Bees, Behavior, and Business: The Challenges of Managing People

Dear Friends,

There is a popular adage: A bee lives less than 40 days, visits at least 1,000 flowers, and produces less than a teaspoon of honey. Honey bees can work up to 12 hours daily, depending on their role in the hive. The busiest hours are usually between 11 AM and 2 PM. Surprisingly, their organizational structure is amazing!

• Nurse Bees (1-10 days old)
Role: Care for the larvae.
Task: Feed the colony's most vulnerable members a protein-rich secretion to promote rapid growth.

• House Bees (11-20 days old)
Role: Maintain the hive's internal environment.
Task: Keep the hive clean and organized, ensuring an efficient and hygienic living space.

• Guard Bees (18-21 days old)
Role: Defend the hive.
Task: Station themselves at the entrance to repel predators and intruding bees.

• Field Bees (21-35 days old)
Role: Scout and forage.
Task: Search for new hive locations when needed and gather resources like nectar, pollen, and water.

• Older Bees
Role: Undertake high-risk tasks.
Task: Handle the most dangerous jobs, such as defending the hive and foraging far from safety.

Dynamic Roles and Survival: Worker bees adapt their responsibilities as they age, supporting every aspect of hive life. This division of labor underscores a bee colony's collective resilience and efficiency. Each role is indispensable, highlighting the interdependence that drives their survival.

Today, progressive organizations are struggling more with people than with processes or products! HR can be considered tougher than Finance, R&D, or Operations because it deals with the most unpredictable and dynamic resource in any organization: people. Managing human behavior, motivation, and performance presents unique challenges that make HR exceptionally complex.

Human Behavior is Unpredictable. This unpredictability adds to the complexity of conflict resolution. As intellectual levels grow in an organization, the rate of complexity increases even more.

Consider this typical HR problem statement today:

A highly productive and critical resource with the best credentials, working remotely on the organization's most crucial product with all sensitive data on their laptop, does not share knowledge or cooperate with peers, desires rapid career progression, occasionally falls sick, and is hence irregular in delivery. This employee perfectly matched the job description during recruitment but began exhibiting this indifferent behavior post-joining!

This scenario is not isolated. Many organizations worldwide are suffering from this syndrome! Fancy degrees often do not address individual behavior or cultural alignment. More knowledge does not guarantee sharing. The power of position does not guarantee loyalty.

As AI and automation progress, this challenge becomes even more crippling!

Do you also experience this in your circles? Do bees teach us any valuable lessons?

Ravi Saripalle

From Scepticism to Acceptance: An Intriguing Question Raised During My Talk at the World Health Innovation Forum

Dear Friends

I got an opportunity to present “Healing with Intelligence—The AI Doctor Will See You Now: Transforming Medicine Through Technology” at the World Health Innovation Forum happening at AMTZ, Vizag, between December 12, 2024, and December 14, 2024.

My presentation revolved around AI surveillance tools such as:

• COMPOSER (Sepsis Monitoring), deployed at UC San Diego Health.

• Google AI (Verily) for diabetic retinopathy, deployed at Aravind Hospitals in Madurai (Google is not charging for this and is yet to get certification from the Indian government).

I also discussed how, in the future, Doctor = Doctor + AI, supported by analogies. For example:

• How Arvind Sanjeev tweaked an old typewriter by connecting it to ChatGPT using a Raspberry Pi (a mini-computer). Arduino (microcontroller) allowed the typewriter to simulate key presses. Hence you speak to Typewriter. It writes the answer! This is also called a “Ghost writer”.

• Similarly, part of a doctor's knowledge in the future could come from an AI-trained model, making the equation Doctor = Doctor + AI validation.

Additional topics in the presentation included:

• 2024 AI trends setting the path for medical innovations.

• AI performance benchmarks vs. human performance on multiple tasks.

• The AI healthcare market outlook.

• The role of AI in science and medicine.

• AI ethics and controversies.

• A recommended framework for adopting AI in healthcare.

At the end of my presentation, I received an interesting question from a medical practitioner. She asked:

“Why have virtual tutors failed in education settings, even though many experimented with them during COVID-19, and why are people going back to the old-school model? Similarly, why is the remote health model failing, despite the availability of teleconsultation technology?”

It was an intriguing question, but there is no definitive answer at this stage. However, I shared my thoughts:

1. 50 years ago, part of entertainment included street dramas. These dramas were highly emotional and engaging at the time. Today, however, dramas are consumed virtually. As a society, we have come to accept the virtual format for this level of emotion.

2. Education, on the other hand, operates at an Emotion+ (Enhanced Emotion) level. Education is linked to livelihood and has a greater emotional and societal importance. Acceptance of virtual solutions in this domain, therefore, takes more time, and physical intervention is still often necessary.

3. Health operates at an even higher emotional level—Emotion++ (Peak Emotion). It concerns life itself, which is beyond livelihood. Hence, acceptance of virtual or remote health solutions takes much longer.

Eventually, when the performance of virtual AI solutions is on par with or better than human performance, society will likely accept these solutions. However, it will take time—it is a directional shift rather than an immediate one.

AI + Doctor = The Future of Medicine

Ravi Saripalle

Failure Conference!! Sounds Interesting!! You Heard Right!! Read This!

Dear Friends,

Occasionally, we hear about Success Meets! Whether it’s an organization or an individual, success is generally celebrated. My son or daughter got a UPSC Civils Rank, scored 99 percentile in JEE, ranked in the top 100 in NEET, cleared CA in the first attempt, the startup received seed funding, the organization completed one year, received an award, our movie ran for 100 days, and so on!

Have you ever celebrated failure? Have you ever attended a party hosted by parents because their son/daughter tried UPSC but failed? Have you been to a party hosted by parents because their son/daughter couldn’t get a JEE rank despite training from an early age? Rare, right? I admit that even I have never celebrated or attended such a failure meet, though I have personally failed multiple times and experienced the pain.

However, one of my admirers, Harish Hande, is organizing one such mega event (6-7 Feb 2024, IIM Bangalore)! It is all about organizational failure, and the name of the conference is “Impact Failure 2025 Experiences (impactfailure.org).” They are not asking you to submit your pitch deck or success mantra. Instead, they are asking you to submit your failure story:

“Share your failure story with us and contribute to a culture that can admit and learn from what did not work, one where failing and learning are shared and celebrated.”

Harish has been doing this for the last three events! His goal is, “Let us humanize it...so many youngsters can take the right path going forward” (LinkedIn: harish-hande-67b226).

You all should know about Harish. I met him only once at IIT Madras, probably 15 years back. However, his story inspired me a lot. If you read his LinkedIn, it is an interesting read. He passed out of IIT KGP (1986–90) BTech. He writes, “This is what my certificate says,” “Grade: With great difficulty.” Then, like a typical confused person, I spent somewhere between 3 to 5 years getting a Master’s and PhD. I surely recommend it if you think you have some years to decide what not to do.”

This shows his humility. In fact, Harish did his master’s degree and later a PhD in energy engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

He was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2011 (Asia’s Nobel Prize) for "his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor through his social enterprise SELCO India.” Hande co-founded SELCO India in 1995, a social enterprise, to eradicate poverty by promoting sustainable technologies in rural India.

Despite his tall success, he writes of himself as:

Employee, SELCO – Not sure about what I do. Worked with creative people worldwide (mostly those who creatively created a career out of 'solving' poverty).

At the age of 25, I was a little fearful of sharing my failures, fearing it would ruin my career and life. At the age of 50, with a short stint left, there is nothing to lose. Today, I am happy to celebrate mentally and internally to start with! Thanks to Harish, we can glorify them too!

Are you ready to celebrate your failure?

Ravi Saripalle