William N. (Bill) Anderson
Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of Management
2023 – Present
3 years (current)
Legacy
Anderson is leading Bayer's Dynamic Shared Ownership restructuring, debt reduction agenda, and portfolio reset while managing litigation and patent-cycle pressure. A chemical engineer who previously ran Roche's pharmaceuticals division, Anderson became CEO in June 2023 specifically to resolve the Monsanto-derived Roundup litigation crisis and to cut corporate bureaucracy, including thousands of job cuts and consideration of eventually breaking up Bayer's conglomerate structure spanning pharmaceuticals, consumer health, and crop science. He has set a target of largely resolving the Roundup litigation overhang by the end of 2026, and has publicly discussed the possibility of eventually splitting Bayer into separate pharmaceutical, consumer-health, and crop-science companies if doing so would unlock more shareholder value than the current combined conglomerate structure. He has pushed a decentralized 'dynamic shared ownership' management model at Bayer, eliminating layers of middle management and empowering smaller autonomous teams, a structural change he has described as necessary to restore the entrepreneurial speed the company lost as it grew into a sprawling conglomerate through decades of acquisitions. He has also had to manage Bayer's exposure to a separate wave of litigation over the herbicide paraquat, sold under Bayer's Crop Science division, adding to the legal-liability overhang inherited from the Monsanto acquisition well beyond the original Roundup glyphosate cases.