Building Bayer for the Future: Rewiring a Global Enterprise for Continuous Change
Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership model is rewiring structures, decision-making and resource allocation to build a more agile enterprise capable of adapting continuously at scale.
Building Bayer for the Future: Rewiring a Global Enterprise for Continuous Change
Bayer’s Dynamic Shared Ownership model is rewiring structures, decision-making and resource allocation to build a more agile enterprise capable of adapting continuously at scale.
Summary
Enterprise agility is an ambitious goal. It requires far more than a checklist of agile practices or asking teams to move faster. Leaders must rethink some of the fundamental ways an enterprise is structured, governed and managed.
The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility from PMI Agile Alliance describes enterprise agility as the capacity to adapt at scale without losing coherence. Its principles call for organizations to combine greater autonomy with shared purpose, clear guardrails, adaptable operating models and the ability to learn and respond as conditions change.
Bayer has spent the past three years doing the hard work of building an agile organization. Through Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO), the global life sciences company is redesigning its operating model to become more adaptive, entrepreneurial and focused on value creation.
Bayer’s experience offers a window into a question facing many large organizations: What does it actually take to translate the principles of enterprise agility into the everyday workings of an enterprise?
- Date
October 2026
- Content Type
- Topics
How to cite: Building Bayer for the Future: Rewiring a Global Enterprise for Continuous Change (2026).
Key Takeaways
- Enterprise agility requires changing the operating system, not just adopting new practices. Bayer is redesigning structures, decision rights, planning cycles and resource allocation so adaptability is built into how the organization operates.
- Autonomy depends on alignment and accountability. As decisions move closer to teams, shared outcomes, clear guardrails, transparency and peer accountability help maintain enterprise-wide coherence.
- Resources must be able to move as priorities change. By freeing people and funding from traditional, rigid structures, Bayer is able to quickly redirect capacity toward high-value opportunities.
- Structures can change faster than behaviors. Making DSO work requires teams to unlearn escalation and resource protection while leaders learn to relinquish control.
The Challenge: The Right Ingredients, the Wrong Recipe
When Bill Anderson became CEO of Bayer in 2023, the company was under pressure on multiple fronts. Investors were frustrated by sluggish stock performance and calling for more radical action, including potentially separating Bayer’s three major businesses: pharmaceuticals, crop science and consumer health. At the same time, the company faced competitive, regulatory and operational headwinds, lingering legal issues from its Monsanto acquisition, and approaching patent expirations for two blockbuster drugs.
Yet Bayer also had significant strengths to build on. Its approximately 100,000 employees across 80 countries had an average tenure of 11 years, annual turnover of just 5%, and strong opportunities for development and mobility. Sixty percent of senior positions were filled internally. And employees already had a strong connection to Bayer’s mission: “Health for all, hunger for none.” The challenge was enabling them to act on that mission more effectively.
The existing operating model often stood in the way. Decisions, resources and authority were separated from the people closest to the work. Products took too long to launch, while approvals and resolutions traveled through multiple layers of management. Rules intended to manage risk and ensure consistency had accumulated into a 1,300-page policy manual.
The board of directors believed that incremental improvement would not be enough. The system itself had to change. Anderson and his team designed Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO) to do just that: reinvent how Bayer organizes work, distributes authority, allocates resources and holds people accountable for outcomes.
Eventually, if you want to do this, you need to change the DNA, the organizational DNA of the company. That’s hard, and it’s why it’s so rare.
The Approach: Dynamic Shared Ownership
Michael Lurie, Chief Transformation Officer at Bayer, describes DSO through five major shifts in how the organization operates:
1. How the organization is structured and how people relate to each other
Bayer’s DSO model shifts the organization from a traditional hierarchy toward a dynamic network of teams. Predominantly organized around customer and product work – not reporting lines or predefined roles – these multidisciplinary teams engage directly with customers and are empowered to explore solutions, make decisions and take responsibility for delivering outcomes.
The shift has dramatically flattened the organization. In some business units, 60–70% of management positions were eliminated in the first year, while the number of organizational layers fell from as many as 12 to five or six. But reducing management layers does not mean reducing accountability. Instead, some of the oversight shifts to the teams themselves. Transparency across the network allows teams to see one another’s progress and dependencies, while team members are expected to provide feedback and address performance issues as they arise.
This self-monitoring system changes the role of leadership as well, from directing and approving work to designing the system and creating the conditions teams need to succeed. At the same time, influence becomes less dependent on position. Expertise and contribution can carry weight across the network regardless of formal reporting relationships.
We made teams the core unit of work, which is a very profound shift.
2. How work gets done
Bayer has replaced traditional annual planning and control cycles with a faster, more adaptive operating rhythm. At its core is a 90-day cycle for setting outcomes, assessing progress and changing conditions, and adjusting priorities and resources accordingly. Individual teams often work on even shorter one- or two-week cycles, creating additional opportunities to test, learn and adapt.
Outcomes provide the connective tissue across the organization. Beginning with the board of management and executive team, outcomes are made visible across Bayer so teams can see enterprise and divisional priorities as well as the outcomes of teams whose work intersects with their own. Every 90 days, network retrospectives bring teams together to examine progress, share learning, identify dependencies and determine what needs to change. Teams can adjust their priorities and release or request resources as the needs of the broader network evolve.
This adaptability operates within what Bayer calls a “bold and light” strategic and financial frame: ambitious enough to establish clear direction, but deliberately light on prescription. The frame establishes boundaries within which teams can experiment and make decisions without seeking approval for every change. The result combines strategic direction with continual learning, giving teams clarity about where the organization is headed while allowing the path to evolve as conditions change.
One of the big obstacles is resource allocation. You might say, ‘I’m going to plan in agile ways,’ but then you hit those walls of yearly OpEx and CapEx cycles that are totally divorced from the structure you’ve created with these teams. And that’s where things die.
3. How value is created
Planning and budgeting have also changed to support this more fluid way of working. Under DSO, funding and other resources are treated as shared enterprise assets that should flow to the work where they can create the greatest value.
Bayer organizes funding into large pools rather than budgets owned by individual teams. Teams draw on those resources based on the outcomes they are pursuing and, critically, are expected to release resources when they are no longer needed or could be put to better use elsewhere.
Rolling projections look ahead at least 18 months and are refreshed every 90 days. The quarterly network retrospectives provide a forum for teams to discuss where resources should increase, decrease or move in the next cycle, informed not only by their own needs but by the opportunities facing the broader business. At the enterprise level, funding can likewise move among major pools every 90 days.
Making resources fluid, however, requires changing the budgeting process as well as team mindsets. Teams accustomed to annual, use-it-or-lose-it budgets must become comfortable giving resources back. Shared information, enterprise-level outcomes, skilled facilitation and visible leadership support help shift reallocation from a competition to protect resources toward a collective decision about where they can create the most value.
We think about funding, talent, and information in the same way. They're all pooled, and they all float... they're not hardwired in.
4. Alignment around outcomes
DSO shifts the focus of work from completing tasks and deliverables to achieving outcomes. Rather than starting with an existing team and determining what work to assign to it, Bayer starts with the outcome it wants to achieve, then brings together the disciplines and capabilities needed to deliver it.
Bayer’s mission provides a stable point of orientation, while outcomes translate that mission into choices teams can act on. This combination enables flexibility without making the organization’s direction feel unstable. Teams have greater freedom to determine how to achieve an outcome while maintaining a shared line of sight to the objectives of the broader enterprise.
Bayer defines outcomes across three dimensions: business performance, including financial and operating results; stakeholder value, encompassing value created for customers, colleagues, investors and others; and ecosystem contribution, reflecting Bayer’s role in the broader healthcare and food-security systems in which it operates. This broadens the lens through which teams consider both success and the value they are expected to create.
The shift from focusing on tasks or deliverables… to focusing on actual outcomes… has been profound.
5. Creative mindset
Changing structures and processes is not enough if people continue to operate according to the assumptions of the old system. Bayer’s fifth shift, creative mindset, is about challenging the orthodoxies and limiting beliefs that reinforce traditional ways of working.
For leaders, that means becoming comfortable creating context and boundaries rather than controlling every decision. For teams, it means moving beyond behaviors learned in a hierarchical system. Many had effectively been trained over years to escalate decisions upward; DSO asks them instead to experiment, exercise judgment and take accountability for outcomes. It also requires an enterprise mindset: Teams must be willing to make choices based on what creates the greatest value for Bayer as a whole, rather than optimizing only for their own interests.
The shift also changes how people learn about what is happening around them. Leaders are encouraged to sense across the network and use those conversations alongside formal data to inform decisions. Together, these behaviors build the capacity to question established assumptions, learn from evidence and operate confidently within a more networked and adaptive system.
It’s about collaboration, interpersonal trust, and the ability to have tough conversations about the business together, without having to kick those decisions upstairs to the leadership team.
Figure 1: How the five shifts at Bayer relate to the principles of the Manifesto for Enterprise Agility
The Solution: Bayer’s Progress on the Path to Change
Bayer is still midway through its DSO transformation, but the changes to its operating model are already yielding business value. Across the company, teams are making consequential decisions about products, markets, R&D, manufacturing and technical capabilities within much shorter cycles.
Two examples illustrate some of the ways the model is changing the game for Bayer, its employees and its customers.
Funding the best opportunities through collective intelligence (Pharma, Italy)
In Bayer’s pharmaceutical business in Italy, DSO invites broad, incentivized input into flexible resource allocation. A process once run annually by a small leadership group now involves about 50 product, customer-team and functional leaders. Participants are given visibility into the economics of the broader business so they can assess opportunities from an enterprise perspective. Commercial incentives tied partly to Italy’s overall performance give teams a direct stake in reallocating resources to support the success of the broader business.
That shared view changes the conversation. Teams periodically assess performance and surface where expectations have changed: a product may be growing faster than anticipated, an account may be underperforming, or a regulatory delay may mean planned launch spending is no longer needed. Participants can then propose resource shifts, including voluntarily releasing funding they no longer need. Teams have even made reciprocal commitments to share resources now with the expectation that they may flow back as circumstances change.
Early results point to a meaningful change in where resources go: smaller, higher-growth brands are attracting more investment than they historically did when larger businesses had greater influence over the annual allocation process. Bayer leaders believe the approach has contributed to stronger growth in Italy, which they describe as one of the higher-growth markets for pharmaceuticals in the Bayer system.
Unlocking local opportunity (Crop Science, Sub-Saharan Africa)
A different value-creation story emerged in Bayer’s Crop Science business in Sub-Saharan Africa. Corn seed production had remained at approximately 30,000 metric tons despite demand for greater supply. Under DSO, Bayer gave country and field teams greater authority to determine how to expand production.
Rather than waiting for centralized decisions or working toward hectare-based targets set from above, teams in countries including Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia could explore new growers, production areas and contracting approaches. Production teams also worked directly with commercial teams to establish targets based on market demand and the opportunities they were seeing locally.
Production subsequently increased from roughly 30,000 to 80,000 metric tons while costs declined. The example illustrates the value of placing authority alongside the information needed to act.
Conclusion
Bayer’s experience with DSO has not been frictionless. Both teams and leaders have had to unlearn traditional ways of working and embrace both the autonomy and the accountability that come with this change.
As DSO matures, Bayer continues to evolve and refine it. A Body of Knowledge and Evidence team now coordinates approximately 15 working teams examining and evolving different elements of DSO. At the same time, Bayer is beginning to extend DSO beyond its organizational boundaries, exploring new ways of working with suppliers and customers and preparing to share the system more deliberately with other organizations.
That evolution reinforces a broader lesson from Bayer’s transformation. Enterprise agility may be conceptually based on values and principles, but organizations need structures, roles and mechanisms that make them actionable. The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility calls for organizations to distribute authority, align around shared outcomes, redirect resources and continually learn as conditions change. Bayer’s experience shows both the potential and the ongoing work involved in translating those principles into the operating system of a large enterprise.
This case study was developed by PMI Agile Alliance as part of its ongoing work to explore how organizations are putting the principles of enterprise agility into practice.
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