How Haier, Bayer and Roche unblock value at scale with Mission Based Teams

This article contains excerpts from my new book Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization.

The Chinese company Haier employs more than 110,000 people and is ultra-flat. Only two layers separate the CEO and everyone else. Can you believe that? It’s true. Here’s how they do it.

Haier is the world’s largest and fastest-growing kitchen and home appliance manufacturer; it makes refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, and many similar products.

For decades, Haier was a relatively traditional hierarchical company. However, as the company grew, it introduced more layers and management structures. CEO Zhang Ruimin felt they were losing competitiveness, and their conventional management practices were unfit to respond to the complexity of the rapidly changing digital age. He said:

“Bureaucracy was ruling, and no one took real responsibility”

In 2005, Zhang introduced a new model to minimize the distance between employees and customers and enable everyone to become entrepreneurs. He deconstructed the hierarchical pyramid and asked the company’s 12,000 middle managers to take on a (non-managerial) role in an ME or leave.

Haier restructured into more than 4,000 self-managing ‘micro-enterprises’ (MEs) — autonomous, customer-focused units comprising an average of 10–15 people. The MEs own their P&L (profit and loss), set their (product) strategy, and decide who to hire and fire. The ME teams use an election to determine who will be their leader. The ME member’s pay depends on the success of their ME — everyone is directly accountable to the customer and has skin in the game. To scale their services, MEs form collaborative networks.

At Haier, everyone (both inside and outside the company) can post a business idea and invite people to help. If they can secure seed funding and attract initial team members, they become the owners of their newly formed ME. They can secure more funding after running a successful pilot. If a ME is unsuccessful, it gets disbanded, and its members can apply to join other ME’s.

Their radical organizational model contributed to Haier becoming the number one global brand in major appliances for ten consecutive years.

Haier’s history and radical organizational model are detailed in Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini’s book Humanocracy.

Bayer‘s transformation

Several organizations have already started to adopt the model. The largest experiment I’m aware of is Bayer, a 100,000-people biotechnology company famous for inventing Aspirin. In early 2024, inspired by Haier, Bayer introduced a new operating model called Dynamic Shared Ownership to bust bureaucracy and accelerate outcomes.

They abandoned annual planning and are forming thousands of self-organized teams working in 90-day cycles. Every 90 days, they organize a ‘marketplace of opportunities’ to discuss outcomes across the organization and shift people and resources to work on the most essential outcomes for the next quarter.

The result? While the transformation is ongoing, some departments have already reported a radical improvement in their time-to-market.

“This model allows us to work at the scale of a multinational, but with the speed of a start-up.” — Bayer

Should you follow Haier’s example?

Should you transform your organization to replicate Haier’s model of networks of self-managing teams? If you can, you totally should. But, likely, you don’t have the appetite or authority to overhaul the whole organization’s structure, and you don’t need to.

Try this: start a marketplace of Mission Based Teams

You can reap some benefits by starting a marketplace of Mission Based Teams, within the existing structure. Here’s how to do it.

The basic idea is to create a place where anyone, either a leader or anyone else, can publish missions; this is a statement about a problem or opportunity that, if tackled, would be valuable to the business.

The mission can be anything: bringing a new product to market, improving common production challenges across different factories, solving a scientific problem, or strengthening certain skills.

People from across the organization then get a chance to apply to join the team. Sometimes, the roles are full-time; sometimes, they can take on the role for 20% of their working week (while continuing to do their day-to-day work the rest of the time).

The Mission Based Team (MBT) then sets a Strategic Intent, 90-day Outcomes, and Steering Metrics. It uses an Operating Rhythm with collaborative team meetings to advance its work (see the diagram below).

The team can ‘recruit’ additional members when needed. It regularly showcases its work to stakeholders and reflects and improves. When the mission is completed, the team disbands, and the members find new work to do. In some cases, the team continues and evolves to take on the next iteration of the mission while continuing to optimize and maintain the delivered solutions.

When MBTs are given the decision rights to drive meaningful change and create an impact, their members stay engaged and willing to take ownership of future missions.

Pharmaceutical company Roche has been very successful in adopting this. Over 1,100 self-managed Mission Based Teams in 89 countries work alongside the formal organizational structure and bring faster, better solutions to patients. By facilitating collaboration across the organization, Roche enables people to apply their talents where they make the most impact, beyond their formal roles and departmental and geographic boundaries.

Concluding

With MBTs, you can let people take ownership of what they care about and believe is good for business, without overhauling the organization’s structure; at least for now.

If you want to learn more about Mission-Based Teams, check out my new book: Unblock: Clear the Way for Results and Develop a Thriving Organization.

Or contact us for a conversation about how to put this into practice in your organization.