Big Deals Like Bayer’s Often Fail to Deliver High Performance
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/busin ... mance.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/busin ... mance.html
Article on Trump meeting with Monsanto and Bayer.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-ceo-m ... 11066.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-ceo-m ... 11066.html
Heard a Bayer commercial on the radio the other day. Not advertising one of its products, but the company itself.
Bayer will keep Monsanto jobs, invest $8 billion if merger is approved
http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news ... on-if.html
http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news ... on-if.html
Chicago is targeting firms in other Midwest cities after Caterpillar recently moved from Peoria to Chicago.
Chicago is targeting firms within a 300-mile radius of Chicago for relocation.
Monsanto/Bayer HQs is an apparent "potential" target. ARTICLE
From the article:
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Chicago is targeting firms within a 300-mile radius of Chicago for relocation.
Monsanto/Bayer HQs is an apparent "potential" target. ARTICLE
From the article:
Another target type is St. Louis-based Monsanto, whose shareholders in December approved a merger with Bayer, the German pharmaceutical firm. Such cross-border deals can spur interest in consolidating U.S. headquarters nearer an airport like O'Hare, which was Caterpillar's stated incentive. A spokeswoman for Monsanto did not return a call seeking comment.
^ In some ways it supports and provide urgency to why subsidizing a direct flight to an European hub is beneficial for the region when in terms of actually travel it doesn't save any time whether you connect via ORD, ATL and or Heathrow, etc.
Some of the smaller cities on that map must be worried. Nor can it help the State of Illinois politics that continues to divide between Chicago and rest of state that just got its bond rating downgraded again. With CAT HQ in Chicago I don't buy that they will keep back office in IL. Believe CAT will be looking to downsize and reorganize/or out source some of the back office out of Illinois in a few years and like all good border wars, St. Louis/MO will be working it as everyone else.
Some of the smaller cities on that map must be worried. Nor can it help the State of Illinois politics that continues to divide between Chicago and rest of state that just got its bond rating downgraded again. With CAT HQ in Chicago I don't buy that they will keep back office in IL. Believe CAT will be looking to downsize and reorganize/or out source some of the back office out of Illinois in a few years and like all good border wars, St. Louis/MO will be working it as everyone else.
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State Farm will not be happening. They had the opportunity to move the HQ just a few years ago and instead decided to double down on Bloomington and go with the three satellite HQ locations in Phoenix, Dallas, & Atlanta.
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I would really like to see St Louis aggressively go after other cities companies.
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Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
I don't understand why so many companies are moving to Chicago; aren't they worried about the State's financial situation? I mean, Illinois is broke, and they're gonna be broke for a long time. Seems inevitable that massive tax increases are on the way, not to mention drastic cuts in services.
Divestments have started in an effort to win approval:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bayer-mon ... 50342.html
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bayer-mon ... 50342.html
Rename this to The Bayer Thread?
Anyway, Bayer is looking at selling off the west side of their Creve Coeur campus. Local head counts would not be affected.
https://www.stltoday.com/business/local ... 91be8.html
Anyway, Bayer is looking at selling off the west side of their Creve Coeur campus. Local head counts would not be affected.
https://www.stltoday.com/business/local ... 91be8.html
Bayer ‘exploring’ sale of part of its Creve Coeur campus
Last Modified: 01:10 PM, Sat Feb 26, 2022
By Steph Kukuljan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 26 February 2022, Pages: A7
News
Word Count: 241
CREVE COEUR — Agribusiness giant Bayer is marketing a portion of its longtime mid-St. Louis County campus for sale as the company weighs how much office space it needs in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bayer occupies several buildings on the west and east sides of Lindbergh Boulevard in Creve Coeur, just south of Olive Boulevard. The company, known as Monsanto before Bayer’s 2018 acquisition, said it does not believe it will need as much office space with employees choosing to work some days from home.
The pandemic has affected how corporate America works as employees have transitioned to work from home. Bayer is the latest major St. Louis-area company to market its campus for sale. Last year, shoe company Caleres put its Clayton headquarters on the market. Caleres has not yet found a buyer, according to the company’s latest quarterly report.
Bayer is seeking offers for its buildings west of Lindbergh. Its property on the east side — as well as its research facility in Chesterfield — are not included, spokeswoman Susan Luke said in a statement.
“We envision a future that will allow us to collaborate in different ways and will ultimately require less physical office space than before,” Luke said in the statement.
The St. Louis area will remain the company’s global headquarters for Bayer’s crop science division.
Copyright 2022, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. All Rights Reserved.
Last Modified: 01:10 PM, Sat Feb 26, 2022
By Steph Kukuljan, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Louis Post-Dispatch. 26 February 2022, Pages: A7
News
Word Count: 241
CREVE COEUR — Agribusiness giant Bayer is marketing a portion of its longtime mid-St. Louis County campus for sale as the company weighs how much office space it needs in light of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bayer occupies several buildings on the west and east sides of Lindbergh Boulevard in Creve Coeur, just south of Olive Boulevard. The company, known as Monsanto before Bayer’s 2018 acquisition, said it does not believe it will need as much office space with employees choosing to work some days from home.
The pandemic has affected how corporate America works as employees have transitioned to work from home. Bayer is the latest major St. Louis-area company to market its campus for sale. Last year, shoe company Caleres put its Clayton headquarters on the market. Caleres has not yet found a buyer, according to the company’s latest quarterly report.
Bayer is seeking offers for its buildings west of Lindbergh. Its property on the east side — as well as its research facility in Chesterfield — are not included, spokeswoman Susan Luke said in a statement.
“We envision a future that will allow us to collaborate in different ways and will ultimately require less physical office space than before,” Luke said in the statement.
The St. Louis area will remain the company’s global headquarters for Bayer’s crop science division.
Copyright 2022, St. Louis Post-Dispatch. All Rights Reserved.
St. Louis developer to buy some of Bayer's Creve Coeur campus
https://www.stltoday.com/business/local ... -top-story
https://www.stltoday.com/business/local ... -top-story
Pier Property Group owner Michael Hamburg declined to comment. Fireside Financial Managing Partner Michael Bailey said the property will be redeveloped as a mixed-use project.
"We think it's going to be a great partnership with Pier Property Group," Bailey said. "We're looking forward to bringing exciting new features to the St. Louis market."
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Update: https://www.stltoday.com/business/local ... a97f4.html
No renderings or other details yet, but the ball is moving.Hotels, retail, office space and townhomes and apartments are slated to replace the former western campus of agribusiness giant Bayer in Creve Coeur.
Edwardsville-based Fireside Financial said its redevelopment will take four years to complete and that is still in the early stages. The company will need to rezone the property at 10300 Olive Boulevard in the southwestern corner of Olive and Lindbergh, said Kristie Bailey, a partner with Fireside. She declined to share a sales price.
I had heard Pier Property is out of the mix, and that Fireside Financial is taking this on themselves. Article has no reference to Pier or Hamburg, so that is likely the case.
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In a bid to claw back $2.15 billion, the struggling pharmaceutical giant Bayer CEO is doing away with middle managers and 99% of the company’s 1,362-page corporate handbook, allowing nearly 100,000 employees to self-manage.
Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut: Its market cap has plunged to two-decade lows—spurred by its so-far disastrous acquisition of Monsanto—and its CEO Bill Anderson believes that flattening hierarchy and slashing corporate bureaucracy could be key to turning it around.
When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and Peace. It’s why, he says, when he listened to feedback from the firm’s workforce, the same complaints surfaced repeatedly.
“They basically said: ‘Increasingly, we can’t get anything done,'” Anderson told Business Insider. “It’s just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen.”
“We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy,” Anderson added. “Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time.”
So, the company is going boss-less, or as he calls it, moving to “dynamic shared ownership.”
Whether or not it’s a fancy metaphor for a headcount reduction, Anderson has insisted that this new way of working could be revolutionary. “We don’t have to be that good to beat the current system,” the 57-year-old chief executive told the Wall Street Journal.
In the coming years, Bayer’s workforce will consist of constantly evolving “5,000 to 6,000 self-directed teams” that work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project.
Employees of Bayer’s consumer health division have already gotten a taste of this new structure—they’re being shown how to practically sign off on one another’s ideas without a manager in sight.
“Stand up, share an idea,” a corporate trainer ordered them during a training session, according to the WSJ. “You’re going to self-organize.”
Is going boss-less enough to fix ‘broken’ Bayer?
Whether or not Anderson’s plan lands, it will buy him time: The company is worth a quarter of its $122 billion peak from nine years ago, its shares have tanked by more than 50% in the last year, and investors are urging it to split.
The company has accumulated around €34.5 billion ($37.5 billion) in debt, not much less than the company’s €47.6 billion ($51.7 billion) in sales last year.
To top that off, since its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has been fighting thousands of claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.
Even Anderson has compared the current state of the company to the time he fractured his leg skateboarding—“badly broken.” But looking ahead, he wrote in Fortune that “our radical reinvention will liberate our people” while saving the company about €2 billion ($2.15 billion) in annual organizational costs by 2026.
But cutting out middle management is nothing new
It’s not clear exactly how many managers will be laid off or demoted. Bayer couldn’t confirm the exact figure to Fortune but a spokesperson said there will be “significant changes” and those impacted will be in the thousands, not hundreds. The Journal reported that 40% of management positions are headed for the chopping block in the U.S. pharmaceutical division alone.
Although Anderson is pitching the move as an innovative way of transforming its corporate hierarchy and giving employees more choice, trimming middle management to save costs and become more efficient is nothing new.
In fact, middle managers—defined as nonexecutives who oversee employees—made up almost a third of layoffs last year.
At Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 was going to be its “Year of Efficiency,” middle managers were the toll in that quest.
“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” Zuckerberg told staff in an all-hands meeting.
After laying off thousands of workers, the billionaire tech entrepreneur said that “flattening” its internal hierarchy was core to its restructure—and he credited Elon Musk as the source of inspiration behind having “fewer layers of management.”
Meanwhile at Google—where more than 30,000 managers are employed—12,000 people lost their jobs, and at Intel, managers’ pay was slashed. Even beyond the tech industry, layoffs at Citi and FedEx have massively impacted managers.
Bayer, the 160-year-old German company known for inventing aspirin, has been stuck in a rut: Its market cap has plunged to two-decade lows—spurred by its so-far disastrous acquisition of Monsanto—and its CEO Bill Anderson believes that flattening hierarchy and slashing corporate bureaucracy could be key to turning it around.
When Anderson took the helm last June, he learned that the company’s rules and procedures handbook was longer than War and Peace. It’s why, he says, when he listened to feedback from the firm’s workforce, the same complaints surfaced repeatedly.
“They basically said: ‘Increasingly, we can’t get anything done,'” Anderson told Business Insider. “It’s just too hard to get ideas approved, or you have to consult with so many people to make anything happen.”
“We hire highly educated, trained people, and then we put them in these environments with rules and procedures and eight layers of hierarchy,” Anderson added. “Then we wonder why big companies are so lame most of the time.”
So, the company is going boss-less, or as he calls it, moving to “dynamic shared ownership.”
Whether or not it’s a fancy metaphor for a headcount reduction, Anderson has insisted that this new way of working could be revolutionary. “We don’t have to be that good to beat the current system,” the 57-year-old chief executive told the Wall Street Journal.
In the coming years, Bayer’s workforce will consist of constantly evolving “5,000 to 6,000 self-directed teams” that work together on projects of their choosing for 90 days, before regrouping for their next project.
Employees of Bayer’s consumer health division have already gotten a taste of this new structure—they’re being shown how to practically sign off on one another’s ideas without a manager in sight.
“Stand up, share an idea,” a corporate trainer ordered them during a training session, according to the WSJ. “You’re going to self-organize.”
Is going boss-less enough to fix ‘broken’ Bayer?
Whether or not Anderson’s plan lands, it will buy him time: The company is worth a quarter of its $122 billion peak from nine years ago, its shares have tanked by more than 50% in the last year, and investors are urging it to split.
The company has accumulated around €34.5 billion ($37.5 billion) in debt, not much less than the company’s €47.6 billion ($51.7 billion) in sales last year.
To top that off, since its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has been fighting thousands of claims that its Roundup weed killer causes cancer.
Even Anderson has compared the current state of the company to the time he fractured his leg skateboarding—“badly broken.” But looking ahead, he wrote in Fortune that “our radical reinvention will liberate our people” while saving the company about €2 billion ($2.15 billion) in annual organizational costs by 2026.
But cutting out middle management is nothing new
It’s not clear exactly how many managers will be laid off or demoted. Bayer couldn’t confirm the exact figure to Fortune but a spokesperson said there will be “significant changes” and those impacted will be in the thousands, not hundreds. The Journal reported that 40% of management positions are headed for the chopping block in the U.S. pharmaceutical division alone.
Although Anderson is pitching the move as an innovative way of transforming its corporate hierarchy and giving employees more choice, trimming middle management to save costs and become more efficient is nothing new.
In fact, middle managers—defined as nonexecutives who oversee employees—made up almost a third of layoffs last year.
At Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg declared 2023 was going to be its “Year of Efficiency,” middle managers were the toll in that quest.
“I don’t think you want a management structure that’s just managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work,” Zuckerberg told staff in an all-hands meeting.
After laying off thousands of workers, the billionaire tech entrepreneur said that “flattening” its internal hierarchy was core to its restructure—and he credited Elon Musk as the source of inspiration behind having “fewer layers of management.”
Meanwhile at Google—where more than 30,000 managers are employed—12,000 people lost their jobs, and at Intel, managers’ pay was slashed. Even beyond the tech industry, layoffs at Citi and FedEx have massively impacted managers.
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So Bayer discovered what Valve's been doing for the last 25 years?
Can we say that Valve's structure is a success? I don't know that Bayer would be going for such a loose structure but from what I've read about Valve is that there is a lack of drive to create new products. Since everyone is encouraged to work on what they like I think there isn't enough cohesion to drive projects through. They've made the Steam Deck and one major game in like 15 years. Gabe probably doesn't care too much since they're swimming in the distribution and micro transaction money from Steam.Trololzilla wrote: ↑Apr 21, 2024So Bayer discovered what Valve's been doing for the last 25 years?
As the article states this might also just be cover for the stock price as they lay off thousands.
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^ In fairness, I never said that Valve's structure is successful, just that it's how they operate. With the Steam revenue and shifting into more of a hardware-based company, they may not even feel the need for software development as much anymore.
As to your second point, I agree wholeheartedly. In any case, we'll see how this change works for Bayer.
As to your second point, I agree wholeheartedly. In any case, we'll see how this change works for Bayer.
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Per STL BIZ Journal: Bayer is continuing layoffs in St. Louis. (No surprise since this has been happening for a while now) They continue to lay off middle management positions per CEO Bill Anderson's strategy to cut costs.
Anyone know how many layoffs have occurred in 2024 and how many are still employed here in the STL area?
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/new ... 2024-05-31
Anderson has considering splitting crop science, pharmaceutical and consumer health into 3 separate companies. They have indicated that none of these companies would be sold or spun off. I wonder what a separate Crop Science entity would look like from a STL perspective.
Anyone know how many layoffs have occurred in 2024 and how many are still employed here in the STL area?
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/new ... 2024-05-31
Anderson has considering splitting crop science, pharmaceutical and consumer health into 3 separate companies. They have indicated that none of these companies would be sold or spun off. I wonder what a separate Crop Science entity would look like from a STL perspective.
Bayer to unload more of Creve Coeur campus, invest $100M in remaining sites
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/new ... 2024-08-21
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/new ... 2024-08-21
^^ I can only assume that AI will be the next thing that reshapes the white collar world and indirectly result in more retreats from these large corporate campuses that have been built across the country.
^ to jshank83 reference to the size and scope of this campus is a plus side that some of these campuses are being turned over to much needed housing and denser development. Thinking Chevron's retreat from its San Ramon CA campus/Bishop Ranch (which is also where ATT has been retreating from) is rapidly being developed/becoming much needed housing, multitenant housing and all within easy walkable to retail/restaurants, park, regional trail and nice community center. Another way to put, development within existing sprawl instead of just more sprawl.
^ to jshank83 reference to the size and scope of this campus is a plus side that some of these campuses are being turned over to much needed housing and denser development. Thinking Chevron's retreat from its San Ramon CA campus/Bishop Ranch (which is also where ATT has been retreating from) is rapidly being developed/becoming much needed housing, multitenant housing and all within easy walkable to retail/restaurants, park, regional trail and nice community center. Another way to put, development within existing sprawl instead of just more sprawl.