Bofors, Bees And Winning: HBR

I was reading about the 5 habits of highly effective hives
(http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/11/the_five_habits_of_highly_effe.html by Thomas Seeley) today. Apparently when the bees search for a new home, they send some scouts to identify good locations. A scout, after identifying a location, comes back and conveys the information about the quality of the new dwelling and its location (using r, theta, phi co-ordinate system) to the other bees. The other bees do a verification and give an independent report of the same location. And then apparently the bees make a final choice, which as per the author is 90% of the time bang on the target in terms of being the most appropriate choice.

I was reflecting on this. We Indians also have adopted a similar system. When India wanted to buy armaments for a billion dollars in 1990s, we sent scout bees to all the armament dealers. And then after a similar song and dance routine (as explained in the link above) India had identified Bofors as the most appropriate choice. Then there would have been a good amount of "honey" trafficking between India, Switzerland, Sweden and Italy in Quattro liter bottles. The then Prime minister of India would have let the best man WIN.

I am reminded of a RK Laxman cartoon which came in the front page of Times of India in 1990 or 1991. A small boy asks his father "Papa, can you tell me about this Bofors scandal?" The father replies "Son, when you are older, the Bofors case will still be open. You will understand it then". Now assuming that boy was 5 years old then, he would be 23 now; old enough to understand the Bofors issue. While some participants are now dead, the case itself is still open. Hats off to RK Laxman. 

While the author has gone on to explain the things we humans can learn from the hives in that link, I was thinking why we behave differently. We human beings would also have behaved like the bees sometime in the past. The single thing behind the difference in the behavior now of the bees and humans is perhaps the concept of wealth. Wealth provides an individual with an identity. A desire for personal betterment is a logical consequence of individual wealth. That would in turn create a conflict between the need for "personal betterment" and the original motif to do good for the group. Depending on what kind of a person we are and the kind of behavior we see around us (and the rewards / punishments for such behaviors) we make our choice in the conflict. 

Imagine if the bees understood the concept of "wealth", especially immediate wealth. And that the wealth can be bartered for other things which hitherto only a community could provide. And assume that the rules of the game is that the scout bee, whose location was finally chosen as the best among all locations, gets a beeg reward immediately. Would the location identification exercise among the bees then be still clean?

An absence of immediate personal reward, I believe, is what makes the bees work the way they do. Is this what Lord Krishna meant in Bhagwat Gita when he told us to put in the effort and not to look for immediate results/rewards?


I have read some of Malcolm Gladwell's novels (eg., Blink) earlier and was impressed. Today I came across his article where he talks about the effects of having an all star team in the rolls of a company
http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2008-11-19/gladwells-outliers-timing-is-almost-everything. More on this later.