Bayer CEO Bill Anderson’s war against bureaucracy

“If I had arrived 10 years earlier, I don’t know that we could have made these changes,” says Anderson. “When I arrived, what I found was a company where there was a really nice culture but people were burdened by the rules … so many rules that nobody can even keep track of them.” 

So how do you redesign a 161-year-old, 100,000-person company without unleashing chaos? He focused on changing the mechanics: Get rid of rules, org charts, annual plans and the decision-making hierarchy. Anderson flattened the structure. He created thousands of teams, each of which has a vision—and goals to achieve that vision—on a 90-day cycle. “The clock’s ticking every 90 days,” he says. “There’s no safe place to hide behind a budget target. Do it, go fast, deliver better for customers, use the least resources. And we’ll talk about how you did four times a year. And, by the way, your peers are going to rate you.”

“It helped that I’ve been doing this work for about seven years before I arrived at Bayer,” says Anderson, who was previously CEO of Roche’s Pharmaceuticals division after being CEO of Genentech.

“What I found was that the bigger the organization, the more it prevented people from just doing what they needed to do. After 20 years, I said, ‘Hey, I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m either going to find a very different way to organize, or I’m done. I can’t live with myself just turning the corporate crank one more year.”

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Top news

Ukraine mineral deal agreed. Zelenskyy will sign a deal this week at the White House offering the U.S. access to various minerals. The deal does not contain a demand for $500 billion in revenues, nor does it contain any security guarantees. “The minerals agreement is only part of the picture," according to Olha Stefanishyna, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister.

The financials: “The final version of the agreement, dated February 24 and seen by the FT, would establish a fund into which Ukraine would contribute 50 per cent of proceeds from the ‘future monetisation’ of state-owned mineral resources, including oil and gas, and associated logistics. The fund would invest in projects in Ukraine,” according to the FT. Not clear: There are questions over how mineable Ukraine’s minerals actually are. Its titanium mines are 6% of global production.

The agreement states that Ukraine should be "free, sovereign and secure" without further specifics. Some U.S. officials have hinted that binding Ukraine to the U.S. with economic ties will create a de facto security shield, per Bloomberg.

The agreement appears to create U.S. assets and investments in Ukraine. It will be interesting to see whether Russia will attack them or leave them alone.

Russia promised to keep fighting. Live coverage from the BBC here.

Nvidia earnings today: Expect the markets to move almost regardless of what the company reports. Key question: Did the new DeepSeek AI model increase or decrease demand for Nvidia chips?

Apple will fix a glitch that replaces the word “racist” with the word “Trump” in its voice to text function.

From Fortune

Tesla shares fall as Q1 worries accrue
Tesla shares fell to their lowest level since last Nov. 2024 on Tuesday and even the EV company’s most bullish investors are concerned that vehicle sales for Q1 will disappoint when reported in early April. Data published on Tuesday found that Tesla’s share of the European EV market dropped from 15% in Jan. 2024 to 6% in Jan. 2025. Fortune

Jamie Dimon apologizes for cursing, not for DEI
JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon apologized this week for using profanity to attack remote work in a leaked town hall audio but didn’t budge on the five-day return to work policy that starts on March 3rd. “I should never curse, ever,” he said in a CNBC interview. “I shouldn’t get angry and stuff like that.” Fortune

Apple shareholders vote to keep DEI
Apple shareholders rejected an anti-DEI proposal drafted by a conservative think tank that would strip the company of its corporate diversity programs. The think tank, National Center for Public Policy Research, had a similar proposal denied by Costco last month. Fortune

The markets

• The S&P 500 posted its fourth straight day of losses yesterday, falling 0.47% … Tesla fell 8% and is now under its $1 trillion market cap … Bitcoin was down 20% from its peak earlier this year … Some investors are calling it the “Trump slump,” as doubts set in about the president’s tariff policies … S&P futures were up 0.54% this morning … Hold your breath for Nvidia’s earnings call later today.

From the analysts

• Wedbush on Nvidia: “...a massive day for the global markets as the Street awaits Nvidia earnings [tonight] to gauge the demand trajectory of the AI Revolution with a focus on if another "$2 billion beat and $2 billion raise" is in the cards for the Godfather of AI Jensen and Nvidia,” per Daniel Ives et al.
• Goldman Sachs on equities: “...diversification – once described, by Harry Markovitz, as the ‘only free lunch in investment’ – [has] failed to boost risk-adjusted returns. For more than a decade, investors would have been served better by ignoring the rules of diversification and rather concentrating exposure to the US equity market and, for that matter, a very small group of technology companies,” per Peter Oppenheimer et al.
• Wells Fargo on equities: “Equity returns have broadened so far in 2025, as investors have rotated from high-flying tech-related sectors to cyclical sectors that we believe should benefit from the new administration’s policies.This broadening has been evident in fourth-quarter 2024 earnings reports, as well, and we expect it to continue in 2025. We believe both growth and cyclical sectors can outperform in this environment and favor Communication Services, Energy, Financials, and Industrials,” per Chris Haverland.

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