Bayer attacked bureaucracy by firing some 5,000 managers and asking teams to ‘self-organize.’ Here’s how it’s going after one year

man in black shirt and black jacket, glasses poses for a portrait (Credit: Getty Images)

Good morning. Lee Clifford here filling in for Sheryl.

When you’ve covered business for a long time, radical corporate strategies tend to get your attention. Whether ahead of their time, truly bizarre, or just plain doomed, it’s certainly interesting to see companies go completely off-script. (The Zappos experiment with “Holocracy” memorably comes to mind.) So I was intrigued to read last year about the radical plan to attack bureaucracy at German pharma company Bayer. The company, which invented aspirin, eliminated nearly all managers and instead asked teams to ‘self-organize’ for 90-day work sprints.