Management by honey bees: What fortune 500 leaders can learn from keeping bees – my lessons learned from being a beekeeper.
Besides working as a management consultant creating tools and methods for sustainable growth and innovation, I am also a beekeeper, just like my great great granddad. But I am not alone, I am like the bees, and we are actually a group of Beekeepers… As I do not leave out personal details on social media, they will be hidden in the hive…
1. All are on the same page — one team.
2. Purpose-driven. Bees have different roles in different stages of their life, from gardening, feeding, collecting pollen, building wax, and repairing the hive— Everybody with the same mission statement, creating a sustainable society.
3. In long-term planning, they collect honey to survive (food, anti-bacterial substances and antioxidants, energy storage). They “drag up new queens” or prepare for new queens when needed, keeping one queen at a time.
4. Democratic information sharing; Wagoll dancing (finding pollen, water, threats, etc.)
5. Eliminate chaos and create cohesion, e.g., how they form a globe during the winter that can keep it around 35 degrees celsius in the middle of a very cold winter.
