Bee management principles:
• Compose a decision-making group of individuals with shared interests. Here bees have a higher stake than us: all members of a colony are related (sisters) and nobody can survive without the group.
• Minimize the leader's influence on the group. Here we humans have much to learn.
• Seek diverse solutions to the problem. Humans realized only recently that diversity is good for a group.
• Update the group's knowledge through debate. Here again, bees are superior to us, as each scout's "dances" become less effective with time, no matter how good a new site is, while stubbornness can lead humans to argue forever.
• Use quorums to gain cohesion, accuracy and speed. Impressively, bees came up with this concept long before the Greeks.
As a departmental chair at Cornell University, Seeley says, he applies these principles at faculty meetings with great success.
