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Business transformation
How Bayer’s dynamic path of shared ownership offers lessons for every leader
Bayer is pioneering a new way of working, focusing teams on creating value with more autonomy and accountability. Early results offer practical insights for leaders everywhere.
Bayer is undergoing a comprehensive transformation. When Bill Anderson became CEO in 2023, our company faced business challenges, significant debt, and mounting litigation costs. Crop Science prices were falling, and investors were pressing for major changes. Like many large organizations today, Bayer was also burdened by a deeply ingrained hierarchical and bureaucratic system that made it difficult to get things done.
To address these challenges, Bayer introduced Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO) to reduce hierarchy and bureaucracy, and increase focus on value creation for stakeholders. Already, we’re seeing positive shifts: faster decisions, improved revenues and profitability, and more engaged teams across the organization.
What we’re learning could help leaders in other regulated industries and beyond.
How we changed Bayer
Bayer, a global organization headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany, operates across three main divisions: Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Health, and Crop Science.
DSO is built on five key shifts that set it apart from traditional management:
- From many KPIs to clear outcomes: Teams now focus on the value we seek to create for our stakeholders, rather than just executing tasks or producing deliverables.
- From silos to networks: We have moved away from vertical hierarchies. Teams now work in transparent networks with autonomy and accountability.
- From annual plans to 90-day cycles: Instead of rigid annual planning, we work in short cycles to test, learn, and adjust quickly.
- From a functional orientation to putting customers and products at the center, enabled by capabilities and resources: Customer teams and product teams drive our focus on providing solutions to customers. Functions such as research and development (R&D) and manufacturing are geared towards providing capabilities and services in support of customers and products. Talent, funding, and information flow to where they create the most value.
- From habit to conscious choice: Employees are learning to think differently and take real ownership of their work and its impact.
This system removes layers of well-intentioned, but often unnecessary approvals with empowered teams solving problems and delivering for customers – fast.
Why scale matters most
In my career, I have helped more than 100 companies apply aspects of this approach, including many in the Fortune 500. But almost always, those efforts were limited to a part of the organization: a function, a region, or a product line.
When I joined Bayer in 2023 to lead our DSO journey, we needed to go bigger – a comprehensive, enterprise-wide approach to address deep-rooted challenges. The urgency drove a bold transformation. It taught me an important lesson: to attempt change at scale, you need either a burning platform or an audacious aspiration. For us, it was both.
Problems that once took six months of back-and-forth to resolve are now fixed in a matter of days.
Early results
Although we still have so much more to accomplish, we are starting to see tangible examples of our operating model creating value and driving our mission forward. Here are some examples:
- Customer team performance: Some customer teams have doubled revenues in a single 90-day cycle by focusing on customers, owning outcomes, and acting fast.
- Product teams accelerating growth: A key new product launch worth tens of millions of euros reached the market a year earlier than planned and is now on track to grow to twice the size originally forecasted. In parallel, mature products found new growth opportunities.
- Faster decisions on the factory floor: A production line that once needed 15 specialists working in silos is now run by five people with different skills. Instead of passing issues up and down the chain, they own the line end-to-end, and deal directly with customers. Problems that once took six months of back-and-forth to resolve are now fixed in a matter of days.
- Gains across the business: Across Bayer, the changes have already delivered higher sales, quicker product launches, and leaner operations.
To break those habits, we had to invest in a multi-year journey of unlearning and rebuilding.
The hurdles for leaders
Traditional systems create deep habits. Managers are used to controlling, and employees are used to being managed. Processes and structures reinforce that dependence.
To break those habits, we had to invest in a multi-year journey of unlearning and rebuilding. We designed our approach carefully:
- Bring leaders in early. We began the change process with the top 1,000 leaders. Over six to nine months, they took part in intensive workshops to redesign how every part of Bayer would run under DSO – from the way teams are formed to how resources move, and how decisions get made. Their commitment was essential for the rest of the company to follow.
- Work first with the willing. Research suggests that about 15% of people are natural early adopters of change. We began with this group, and 90 small “front-runner” teams, totaling 3,000–4,000 people, volunteered to go first. They worked with senior leaders to test new ways of working, creating momentum for the rest of the company.
- Develop experts to spread the change. We trained around 200 employees as “DSO practitioners.” They come from different parts of Bayer and work with senior leaders and front-runner teams to spread the new way of working and help colleagues practise it in their daily jobs.
- Let natural enthusiasts step up. We also identified thousands of champions within teams. Transparent communication built trust and momentum: people who were enthusiastic about the change and willing to help drive it forward.
- Keep everyone in the loop. From the start, we kept people updated through regular posts and stories through internal Bayer channels, so everyone could see what was happening. That openness helped build trust.
Freedom without losing control
Some might ask how this model might work in highly regulated industries, where decentralization can seem risky. But embedding compliance experts within teams speeds up problem-solving and improves quality. Autonomy and regulation can work hand in hand.
The outcome is quicker launches, better quality products, and stronger ties with regulators. Done right, autonomy and regulation can support each other, rather than clash.
Lessons for leaders
What we’ve seen at Bayer may help others facing big change. Five key lessons stand out.
- Trust your people. Trust that employees are capable of creating value and leveraging their expertise. Old systems treat them with suspicion, while DSO treats people as fully formed adults.
- Focus on and measure impact. Set and measure outcomes that matter to customers, employees, investors, and other stakeholders, at every level from teams to the whole organization.
- Foster passion and urgency. Without a burning platform or a bold vision to drive change, small targets won’t justify the disruption.
- Engage the whole system. Pilots in one corner of the business won’t last. To stick, the model has to reach the whole company.
- Lead differently. Leaders need to stop directing and start enabling. We’ve replaced command and control with a new approach: leaders as visionaries, architects, catalysts, and coaches.
These insights connect to my presentation on leadership in a new era at the 2025 Drucker Forum, the annual Vienna meeting of business leaders and thinkers. Our experience with DSO offers one answer: it is how a company can unleash its full potential and grow successfully and profitably in today’s turbulent environment. Our turnaround continues, but DSO demonstrates that empowered teams focused on value creation make faster decisions and deliver better results – and these lessons reach far beyond Bayer.
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