Lessons - Unlocking Business Wisdom From Honeybees | Seth Godin, Author & Entrepreneur

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. You mentioned the Honeybee example, and I want you to explain what that example is, and some of the similarities, and how we can sort of take examples from Honeybees, which is a wild example, and you're going to go into it in a second. So explain that to me. So let's start by explaining that humans are not bees. But in fact, a bee hive, and I could share bee trivia all day long, but a bee hive is 15,000 individual creatures that are not actually individual. They're very much like the neurons in a human brain turned inside out. If one bee sacrifices its life or is killed, the bee hive persists, that they somehow manage to be organized without an organizer, to exist in community without a leader. And that's how our brain works, too. There isn't one neuron in your brain that's in charge of everything. So what Jack and Freeman wrote about when she wrote the song of increase was what happens to the bees at the end of a long winter, so that's in May in the northern hemisphere. If they've survived, and many hives don't, they will have depleted much of their honey, because the purpose of the honey, of the honey and the hive, is not to give people some of plastic-shaped bearer to squeeze in their teeth. The purpose of the honey is to sustain the hive when times are tough, but if they made it through the winter and they have enough honey, just barely. The council maidens, the women who run the hive, will have a meeting and realize they have a chance to leap. And so they'll do two things. The first thing is they'll build a vertical egg chamber and ask the queen to lay and fertilize a queen egg, because there's only one queen in a hive at a time. And the second thing they'll do is they'll instruct all the other maidens, sometimes called worker bees, to go out and collect as much pollen as they possibly can. And within just a couple weeks, they will replenish all the honey that the hive was running low on, and their baby queen will be about to be born. And then something really cool happens, which is that within a 10-minute period of time, more than 10,000 bees, and the queen will swarm and leave the hive all at the same time, and go 200 meters away, that's called the song of increase. What a daring leap to leave behind the honey, leave behind the new queen, leave behind all the babies, the pips, and just go somewhere you've never been before. And then they only have three days to find a new place to live. And that leap is what permits bees to thrive and to evolve. And human beings who are not bees have been seduced by industrialism to sing the song of safety, to hunker down, to watch a little bit more TV, to buy a little bit more crap, and just go to work tomorrow. And we are capable of more than that. So what is it going to take? What is it going to take for us to make that leap? I am asking people through this book to have a conversation, to talk to the others, and to simply say, let's get real, or let's not play, to engage in a series of mutual commitments with bosses and with co-workers, with the people who work for you. To say, I will not treat you disrespectfully and you shouldn't do the same to me. I will not call a meeting just to make sure you're not out doing your grocery shopping and then lecture at you for half an hour when I could send a memo instead. I will not focus on obedience, I will focus on standards, that it is possible to create change. And change is what makes us human. Change is where significant lies. If all you're doing is managing and repeating and repeating, all that sort of important, but maybe someone else can do that. What does good look like? What does an ideal organization look like so that we can sort of frame it? Why is the, it sounds silly to say this, but why is the assembly line mode of leading an organization not ideal? Okay, so there are very few villains here. Most people who are working hard, whether they are managers, bosses or employees, are not seeking to do the wrong thing. I will leave several billionaires out of that discussion, but in general, they're just doing their job. But their job was invented 110 years ago. That industrialism is a very specific way of being in the world that was inconceivable before the 1800s and return on machines, return on time, figuring out how to use a stopwatch, measuring everything. Well, it made us all rich. It gets you a certain kind of productivity, but it's running out of steam. It's running out of steam because now every car is really high quality and now every car is made in pretty much the most efficient possible way. It's being replaced by a creation of value that works a different way. So the project I did before this one, I was a volunteer for over a year, coordinating the work full-time of more than 300 people in 40 countries to build the carbon on that. Every one of us was a volunteer. We produced a book that's been translated into Italian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Czech, and many other languages that want a worldwide award for design. 97,000 words, it's footnoted. When it came out, there wasn't one significant error in the world. How did 300 people produce in less than five months a book like this with nobody in charge and nobody being told what to do? Well, that kind of leap is possible when you get good people who are enrolled in a journey and get out of their way. And you have standards instead of obedience. So yeah, we still need managers. I want the people at the pacemaker factory and the people who are, you know, doing surgery to be extremely structured in their management style. But if our job is to invent the future, we have to get beyond being mediocre because GPT is better at being mediocre than we are. I want to, I want to understand your thoughts. An organization has to have that higher calling and that vision that permeates the people that work there, but simultaneously, you're running up against the issue of people being very transient in their careers and moving. So the organization wants to have a vision, wants to be able to buy into it, but that person is only spending two years at that organization. How do you solve for that? Well, what's the vision of the hillside elementary school, right? The vision that one of the most common jobs in the United States is school teacher. Lenny Levine, who was the kindergarten teacher at hillside until he passed away, every year started over from scratch. And the mission for a lot of teachers is follow the curriculum, earn tenure, do your job because that's what principals push them to do because that's what boards push principals to do. And Lenny said, let's get real or let's not play. He said, in my kindergarten class, the rules are going to be different and I'm going to change these kids forever. And 25 years later, my kid still remembers because you can choose to do that. And the receptionist at the doctor's office isn't the person who's going to be sticking a scope up somebody's nose, but she has a lot to do with whether someone's going to get better. And so the question is, how does she manage the office that's her title, office manager, to create the conditions for possibility, not just for the patients but for the people who work there, so that it's not day's work for a day's bed. It's a human being showing up not as a resource, but as the point because that's what work is for. We figured out how to go on a food and other resources to survive. What exactly is the point of going to work?