The Art of Making Honey (Ebook)

A Fable About Turning a Business Around

"The hive is dying."

It is the third thing anybody says to Bea after they make her queen. Nobody has offered her a chair.

Forty-four days of a hundred-day clock have already been spent by other bees. She does not get them back. She gets what is left: fifty-six days to find a new home for forty thousand bees, and something for a hundred thousand bees to do.

Her sales lead cannot say which customers make money. Her engineer has six years of ideas nobody asked him for. Her board has watched the decline for a decade and still calls it considerable upside. Everybody is working hard. The numbers are getting worse.

What Bea does about that, in the order she does it, day by day, with the clock on the wall, is the story. She finishes with twenty-four days in hand and the colony still hers.

Part One is how it happened. Part Two is how to run it.

Every leader ends up standing where Bea is standing: holding a problem they did not create, on a clock they did not start, in front of people waiting to see what they do first. That first move is the job. Get the order wrong and all that effort goes into the wrong thing. Get it right, and a hive that is dying becomes a hive that is building.

Part Two is the playbook underneath the story, the Profitable Growth Operating System, in four repeating phases: Segment. Simplify. Zero-Up. Grow. Five questions at the end put it to work in your own company.

Nobody gets a clean start. You get a clock and a team.

Read the story. Then start your own Day One.

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