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Good morning. After you’ve streamlined and transformed and flattened your company, how do you get it to grow again? I recently asked that question to Bayer CEO Bill Anderson, who’s done all of the above at the 163-year-old health science giant. He’s reduced the number of managers from about 16,000 to 4,500 (in a company of 88,000) and replaced hierarchy and annual budgets with 5,000 small teams working on 90-day cycles. So what’s next?
“Our ambition, for the last three years, basically, was to survive,” he told me, as we sipped takeout coffee in an empty corner of New York’s Javits Center last month. “How much are we willing to stretch ourselves now and put out a bold ambition for what this company can be and fight for that?”
Good question. Bayer announced plans to invest $2.2 billion in a new Ohio manufacturing site last week. Global COO Sebastian Guth recently wrote in Fortune that the company stopped assigning sales targets. Investors are newly enthusiastic as Bayer’s stock is up 57% over the past year (versus about 21% for BASF and 14% for Novartis) but flat over the past three years (versus 43% and 47% growth, respectively). Anderson has improved profitability and won a Supreme Court ruling that addresses liability claims predating his arrival, but the real test will be whether he can continue to drive revenue and profit growth.
Anderson has found that giving people more authority doesn’t necessarily increase their willingness to make tough decisions. “We have a nice culture” that’s “a little softer” on things like “courageous authenticity and decisiveness.”
To address that, he started at the top: “The job of the leaders is not to manage people, and it’s not to decide the goals, and then, you know, cascade them. No, forget that. The job of the leaders is to set the vision. That’s very different than telling everyone what to do,” he said. “We are putting 95% of decision making at the bottom, not delegating it down in the hierarchy.” He ranks his priorities in descending order: Mission first, employees second, shareholders third, senior management last.
What’s oddly heartening is the realization that Anderson doesn’t have all the answers. It shows that transformation is ongoing and hard. “This is not a culture program or a communication program,” said Anderson. “Ninety-nine percent of all corporate transformations are not transformations. They’re just shuffling the boxes around.”
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com