Bayer COO: we stopped assigning sales targets. Our teams aimed higher
· Fortune
At Bayer Pharmaceuticals, we made a decision that would sound reckless in many large companies: we stopped assigning sales targets to regions or countries.
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We did not eliminate accountability. We shifted it – from an annual number handed down from headquarters to employees deciding where resources will produce the greatest return for patients and the business.
It was one of the hardest decisions I made. My 25-year career had taught me to equate sales targets and budgets with accountability. And there was an added complication: I still had a sales and earnings number to deliver. We are a publicly traded company, so along with our commitment to customers and patients, we guide the financial markets, and I am accountable to our shareholders.
My first instinct was to take that commitment and divide ownership up among employees. But I chose not to. I came to believe that sales targets and budgets can undermine the accountability they were meant to create.
Eliminating these numbers was only one part of a broader redesign of how we operate. Instead of adding layers to the bureaucracy, we stripped them away. Instead of locking in targets and budgets once a year, we began flowing people and resources to opportunities with the greatest potential. We deprioritized the rest. The goal was to put more authority – and accountability – in the hands of the people closest to the market.
That required me to change my own assumptions about leadership. With the redesign, would people still give us their best? The answer depends on what you believe about your people. Ultimately, I had to trust that giving people more ownership and freedom would lead them to aim higher.
My conviction that we needed to change didn’t come from a management book or a consultant’s presentation. It came after sitting through yet another discussion about cutting investment behind our prostate cancer treatment Nubeqa, one of our most important medicines, and thinking: this makes no sense.
In many companies, including ours, there is an incentive to argue for as many resources as possible while keeping the revenue commitment achievable. If you negotiate the expectation low enough and then exceed it, you have succeeded – even if the business could have achieved more.
For example, there was real anxiety as we approached a new year about our ability to grow when Xarelto and Eylea, two of our most important products, faced loss of exclusivity. In the old days, we might have turned that outlook into a negotiation over an achievable sales target: hypothetically, say, a 4% decline, and then celebrated if we beat it and finished down only 3%.
But why should a negotiated number define our ambition?
So, we didn’t turn the forecast into a target. We instead asked a different question: How might we, against all the obstacles, turn this into a year of growth?
That didn’t mean abandoning rigor or going rogue. We identified the handful of things we would have to do exceptionally well, while continually asking: Where are the biggest opportunities? Where should our people and resources go? What is working, and what should we stop? We replaced targets with greater scrutiny of a plan – and more candor about our progress along the way.
Nubeqa became one of the first tests of this approach.
At the time, our U.S. pharmaceuticals business needed to grow significantly. Nubeqa was gaining momentum and represented a big growth opportunity. Yet by the second half of the year, budgets had been spent elsewhere, and we were again preparing to pull investment from a product we relied on for future growth.
Freed from a sales target and a conventional budget, the U.S. Nubeqa team created an ambitious mission: “Quest for a Billion.” It dropped the traditional brand plan and pursued new opportunities with unusual speed.
When the team saw a chance to better serve U.S. veterans, it partnered with a contract sales force – a decision made in under an hour. We launched the program in 45 days. In most large companies, including Bayer, that work would have taken months. Nubeqa became the fastest-growing drug in its category in the veterans community in 2024, increasing utilization by 60%.
What happened afterward matters, too. Once the VA effort had met its objective, the team disbanded it and moved on.
I wasn’t involved when they decided to scale it or when they decided it was time to stop. That’s the new kind of accountability I want: teams knowing when to invest, when to stop and where resources can have greater impact.
The team ultimately achieved blockbuster status five months ahead of schedule, contributing strongly to Nubeqa’s global sales of €2.4 billion in 2025.
The change also altered conversations among our leaders. In the old system, each country leader had an assigned number and budget to defend. Without those individual targets, the question became what would produce the best result for Bayer as a whole.
I saw that shift in late 2024, when I stepped into my role as Worldwide Chief Operating Officer, and we began to scale our transformation. My senior leaders were in a room discussing how to allocate resources across our global business. At one point, the head of Latin America stopped the conversation by simply saying, “We are all the U.S.”
He wasn’t abandoning Latin America. He recognized that the most urgent need – and business return in that moment – was in the U.S. and put the enterprise ahead of his own region.
That’s increasingly how we operate: as one global enterprise where accountability sits close to our markets, but leaders act as owners of the whole. That only works when leaders trust one another to use shared resources wisely – and to move them again when circumstances change.
Bayer’s transformation remains a work in progress. But it is delivering results.
Remember the anxiety I described about whether we could grow? We did, despite the loss of exclusivity of our two biggest brands. And that isn’t all. The U.S., our largest market, now represents more than 30% of Bayer’s pharmaceutical sales, up from 19% a few years ago. We’ve seen growth in markets outside of the U.S. too. In China, the changes have helped us double sales of our kidney therapy, Kerendia, and grow Nubeqa sales by 70%.
Removing sales targets was never about lowering expectations. It was about changing how those expectations are created.
Instead of asking people to negotiate a number they can promise, we ask them to determine what is possible and take responsibility for the choices required to get there. That’s a different kind of accountability: not simply hitting a target someone else assigned but owning the decisions – and the results.
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