oxycontin was marketed by Purdue
| Pharmaceuticals as a less-addictive substitute for morphine and
| heroin.
|
| very early on in the discovery of morphine, there was some hope
| that it would be a less addictive alternative to opium.
|
| these drugs are so powerful at relieving immense suffering that
| people desperately want a version with no downsides, and are
| willing to fool themselves about this. (that these various
| pharmaceutical companies were willing to encourage this wishful
| thinking is still despicable.) i expect it to happen again with
| some new type of painkiller in another generation.
| andsoitis wrote:
| you might get rid of managers, but you will still need leaders.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| This will end hilariously
| pvaldes wrote:
| Soon a lot of workers will need to start buying Aspirins by
| Kilograms. Bayer wins again.
| hasoleju wrote:
| The problem with too many layers of management is mainly that
| they stop doing what they should do. Making decisions.
|
| The lowest management layer cannot make any decisions alone,
| otherwise the next layer would have no reason to exist. The next
| layer might even have to hand over the decision to one layer
| above. Up there no one really understands the decision that needs
| to be made because they are too far away from the actual impact.
| The result is that the decision is not made at all. Instead they
| procrastinate by asking for more details about the decision and
| the options.
|
| If you have only one layer you get a decision very fast.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The layers above _do_ likely understand the actual business
| goals better, and want to be sure that this thing you are
| asking for is actually going to support achieving those goals.
| Ideally that is the case, anyway.
| michaelt wrote:
| To an extent, sure.
|
| If you've got the CEO, and you've got front-line workers
| doing the actual value-producing business, you can have two
| layers in between, sure. Maybe three layers.
|
| But once you get to four or five layers? I hope your culture
| and productivity and ways of working were exactly where they
| need to be, because they're now impossible for anyone to
| consciously change.
| fizx wrote:
| Hi, sometime middle-manager here. The goal isn't to have me
| make decisions, its to let people around me make decisions
| quickly and well enough that most of the time it works out, and
| when it doesn't, we can roll back easily.
|
| If this isn't working out, I hire experts to improve the
| quality of decision-making, with me making decisions as a last
| resort.
| xingped wrote:
| I mean you can say that, but that has never been my
| experience. Neither, I'm sure, has it been many other
| peoples' experiences either.
| sodapopcan wrote:
| Naw, it was my experience once. It's rare, though.
| jncfhnb wrote:
| So... the goal is for you to do nothing? Except not impede
| people making decisions and hiring consultants when you, not
| the person closer to the issue, thinks it's not working?
| pgwhalen wrote:
| A more charitable interpretation might be that their goal
| is to create space for good decisions to be made, and to
| de-risk those decisions.
|
| Unless your mental model of a manager is "person who make
| decisions," than that is far from "doing nothing."
| kbenson wrote:
| As someone squarely in this position for the last few years
| (from a prior senior engineering position), I would say my
| job is to try to emulate the decisions and guidance _my_
| manager would give, but to more people than he has time to
| do it for.
|
| This is fairly obvious because for a while he was doing
| that for too many people because we couldn't find a person
| for the position. If I can speed up answers and feedback
| and provide direction quickly in a way that's similar to
| what he would have do for people that often ended up
| waiting for him because his schedule was too busy, then I'm
| doing at least one part of my job well.
|
| The more layers of this there are the more likely the
| message might be garbled by that game of telephone, but
| ultimately people can only handle so many relationships
| successfully, especially when they require specific regular
| action, and delegation (which is all middle management is
| essentially) is one approach that's been found to work
| around this.
|
| When I'm doing my job well, the people I manage have clear
| directions and expectations, and if the company is managed
| well those expectations are seen as achievable by all
| involved, and if they aren't it's my job to communicate
| that either up or down the structure. I don't think it's
| sane to assume that will just naturally occur once a
| workforce gets big enough, so something is needed to help
| that along, and managers are one way to do so.
| toyg wrote:
| Basically you're describing a lieutenant/sergeant
| relationship. The sargeant will try to give each private
| the same commands that the lieutenant would give, with
| necessary adjustments for the immediate realities of the
| field.
| grecy wrote:
| After working at a very large Telco with 50,000 employees and
| management style straight from the 1950's, your comment hit the
| nail precisely on the head. I put faces to the positions in
| your comment, and it sent shivers down my spine.
|
| Never again.
| incrudible wrote:
| > 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.
|
| That's how you produce nothing, but _a lot_ of it.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I seem to recall that the central takeaway from the essay tyranny
| of structurelessness is that when one affects to dispose of an
| official, formal and acknowledged power hierarchy, it simply
| reappears as an unofficial, informal, actively disavowed, and
| even more paranoid version of its former self.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, the issue with social power is that it can't really be
| created or destroyed, just reorganized.
|
| Similar to how if governments get too weak, you end up with
| warlords/gangs just taking their place, power abhors a vacuum
| and all that.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| "Well hello there. It is I Bill Anderson" "How good to see you
| all". "A year ago we got rid of middle management, and it is a
| huge success" "Sadly, we need to cut another 1000 jobs, but we
| all understand that." "my private jet needs to be replaced and I
| need a bigger bonus" "Now you need to self-organize and pick the
| 1000 coworkers who wont be co-workers anymore. "You will have 30
| minutes or organize and remember this is a flat structure". "Also
| what do you think the severance package should be?" "It will be
| financed directly from the remaning workers' wages." "We wont
| have anyone like evil HR make these decisions anymore now you can
| do it yourself". "BTW this (carnage) will all be streamed live on
| Hulu where watchers are already placing bets"
| _the_inflator wrote:
| I am not convinced. Reading the whole article it seems that Bayer
| is moving to a system better known as QBR, mixed with OKRs and
| most likely some sort of agile model.
|
| There is no no-hierarchies. Working in a 3 month cadence on an
| organizational level puts a lot of pressure on all people.
| Usually QBRs work top down and there is more monitoring along the
| process.
|
| What sounds great is more or less success theatre as well as
| inflexibility. No one wants to lack behind in a QBR report.
| Risking 4 times a year being red flagged in a report sparks fear.
|
| Also approval processes and idea sharing are the first victims of
| such reorganizations. No one risks a 2 week sprint for some
| improvement sprint or working on technical debt in tech for
| example.
|
| I've seen this within a company with 100k employees worldwide.
|
| People will regret QBRs.
|
| Usually companies want to get rid of the costs of middle
| managers, which are usually elder than normal staffers. Also
| companies want to include younger folks, because they are on
| average cheaper per resource from a controlling perspective.
|
| Young guns without leadership with delivery pressure by an even
| older senior management layer means having a large gap and divide
| between them.
|
| Senior management adds so called assistants to their staff, the
| hidden layer.
|
| I watched a lot of mobbing at the lower level as a result. Fear
| of tumbling over mistakes aka receiving a bad performance review
| is rampant when you need to report all the time results.
|
| Mixing teams every QBR sounds fun, but isn't. It means even more
| being in constant competition. Who is the most flexible employee
| and most successful under different circumstances?
|
| Large organizations are hard to manage. People will very soon
| miss their middle managers to cover things up in a human way.
|
| QBRs don't help if there is a clear product strategy missing.
|
| There is no perfect system, but QBRs are some of the most toxic
| form of working and collaboration that I have witnessed so far.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Self-organizing still leads to bosses, but they just get paid
| like regular workers.
|
| My company does this sort of thing but with dev chapter leads.
| The chapter leads have no management training and no authority.
| They don't even really know what you're doing since they're on a
| separate team and have their own coding work. They're senior devs
| that have added management responsibilities and are just paid as
| senior devs. Fuck that.
| arwhatever wrote:
| Reminds me a bit of that Tyranny of Structurelessness essay,
| well worth a read.
| ofslidingfeet wrote:
| That doesn't sound like they have a big lawsuit/investigation on
| the radar or anything.
| moneycantbuy wrote:
| what happens is new manager now has ~100 direct reports so has no
| idea what anyone is doing. everyone under him now needs to
| "demonstrate leadership" so everyone is telling everyone else
| what to do with no authority. end of year performance is purely
| how well you politicked. stock now at multiyear low.
| kemiller wrote:
| These types of move are sold as empowering workers but they are
| really about kicking the ladder so there's no pathway to the
| executive class. It's always hard to find leaders who aren't
| empire builders, but this makes it impossible.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| State prison "inmates who are really managers" is certainly a
| danger. Or "All employees are equal, but some are more equal than
| others."
|
| However, this is worth a try. HR can devote itself to slapping
| down anyone who tries to become the toughest convict in the yard.
| Or the meanest girl in the cheerleading squad.
|
| Middle managers are invariably the source of all corporate
| problems. So postulating "we're not going to have any" is a good
| start, but then you have to control the problems that inevitably
| arise from that.
| esel2k wrote:
| << It is just lots of noise >> thats what people told me who know
| him/worked for him.
|
| The reality is that Bayer is in deep mud with their lawsuit and
| laying off lots of people in Germany is difficulty. If you pack
| it under a nice << we are modern, amazing shift >> package, then
| he will get more support and also shareholders will be pleased
| (for a while). That's my theory.
| Quarrel wrote:
| This was absolutely my first thought.
|
| In Germany he'll need to get buy-in from the board, which will
| include employee representatives (I've not looked at Bayer
| specifically, but either directly, or through a supervisory
| board that has real power), while also convincing shareholders
| that he's going to either goose the share price short-term, or
| actually add value long-term. While the hope for the German
| corporate model is that it delivers on long-term value for both
| employees & shareholders, it has not held up to much long term
| scrutiny unfortunately (which isn't to say it is bad, just that
| it hasn't necessarily shown itself to be better than most other
| corporate governance models). What it has done is make for
| innovative CEOs, and not necessarily in the US model, as they
| try and negotiate the pitfalls.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| Middle management is a plague.
|
| I am convinced that hierarchical structures and strong leadership
| are necessary, but some layers are often superfluous.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| The bad kind of middle managers want to hire more people to
| increase its power, regardless of the true interest of the
| company he is working for.
|
| Apply this logic recursively, if there is enough cash, and you
| can easily imagine where it goes.
|
| And it is also extremely difficult to unwind, they usually are
| pretty smart and cunning individuals who know how to make it look
| like all of this is necessary.
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