In two installments (the first and the second) we made it all the way through to the end of The Beekeeper, but we promised to deal with the lingering implications of the book before sending it off on its way. We were, you recall, asked to “place this copy in a space for others to read.” We were thinking of leaving it on the streetcar, but it is very difficult to lose a book on a Pittsburgh streetcar. Some kind passenger will inevitably pick it up and say, “Excuse me, you dropped your book,” and hand it back in such a way that it is impossible not to say “Thank you” and take it. One will have to be sneaky about it.

The best way to understand The Beekeeper is as a religious text. Not as a scripture; it is not as ambitious as that. It is more like those books you find at the Christian bookstore with pictures of sunsets on the covers, the ones that promise to deepen your faith through shallow platitudes. They are not aimed at atheists or Shintoists or Jains or even Episcopalians. They are aimed at Evangelical Christians who want to feel good about the particular kind of Christianity they already profess.

We are having the same experience when we read The Beekeeper. It is not written for heretics or infidels. It is written for people who already know that there is more wisdom in the latest management buzzword than in all the works of Plato, and its purpose is not to change their minds about anything but to strengthen their faith in what they already believe.

Perhaps the most obvious indication that we are dealing with a religion is that it is impossible for wisdom to be sought outside the cult. Imagine an evangelical Christian publishing a book for the Family Christian Stores in which his hero visits India and learns valuable wisdom from a Hindu philosopher. It would not fly. When he presented his book to his target demographic, the author would be tarred and feathered and made to watch music videos by contemporary Christian bands until he broke down and confessed that he had never truly been saved at all, after which he would be welcomed as a lost sheep and given a bath. But it would be quite all right if he went to India and learned the wisdom of Indian tradition from an Indian Baptist. The author would simply have to make sure to indicate that the Indian had been converted some time ago, or had come from the only Baptist family in his village, or something like that, and then his readers would trust him completely.

The same is true here. If the authors had suggested that a business-school graduate needed to learn something from a farmer—or from an airline pilot, or from a poet, or from a race-car driver, or from anyone who was not a member of the cult—they would be denounced as heretics and their book would go into the shredder, which it would break in a spectacular way because it is a hardcover book. Outside the business world there is no salvation. Business-school graduates tell farmers and airline pilots and poets and race-car drivers how to do their jobs, not the other way around. This is why it was vital to establish at the very beginning that the farmer was a retired CEO of a marketing company. If a certified businesswoman is going to learn from a wise mentor, it had better be someone with the authority to teach, and that means either a business-school graduate or an insect.

Where even generic nondenominational American Evangelical Christianity has an artistic advantage over the faith of the MBAs is in its willingness to admit that human beings fail. The standard drama of Evangelicalism requires a conversion story: the protagonist must reach the lowest possible point in order to accept Jesus as his or her personal savior and go through the triumphant conversion experience. This is drama. We can argue about the theology if you like, but there is the germ of entertainment here. Contrast that with Catherine’s conversion story. At the beginning she is very successful, and the only problem she has to deal with is too much success. At the end she is a little more successful and a lot more smug. That is the archetypal conversion experience of a business-school graduate. It does not make a good story.

One other difference between Evangelical Christianity and Evangelical MBAism is that MBAism is very clerical. There is a priesthood, and they are the only people who matter. At the beginning of the story, the problem Catherine identifies—the one that comes from too much success—is a problem of relations between managers and employees. The employees feel as though they don’t matter, as far as we can make out through the jargon: “our employees felt that our company values of recognition and connection were nonexistent between managers and employees.” From then on, Catherine deals only with managers, as if employees did not exist. The Leadership Team are the only people who have any effect on the world. All Catherine’s wise little emails from the farm are sent to the Leadership Team. When she comes back to work, she is greeted by the Leadership Team. She speaks only to the Leadership Team: she doesn’t say hello to the security guard on the way in or have a friendly word with the janitor. “The beekeeper is responsible for all the bees, their growth, and their ability to do the jobs that they were placed here to do,” she has told the Leadership Team in one of her posterworthy “quotes.” (We could write an essay on the use of the word “quote” to describe something you just made up yourself but are particularly proud of, but we have other dead horses to beat.) That means she, the Be Keeper of Be Keepers, never has to deal with anyone below the level of supervisor. If you do not have MBA after your name, you are a grey blob in the hallway.

It really sounds as though the MBA priesthood could learn a few lessons from the Popish Church, which, in spite of its top-down business model, has been trying in the past few years to emphasize the importance of the lay members. This is especially useful when there is a shortage of qualified management, but then of course there will never be a shortage of qualified management in the business world, because managers will determine their own qualifications in such a way that they already meet them.

So we have found The Beekeeper very instructive, though perhaps not in the way the authors intended. We have learned quite a bit about the religion of business, which is the only religion that matters in America, all the others being tolerated only so long as they do not inconvenience the official state religion. All that learning has taken us three days, but perhaps we have spared other readers quite a lot of work. If you should happen to receive a copy of The Beekeeper at your place of business, with a similar request to leave a review on line, you need not take all the trouble Dr. Boli has taken. Artemus Ward once printed this endorsement of his lectures attributed to “Old Abe”:

Dear Sir—I have never heard any of your lectures, but from what I can learn I should say that for people who like the kind of lectures you deliver, they are just the kind of lectures such people like.

Yours, respectably, O. Abe.

You could easily adapt that for an Amazon review.

Dr. Boli would like to conclude by making an offer to authors: if you have written a leadership fable that needs publicity, you can send it to the celebrated Publishing Empire, and if his secretary pulls it out of the stack on a day when Dr. Boli is feeling benevolent, Dr. Boli will review your book as thoroughly as he reviewed The Beekeeper.

The Beekeeper: Pollinating Your Organization for Trans­formative Growth. By Katie P. Desiderio and Michael G. Frino. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2023.

Here is the second part of our review (the first part is here), which we repeat is written at the personal request of the authors. We mention that just in case the authors have lawyers. So where were we?

Running a growing company. That is how Catherine was spending her time when her children opened up a PowerPoint presentation to explain to her what they wanted to do for the obligatory family vacation.

Stop and take a moment to pity these two apparently perfect daughters. They open up a PowerPoint presentation to explain what they want to do on vacation. We are faced with one of two possibilities: either the kids think that PowerPoint is the only kind of communication that will get through to Mommy, or their brains are so completely washed in the grey water of business-school jargon that they themselves think in PowerPoint presentations. Should we call Children and Youth Services?

But of course the children are not real children. They are catalysts, as the MBAs might say. They make stuff happen in the book, but our narrator Catherine has already made it clear in the second chapter—the one about her perfect life today—that her family exists only to further her career.

Helping organizations optimize performance through their people is what I love to do. The return on investment is so worth it. There has been a huge buzz within the organizations I am working with, and differentiated behaviors are taking flight, which are transforming individuals and teams. The surrealness of these transformations makes me smile.… I have my family to thank for all this work—none of which has anything to do with running my growing essential oil company. Sometimes I feel stretched thin and even overwhelmed, but my family is the bees knees, and I have them to thank for the impact I am making.

Several observations here. First, Dr. Boli’s Markdown editor has correctly pointed out that “bees” in “bees knees” ought to be possessive, and the software may therefore apply for a position as a copy editor at John Wiley and Sons. Possessives are difficult for our authors. Second, we are not sure what “differentiated behaviors” are, but it probably means we can distinguish what one team member is doing from what another is doing. If one is chopping wood while another is playing the banjo, those are differentiated behaviors. But we suppose that if we have to ask what differentiated behaviors are, we are not the target audience for this book. Third, we are leaving the whole thing about “surrealness” alone, because we can’t do everything for our readers, and the authors have just handed them a build-your-own-joke kit. Fourth, we note that our narrator thanks her family for the work she is doing. Specifically, what she is doing is spending all her time away from her family. How does her family feel about that? Apparently they encourage her.

And about that essential-oils business. It is growing. We learned in the second chapter, the one that takes place after our heroine has accumulated buckets of wisdom, that it is growing. But in the next chapter, the one that takes place before she has tasted the first sweet drop of intellectual honey from the bees, it is already growing. She is “running a growing company,” “running our growing company,” etc. “Our company, Essentially Proximal, was in the diffusing and essential oil business and was growing faster than it could adapt.” So the problem she has to solve, the thing that triggers her personal development, is too much success.

Essentially Proximal? All right, we get the Essentially part, but Proximal? This is our first warning that the word proximal means something very important. But it is another of those buzzwords we just have to know. If we don’t know what proximal means, and why it’s different from what the dictionary says it means, we obviously haven’t been to business school, and why are we reading this book?

At any rate, the perfect kids have a list of things they want to do on a farm, so it’s off to the farm in Iowa run by that guy from Chapter 1, the MBA beekeeper. How did they find out about his farm? How did they choose it? Don’t know. But it’s the H. Ives Family Farm. H. Ives. Get it? Our heroine doesn’t get it till page 116 of a 146-page story. “How had I not made the connection before?”

Catherine is worrying about her essential-oils business, because it is too successful too fast, and “our employees felt that our company values of recognition and connection were nonexistent between managers and employees.” A grumpy manager might tell them, “Your problem is that the things you value are meaningless abstractions.” But Catherine is really worried.

So, again, about this essential-oils business. Why essential oils?

Here is a fair example of how much effort our authors put into establishing the essential-oils part of the background.

We ventured outside to take in the atmosphere. It was quiet. It was peaceful. I could smell eucalyptus, which seemed to be coming from an herb garden not too far away. This was one of our best-selling oils.

Eucalyptus is a tree. Eucalyptus oil generally comes from the Blue Gum, Eucalyptus globulus, which is hardy in USDA zones 8–11. Iowa is in zones 4 and 5, with a tiny sliver of zone 6 in the extreme southeast. You are not going to find blue gum in an herb garden in Iowa, because it is a tree and because it does not grow in Iowa.

This is just a stupid little mistake. But it is indicative. The thing our heroine’s company actually sells is so uninteresting to our authors that they could not be bothered to do a thirty-second Google search for some plausible background. They could not imagine anyone being interested in essential oils. The only things real people are interested in are being cultural transformation stewards and optimizing performance, and the whole essential-oils thing came in because the business had to be about something—and probably because it had to be about something that sounded like a woman would be the CEO of it. It seems to Dr. Boli that many real businesses run this way: they sell stuff, but the stuff is only there to give business-school graduates an excuse to leverage their core agilities and become performant. It is a dull necessity, the way a stone foundation is a dull necessity if you want to build a Gothic cathedral. If you work at one of those businesses, and you are happy there, this will be your favorite book.

Off to the farm, and now the book drops into a set formula, which means that we don’t have to dwell too much on most of the main body of the book. (So many readers are puffing out deep sighs of relief right now that weather patterns have changed across the North American continent.) In each chapter, our heroine learns a lesson that can be summed up in a trite little platitude, and then she emails her newfound wisdom to the Leadership Team back at her company, who are blown away by it.

She begins to learn about bees from the Beekeeper, and at the end of the chapter she emails her Leadership Team:

Dear Leadership Team:

The hive is at the core of learning and growth, and bees provide the nourishment for all things to grow. Bees work together and are focused on the same mission.

—Catherine

Meanwhile, back at Essentially Proximal headquarters, they’re asking each other, “Did she, like, hit ‘send’ accidentally or something?” But that’s not in the book, because our narrator isn’t aware of it.

The learning continues, and the emails pile up.

The hive must Be Nourished to continue to thrive…

Be Vulnerable with your team. This will accelerate your personal growth. Like the forager bee, you’ll also pollinate the environment around you, providing the food needed for others to grow.

Back at headquarters, the Leadership Team have come together in the break room for an informal discussion.

“She sounds like she’s high,” one of them says.

“Should one of us call and see if she’s okay?” asks another.

A third one adds, “I’ve been updating my resumé—you know, just in case.”

A fourth says, “Well, if she’s going through some sort of, you know, thing, we’d probably better humor her.”

The book goes on, and the nuggets of wisdom pile up so high that we were looking around for a pitchfork, but eventually all good things must end. The vacation is over, and the lessons are learned. Catherine discovers that she has become a Be Keeper, a custodian of the mysteries of existence itself.

Then she goes back to her company to find that the whole office is decorated with her inspirational emails, made into posters with bee imagery.

“The team thanked me for the quotes and said that it was helpful and gave them new perspective on how we could work together.”

We notice that the team picked their words very, very carefully.

The team learned that they had to Be Proximal, and we are happy to report that, as far as we know, they are still just as proximal as all get out.

Now follows a section that purports to tell us what was going on back at the office while Catherine was off getting high on life, although (as we have mentioned) we have our own private opinions about that. This is also the part of the book where the lessons of the previous chapters are pounded in with a club, in case the sledgehammer the book had been using up to this point was too precise. “We hope you enjoyed reading The Beekeeper. As a reader, you probably caught onto the symbolism between the Beekeeper and transforming a culture and becoming a Be Keeper.”

If the author were speaking in a lecture hall, this is where Dr. Boli would be sorely tempted to shout from the back of the room, “No! Really? I must have missed that! Could you explain it to me again?”

So we get some little vignettes of how the leadership team applied their Be Mindsets to the problem of existence, and the book is over.

And then comes the index, and believe it or not, the index is probably the most entertaining part of the book. It would be an amusing parlor game to read a section from the index and then have the players guess what kind of book it indexes. Here is the entire P section:

Pain, perception, 109

Patience, 66–70, 107

rich returns, 69, 70

Peace, 69–70

Personal growth (acceleration), vulnerability (impact), 55, 135

Pheromones

emission, 81

impact/diffusion, 77

Pigs, feeding, 59

Pollen, spreading (beekeeper responsibility), 110

PowerPoint, usage, 17, 29

Property

farm experience, 17

inheritance, 6–7

seeds, planting, 6

transition, 6

Proximal Hive, welcoming, 141

No entry for “Proximal (meaning of in business jargon).” Did you know, by the way, that there are people who specialize in nothing but indexing, as if it were a valuable skill or something? Their clients must be idiots, because word processors have indexing functions built in, so anybody can make an index.

And the index is the end of the book. Now all we are left with is a bundle of lingering implications, along with a strange craving for Lavoris. The lingering implications deserve an article of their own. You’re on your own for the mouthwash.

Continue to Part III.

The Beekeeper: Pollinating Your Organization for Trans­formative Growth. By Katie P. Desiderio and Michael G. Frino. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2023.—This book is reviewed at the personal request of the authors, who sent a copy to Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Publishing Empire with a note asking “that you read it, share a review online, and then place this copy in a space for others to read.” Dr. Boli is still in conversation with his liability attorneys about whether he can safely do the third of those three things, but he is happy to oblige with the first two. In fact, he is going to be unusually thorough about the reviewing, which means that this review will have to be published in installments. There is only so much our readers can take in one gulp.

We note at the start that the book is published by John Wiley & Sons, the two-century-old publisher whose authors have included Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and now Katie P. Desiderio, MBA, PhD, and Michael C. Frino, MBA, PhD. One of those authors is an associate professor at Moravian University, one of the very small percentage of schools in this country founded before the Revolution. We mention these things so that readers may form an opinion of the general trend of intellectual development in These States.

If we look at the cover design, we notice that the second E in the word “Beekeeper” is rendered as the dotted flight trail of a bee, suggesting that the letter is flying away, leaving… what, students? Yes, that’s right! The noun “bee” sounds exactly like the verb “be,” and if you held out any hope that two MBA-PhDs would not be sucked in by the awful profundity of that pun, the cover sends a firm message that you must lay your hopes to rest.

But enough about the mere external accidents of the book. Let us open it and look at the words.

The Beekeeper is a simple fable whose moral is that, in order to function well in the capitalist world of today, we must place ourselves at the intellectual level of insects. For the heroine of the fable, this requires a lot of mental development. But she has advantages that not every reader will share:

Fortunately, my DiSC™* personality style is an Si-style, which means that I am easygoing and warm, always ready to offer support, collaborate, and be a team player.

You might think that the asterisk up there would lead to an explanation of what DiSC™ is, but you would be mistaken. It goes nowhere. Without an Internet search (which is not readily available in a hardcover book), we can only infer that DiSC™ must be an MBA-oriented branch of Chinese astrology. Incidentally, here is a principle that has saved Dr. Boli a lot of time and effort over the past few decades, and he willingly publishes it to the world at large: Nothing trademarked is true.

A glance at the table of contents shows us that every chapter title begins with “Be”: “Before,” “Be Trans­formational,” “Be Nour­ished,” “Be Prox­imal.” Fortunately we were warned by the cover graphics to expect something like this.

It is not until the third chapter that the story begins, because we have two chapters of setup to get through first.

In Chapter 1, “Before,” we are given the origin story of the beekeeper who will impart his simple wisdom of the bees to the heroine. It is very important to know that he was not always a beekeeper. In his origin story, we learn that he was once CEO of a marketing company, but retired to a farm he had inherited. It was important to get this established at the beginning, because otherwise the MBAs who are the target audience for this book would not understand how a beekeeper could have any advice to give them. Don’t worry, says the book: he’s a beekeeper now, but he’s really an MBA, and thus has real wisdom to share. We wouldn’t want you to think we were heretics who believed in knowledge outside business school.

Chapter 2, “Be Fulfilled,” jumps ahead into the future to give us a picture of our heroine’s life as she lives it now, after she has learned the lessons of the bees.

It begins:

“Hello, this is Catherine,” I answered the phone. Air pods in and luggage in tow, I was rushing through the chaos of the airport.

So you probably think some life-changing phone call is going to trigger the events of the story, but it’s a telephone solicitor “inquiring about franchising my essential oil business,” and she politely hangs up. This incident has no further effects in the story. As far as we can tell, these two opening paragraphs are there simply because the writers wanted to tell us that their heroine was named Catherine and she had an essential-oils company, but they wanted to do it in a natural way. They failed. They only drew attention to the fact that this story is an artificial construction by writers who are not very comfortable with storytelling technique.

From here we are given a picture of Catherine’s busy life as a management consultant. She flits here and there helping managers begin cultural transformations and become catalysts and stuff like that.

It was then off to New Jersey, where an executive leadership team of a Fortune 500 company was struggling to break down silos where fixed mindsets were encouraging overuse of traditions. The goal was to learn how to effectively demonstrate agility in considering how they could be cultural transformation stewards and impact collective growth from the top down.

If that is the goal, by the way, your company is in more trouble than you realize. Dr. Boli, whose own doctorate in business administration comes from the Boli Institute for Advanced Studies, thought that even a woman with an associate’s degree in business administration would know enough to ask, “How can we measure that?”

But this is a picture of Catherine living her ideal life. Her entire existence has become a symphony of buzzwords thanks to the simple wisdom of the bees. Surprisingly, our authors, who are firm believers in the profundity and power of bee-related puns set in italic type, have missed the wonderful opportunity here, but Dr. Boli is happy to point it out to them for use in the second edition.

How did Catherine reach this state of unmitigated bliss? Well, it all begins with her perfect children, who ambush her with a PowerPoint presentation. Aren’t children adorable?

Here, however, we need to stop for a while and take a good long drink before moving on. Dr. Boli himself is drinking Keemun tea, but if his readers feel that they need something a bit stronger than that, he understands and sympathizes.

Continue to Part II.

A few days ago, the authors of a book that describes itself as “a leadership fable” were kind enough to send a copy of their book to the celebrated publishing empire—not to Dr. Boli himself, but to the business as it is registered in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “We ask that you read it, share a review online, and then place this copy in a space for others to read,” said the accompanying note (printed in two colors, one of which is metallic copper).

Yes, Dr. Boli will be delighted to review your book. Let us open it at random:

The goal was to learn how to effectively demonstrate agility in considering how they could be cultural transformation stewards and impact collective growth from the top down.

Hmmm.

Let us skip ahead a couple of pages.

The upcoming meetings were the result of a small micro-intervention that has turned into a macro-organizational intervention, through the organization’s leadership modeling the way, and encouraging the same behavior at the group level, while also encouraging individuals to embrace change and be transformational. This is what I love to see!

Well…

I was blessed to have a strong star system to provide that ongoing support so I could do my best work as I helped humanize how organizations were enacting what they espoused to be important.

Yes, this book definitely deserves a thorough review. But it’s going to take a while. Expect a review of The Beekeeper by Katie P. Desiderio and Michael G. Frino in a few days. Meanwhile, those among our readers who are religious may wish to say a prayer for Dr. Boli as he embarks on this endeavor. Those who are not religious may wish to become religious before reading any more quotations from the book.

UPDATE: The review has been published.

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