subject: Learning The Skill Of Management From Bees [print this page] Humans have kept bees for thousands of years -- which is long enough to form some admiring opinions of them. Dogs are loyal; cats are curious; but the industrious bee might just be the spirit animal for the businessperson of today. Bees are great organizers, risk mitigators, and distributed decision-makers. What creature better to learn from while navigating the fast-paced, complexly structured hives of finance we have created? In a blogpost for the Harvard Business Review, Michael O'Malley, vice president of human capital at Sibson Consulting, says as much:
Professionally, I once helped a large rotary kiln company manage risk by focusing on how their recruiting, compensation, training, and other systems encourage people to behave. What I came to recognize was that beehives were organizations that naturally got things right. The honeybee colonies I was cultivating were structured for consistent long-term growth and the prevention of severe loss due to unpredictable environmental surprises.
A beehive may be a massively complex organization, but it's also a family (which might actually further complicate matters). As a bee ages, so does its role in the hive. It begins in the nursery, being fed and tended to by its only slightly older sisters before it graduates to their same role. By the time another set of bees has been born, that the now slightly older bee will train them. Eventually, it graduates to storing food, cleaning the hive, and, finally, flying outside in search for pollen. When it's too old to brave the outdoors, it returns to the hive for more housekeeping. The amazing thing is, every step of the way, an older bee is with a younger bee, teaching it the ropes, on down the line. Large Catholic families have some sense of how this structure works.
There is, however, a key difference between the organization of a hive and an efficient business (well, OK, there are many, but stay with me for a moment): because each job is tied to the age of a bee, and because these tasks a single bee assumes are repeated, thousands of times over, throughout the hive, and because each job is absolutely vital for the hive's continued survival, well, you have yourself a house of cards. Wipe out one generation and no nursing, no new generation of workers; no cleaning, and the hive will be invaded by any number of creatures desiring the bee's honey (wax moths and ants, mostly); no nectar, no honey, and the hive starves. What disrupts this generational work cycle on a massive scale? We do.
