The Hive Mind at Work

Auteur

Siobhan McHale has worked across four continents, helping thousands of leaders to create more agile and productive workplaces. She also has been on the “inside” as the executive in charge of culture change in a series of large, multinational organizations. One of these inside jobs was a radical seven-year change initiative at Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ) Bank that transformed it from the lowest-performing bank in the country into one of the highest-performing and most admired banks in the world. Professor John Kotter used her work with ANZ as a Harvard Business School case study designed to teach MBA students about managing change.

Résumé

Learn a new model for understanding how organizations really operate and implement changes that get real results.

With so many forces of change buffeting the business world today, a scary state of flux has replaced any sense of certainty, stability, and familiarity, delivering a wake-up call to make crucial changes happen, make them happen quickly, and make them stick. Traditional approaches to change management fall into one of two categories: Organizations function like machines, where managers pull change levers to “fix” problems with an engineer’s mindset (IQ). Or People form social networks wherein individual “influencers” make change happen by developing effective interpersonal relationships (EQ). Neither of these models offer a full picture to what really happens in an organization.

In this groundbreaking new book, change expert Siobhan McHale offers a third option: organizations are complex ecosystems that require a Hive Mind or Group Intelligence (GQ) to bring about meaningful and lasting change. We can learn a lot of lessons from how bees operate:

• Hard work: An individual bee spends its entire 40-day life span gathering food for the hive.
• Teamwork: Inside each teeming beehive an entire community works collectively to achieve shared goals.
• Role clarity: Every bee has a specific job, with the queen, drones, and worker bees faithfully playing their part.
• Resilience: Bees can overcome daunting challenges, including all the parasites, pathogens, pesticides, and climate fluctuations from Maine to Miami and beyond. See how a hive mindset solves many of the common problems all businesses struggle with today!