The Beekeeper

Pollinating Your Organization for Transformative Growth

By: Katie P. Desiderio, Michael G. Frino

Narrated by: Wendy Tremont King

Become a beekeeper and grow your business

Catherine had just celebrated her forty-third birthday on May 20th. Her dream of owning and running a thriving company was coming true. Essentially Proximal's essential oil line was becoming a major success, and her company was in growth mode. As a female business owner, she was doing her best to promote positive culture at work and retain talent. Her goal was to build a diverse high-performing and inclusive leadership team, but her leadership team was struggling to put people first and live the mission and values of the company. She had to make some serious changes to ensure the future success of the company. She decided to take some time over the summer to recharge with her family.

When the family arrived at H. Ives Family Farms, Catherine quickly realized that the farm was much more than just a family vacation. It was where she learned to become The Beekeeper, enabling her to transform the culture at Essentially Proximal. The story brings to life the world of a Beekeeper and how understanding bees' role in the growth of all things around us has transferable knowledge for anyone wanting to effectively lead. Families, organizations, and farms need more Beekeepers, and this book is the catalyst to becoming one.

©2023 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2023 Ascent Audio

Great business novel!

Unlike the main characters in some other classic business novels who are on the brink of destruction (The Goal, The Servant), here the organization and its leadership needs a tune-up, a refresh, which makes for such a pleasant, uplifting story with no less impact than the classics. Excellent narration too, that fits the story perfectly.

Leadership Perspectives

I chose this book based on a recommendation from a leadership group. Although this wasn't the most inspiring leadership book I've read, it did provide a unique perspective from the worker bee level. It would have been great to have the team perspective section expanded as that is a side leaders often are not privy to.

Loved

I’ve been needing something like this to help inspire me. It really had me thinking about my own leadership skills.

Great listen!

Very inspiring book and message! Great for all teams and organizations. Must read
or listen.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast

Every leader (or aspiring leader) should read this book, often! The culture is your responsibility. Forming and transforming organizational culture is a top-down phenomenon (I don't want to call it a process because it's as much soul driven as it is stepwise). Every other culture book I've read misses this subtlety. Katie and Michael fill this gap with what initially feels like a cute story about a family vacation to farm, but they nicely analogize the various functions of honeybees (and their impact to the surrounding environment) to how our organizations work -especially from the leadership lens. My favorite part is towards the end when they turn the script to consider the reactions to some of the messages from the CEO, and how members of the leadership team choose their lens to either embrace or resist ownership of the organizational culture. Great read. Thanks Katie & Michael!

Awesome Fable!!

I have read or listened to quite a few fable-style books since 2020 (Patrick Lencioni, David Bach, and Chris Guillebeau had some of my favorites).

The Beekeeper flew to the top of my list. Perhaps the best part of this leadership fable is that the lessons didn’t come from the workplace, but rather from a vacation. I think it goes to show that there are learning moments all around us - we simply need to embrace them.

I highly recommend this book!!

Great Tips

I found this fable helpful in identifying key areas to focus on. This will be a guide as I plan the school year.

Don’t waste your time..

This fictional story is not going to make you a better leader. In fact, I would advise against doing what the main character does. When she started sending random quotes to her leadership team without any context I checked out.