Rewiring a Giant: How Bayer is Dismantling Bureaucracy and Betting on Shared Ownership

This blog post is part of 80+ case studies of progressive organizations we created for the ZeroDX awards 2025. These organizations embody the principles of RenDanHeYi in their work structures:

• Zero Distance to customer: Decision what to build is based on insights from the marketplace

• Autonomy: Small teams with full decision-making autonomy enable speed in execution

• Shared Rewards: Everyone in the micro-enterprise participates in its financial success.

Internally, the system had become too slow, too centralized, and too distant from its customers. Employees found themselves buried in bureaucracy. Teams operated in silos. Important work was routinely delayed by layers ofmanagerial review. It had become clear that small fixes would not be enough.

Then came a bold commitment to transformation. With the arrival of CEO Bill Anderson, Bayer made the decision not just to streamline, but to fundamentally reimagine how the company worked. The result was a new operating system:Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO). At its core was a promise to distribute leadership, shorten the distance to the customer, and unleash the full potential of every team.

Although Bayer presents Dynamic Shared Ownership in its own terms, the core features of the model include decentralization, user-focused teams, shared P&L responsibility, and a redefinition of leadership. These features reflect principles long practiced in Haier’s RenDanHeYi. Rather than being a short-term initiative or a structural adjustment, Bayer’s transformation signals a fundamental rethinking of how the company operates. This shift is anchored in five interconnected changes: a move from shareholder value to mission and outcomes; from hierarchy toopen networks; from functional silos to value-creating teams; from static annual planning to adaptive 90-day cycles; and from reactive mindsets to creative ownership.

These changes are already taking shape. In one oncology project, a team preparing to launch a life-extending therapyremoved more than 800 internal documents that served no purpose other than satisfying internal review processes. This eliminated delays and accelerated access to regulators. In previous years, such a decision would have been unthinkable without multiple levels of approval. Now, it reflects a broader cultural change: teams are expected to focus on what truly creates value.

Cross-functional collaboration is becoming the norm. When a regulatory issue disrupted the production timeline of a key eye care product in the United States, Bayer’s supply and commercial teams coordinated directly to meet launch goals without escalating decisions through management. These new horizontal relationships are not just more efficient. They are expressions of adeeper shift in culture, where decisions are made by the people who hold the relevant knowledge.

To support this new way of working, Bayer has restructured around four core team types: customer, product, technical, and enabling. Each exists not to preserve a function, but to contribute directly to shared outcomes. In Italy, a smallhemophilia team responded to persistent patient complaints about multi-vial treatments. Instead of waiting years for a global packaging overhaul, they designed a €6 3D-printed holder, validated it with local medical staff, and delivered it to patients in a matter of weeks. This kind of rapid, user-centered innovation, led by those closest to the need rather than furthest from it, is a hallmark of RenDanHeYi-inspired logic.

Planning cycles have also shifted. Instead of relying on fixed annual strategies, Bayer now works in 90-day rhythms. Teams define clear outcomes, test ideas, reflect, and adapt. In the United States, brand managers no longer remain in fixed assignments. Through a quarterly "brand marketplace," they align themselves with the work that matters mostbased on current priorities. Influence flows from contribution, not from title.

Mindset change underpins every structural shift. Bayer is encouraging employees to unlearn inherited habits such aswaiting for approval, deferring to hierarchy, or avoiding responsibility. In Portugal, one team shared that since adoptingthis way of working, their Monday morning dread had disappeared. The system is not only more agile; it is more human. Teams are beginning to feel ownership, not just obligation.

Leadership has been redefined. Bayer has reduced its management layers from as many as 13 to approximately 6 or 7, depending on the business unit. Former managers now act as visionaries, architects, catalysts, and coaches. Theirpurpose is no longer to authorize or control but to support and enable. Over 250 full-time DSO practitioners and morethan 1,000 team-level champions are embedded across the organization to help make this new approach real. The result is an internal platform structure that mirrors Haier’s approach to enabling self-managing teams.

By mid-2025, Bayer had launched over 100 front-runner teams and implemented the new model across half its globalbusiness. The company is also targeting €2 billion in cost savings by removing redundant structures, simplifying reporting chains, and focusing resources on activities that create direct stakeholder value. However, these savings are not the main goal.

The transformation is designed to unlock innovation, responsiveness, and entrepreneurial energy at scale.

Change on this scale takes time. Roughly one third of employees are already leaning into the new system. Anotherthird remain cautious, and the rest are waiting to see what unfolds. Bayer is addressing this with robust support: team coaching, peer learning programs, self-serve toolkits, and regular reflection cycles. Progress is not measured by compliance but by each team’s ability to deliver meaningful outcomes and respond to user needs.

Bayer’s ambition is not just to optimize a legacy structure. It is to create a fundamentally new model of enterprisewhere authority is distributed, users are central, and teams operate with real autonomy and shared accountability. While its vocabulary and tools are distinct, the direction closely parallels the path taken by Haier through RenDanHeYi. In both cases, the goal is not to manage people better, but to design systems where people can lead themselves.

This journey will require persistence, humility, and time. But the foundation is now in place. Across business lines andgeographies, more and more teams are stepping into real ownership, solving problems at the edge, and demonstrating what becomes possible when distance is replaced by trust.

If Bayer succeeds, it could become the first Fortune 500 company to embed a decentralized, outcome-driven model of shared ownership at global scale. More importantly, it is already showing that even the most traditionalorganizations can rebuild themselves from within, not by pushing change from the top, but by releasing the potential that has always existed across the system.