Visit our other Zingerman's Businesses: Mail Order Deli Bakehouse Roadhouse Creamery Catering Coffee ZingTrain BAKE! Press Candy Food Tours  
inside the center of the gastro-deli universe

An Introduction to a Few Fine Foods of Hungary

As you’ll quickly be able to tell from either the headline or reading even half of what follows, I’ve got Hungary on my mind, and, increasingly, in my heart. What follows is just a taste, a glimpse, my initial sense of an incredibly interesting cuisine, complex culture and engaging history. In the last few years, I’ve learned a bit, but I feel like I have about two lifetimes of more learning to do. I may just be at the beginning, but I’m very excited. Sorry for the pun, but I’m hungry for Hungary. What follows are a few featured “courses” from my first year of study. I’m far from fluent in Hungarian culture but if enthusiasm and interest count for anything I’m well on my way—our future at Zingerman’s holds many good, and very flavorful, Hungarian things to come.

I Wish I’d Met George Lang

There are a thousand ways to approach the complex world of Hungarian food. I entered it first, rather casually at the time, many years ago through the writing of George Lang and his 1971 classic, The Cuisine of Hungary. Even if I wasn’t yet as fascinated by the subject as I am today, it’d have been hard not to take notice. “The subject of this book,” Lang begins, “is the cuisine and wines of a comparatively little-known country which has had the misfortune that the little that is known about it is generally pseudo folklore with a lot of gypsies playing into the ears of contented tourists while they eat the red-hot ‘goulash.’” Lang’s intro had me hooked. And while I’ve learned only a little about the difficult-to-master Hungarian language, I have learned quite a lot about George Lang.

At the time I first cracked open his book, I really knew very little about him. Back when we were getting the Deli going in the early ‘80s he was one of those people who everyone knew about and who clearly had enormous positive influence on the culture of food and cooking in America. Like a kid learning to play basketball who looked up to someone like Michael Jordan, I admired George Lang. He was someone who seemed to have attained international success at a level that was almost unimaginable to me. I was intrigued, but as a shy 25-year-old just getting started in the food business I wasn’t about to pick up the phone and call one of the most renowned of restaurant consultants. I wish I had.

Sadly, I waited too long—George Lang passed away last summer at the age of 86. My mistake. I actually had plenty of time to have taken action on my desire. When we opened the Deli back in 1982, he was living in New York and was actively involved in running the classic Café des Artistes. He stayed active in the food world up until his death. While I truly like to learn from everyone—eight-year-olds, world famous experts and everyone in between—George Lang was the sort of man I really look up to. While many people are good at one or two things, he was clearly multi-talented and very much multi-faceted; he lived a life that was loaded with travels, travails, achievements and insights. George Lang lived a long time and he pretty clearly seems to have kept learning through it all, at least up until he began to suffer from Alzheimer’s in his last few years. From what I can tell, George Lang always had his own way of doing things. He didn’t give in to everyone else’s opinions every time they pressured him to conform and he brought a lot of pleasure to other people’s lives. Writer Rozanne Gold, who did get to meet Mr. Lang, said he was, “brilliant, urbane, cultured, a story-teller, clever. I believed he felt his role in daily life was to amuse and ignite the imagination of others.” And she went on, “George Lang emanated brilliance. Whimsy. A life of the mind and of the senses. He even invented a few of his own.” Like I said, he seems like my kind of guy. If he’d been a bit younger, it’s not really that much of a reach to think that we’d have connected and that I’d have taken my first trip to Hungary with a list of tips that he’d emailed me before leaving.

While I might like to have entered the world of Hungarian food with Mr. Lang on my arm, I did do it with his insight in hand. Like so many things in my life, I suppose my admiration and interest in his work and his life started with a book—in this case, the above-mentioned, 500-page classic, The Cuisine of Hungary. It has long been one of my favorites. If I had to move into an efficiency apartment and could only take, say, seventy or eighty books with me (the “only” in there ought to give you some sense of how many food books I actually have), Lang’s would be one of the top picks on my list. Which, now knowing a bit about him, is probably one of the highest quality compliments that I could pay—the man had had over 3000 cookbooks in his personal collection.

There was, of course, a lot more to George Lang than his book. The man that I know as George Lang was actually born György Deutsch in 1924. He grew up in an academically oriented, Jewish-Hungarian, kosher-keeping home in the easy to remember, very simple to spell (just kidding) town of Skékesfehérvár, about 35 miles from Budapest. In 1944 the family was sent to labor camps by the Nazis. His parents died in the camps, but György got out and made his way to the U.S in 1946, where he changed his name to George Lang. Given the literal meaning of the surname he’d been born with—“Deutsch” means “German”—it’s not that hard to see why he chose to change it. “Lang” was his mother’s maiden name. Here in the States he went on to become one of the country’s great restaurateurs and wrote beautifully about Hungarian food and other subjects. He helped open over 300 restaurants in nearly 30 countries, best known of which was the above-mentioned Café des Artistes in Manhattan. In 1992 he traveled back to Budapest to renovate and restore Gundel, the Hungarian restaurant landmark that had fallen into disrepair. He was one of the real pioneers of the restaurant world in the modern era. His work with the firm Restaurant Associates and with his own restaurant, Café des Artistes, was well ahead of the curve.

George Lang’s legacy is one of pace setting, scene changing, trend taking, and history teaching. It is food-oriented and very rooted in culture and tradition. Here’s what the Village Voice wrote about him following an interview a few years ago: “George Lang, at 83, seems to have lived several lives, many happy, and some incredibly difficult. Over the course of an hour or so, Lang talked about being a child violin prodigy and eventually playing with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. As a teenager, he was a 100-meter running champion. Later he escaped Hungary, where his entire family perished in the concentration camps. At 21, Lang came to New York and rented a bed in Hell’s Kitchen while working as a dishwasher, then later as a saucier at the Plaza and a manager at an Italian wedding factory on the Lower East Side. He is an impressive calligrapher, a former Fulbright Scholar in Italy, and a writer at Travel + Leisure; he ran the Four Seasons; and, of course, he revived the Café des Artistes and became the first international restaurant consultant. Oh, and last Christmas, he hung out with the pope. What did you do?” Like I said, I wished I’d made the effort to meet the man.

I can only smile to tell you that he, like me, started his food service work as a dishwasher. If I can take my work to the same sort of heights George Lang did by the time he died, I’ll feel pretty satisfied. Asked what he would have at a theoretical last meal, George Lang gave a rather lengthy and detailed answer. Much of what he listed were dishes from his mother’s kitchen: fisherman’s soup, stuffed goose neck, sour cherry soup, layered cabbage, stuffed peppers, plum dumplings, pancakes with apple meringue, and whipped-cream strudel. “And then,” he said, “I will have what it takes to get to another world.”

What George Lang listed as part of his last meal is but a small bit of the country’s fascinating food and cooking. You’ll know that just by picking up his book. The Cuisine of Hungary isn’t a quick read. It’s nearly 500 pages long and my old, green-dust-jacket-wrapped, hardcover version probably weighs about a pound. And yet, as long as the book is, Lang wrote in his introduction that “Much of the fascinating material (I’ve researched) is too abstract or specialized, and with sadness I had to take out much more material than I left in the book.” That alone should give you some sense of how interesting and complex Hungarian cooking is. If a man with the insight and intellectual ability of George Lang was so exceptionally fascinated with its food . . . well, you know that Hungarian cooking is no minor league cuisine.

May 15th, 2012 by | Posted in Food | Leave a Comment »

Leading Towards a New Way to Work

Paul and I have always operated with the outlook that we, as owners and leaders, need the people who work here far more than they need us. If no one had ever chosen to work here, and then decided to do great work once they came on board, we’d probably still be struggling to keep a small, twenty-nine-seat sandwich business going in a hard-to-find-building in a not-very-good neighborhood. But clearly a lot of good things have happened over the last thirty years, and really all of it only because a lot of smart, hard-working people have given us the chance to lead. Despite the illusions (or is it delusions?) of some people who sit at the top of corporate org charts, the reality is that no leader will accomplish anything productive without colleagues who willingly choose to go wherever their (singular and plural) vision says they’re going. And if our new staff members are kind, caring, and intrigued enough to entrust their futures to us, we both believe we’d better take the time to meet them, hear their hopes and history, and then, in turn, share our story, our dreams, expectations, and passions with them in a productive and personal way. Leaders without followers are most definitely destined to fail; they usually end up being nothing more than barely-heard-of historical footnotes.

The End of the Old Model?
The more I work, learn, listen to others, write, and reflect, the more passionate I’ve become about it all. In my dreams at least, many people in the world are now ready to find that sort of better way to work. I want to believe that the economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 served as a warning, a sort of Hurricane Katrina for the country’s socioeconomic existence, a naturally occurring crisis that shows us in extreme form that our system isn’t working. My hope is that the crisis got people paying attention and opened their minds to a more positive, more sustainable approach to business, leadership, and organizational life in general. I’m probably overly optimistic on that front—most people fall quickly back into what they were used to as soon as the short-term crisis subsides. Change isn’t easy for most folks—as Dawna Markova describes it in her book I Will Not Die and Unlived Life, “we become imprisoned in our own rigidities.” But the change that I believe is happening is going to go forward nevertheless. That change will lead to a workplace that is both rewarding to be part of and also more productive. It’s about working in synch with the 12 Natural Laws of Business ; crafting an organization that’s focused on quality, care, and collaboration; building a community that benefits the greater good, a place that’s more fun while still functioning effectively in the field of the free market.

Wendell Berry wrote, in a letter to the editor of The Progressive magazine in the fall of 2010, “It is true that the industrialization of virtually all forms of production and service has filled the world with ‘jobs’ that are meaningless, demeaning and boring—as well as inherently destructive. I don’t think there is an argument for the existence of such work, and I wish for its elimination, but even its reduction calls for economic changes not yet defined, let alone advocated, by the ‘left’ or the ‘right.’” I agree. So, too, I’m sure, would most of the anarchists that I quote in my book, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 2: A Lapsed Anarchists Approach to Being a Better Leader. Berry added, “The old and honorable idea of ‘vocation’ is simply that we each are called, by God, or by our gifts, or by our preference, to a kind of work for which we are particularly fitted.” That, to a T, is how I feel, and I feel fortunate to feel that way.

The predominance of bad work has been building for a long time. The anarchists wanted to end it in a bad way. Alexander Berkman wrote: “It stands to reason that a person can give the best of himself only when his interest is in his work, when he feels a natural attraction to it, when he likes it. Can you expect the modern drudge in the ugly huge factory to make beautiful things?”

Skip forward to our own era where, unfortunately, bad work is still the norm. Poet David Whyte, in Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, quotes Brother David Steindl-Rast, telling him as he struggled to find his way in life that, “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness. You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while.”

I think he gave David Whyte some pretty sound advice. Bad work is almost always exhausting; people finish it feeling physically and emotionally drained: doing less bad work is only slightly less exhausting than doing more. Bad work, to use a technical term, just plain sucks. I don’t want to do it, and I don’t want anyone else to have to do it either. Bad work is about people being treated as if they have nothing insightful to offer, as if they know next to nothing, or are “too stupid to understand upper-level activity.” Bad work is about people being regularly managed in ways that are at best disrespectful and, at worst, downright abusive. It’s about people going to work every day in settings that aren’t in synch with their values—going “into the closet” when you go to work is a hard way to go. At best, bad work is tolerable but it’s never, ever terrific.

Now, I know that just wanting bad work to come to an end isn’t going to change the world overnight. But why not think big, right? I really believe that the approaches that we’ve learned and adapted and teach—taken from insightful, passionate people like Robert Greenleaf, Peter Block, Ron Lippett, Anese Cavanaugh, Emma Goldman, Gustav Landauer, and others—really can reconfigure the way the world thinks.

The Start of a New Era
Good work is life altering, fulfilling, and fun. Good work is about learning, laughing, growing, all the while earning enough money to make your dreams come true. It’s about collaborating with people you care about and who share your values, contributing something positive to the people and the community around you. It’s fun, not something you flee from. It’s a place you want to be, even if you rightfully have other places you want to go. Good work is about positive energy—both feeling it and building it. Good work is about doing something you believe in, work that you care about in a workplace that cares about you. It’s endlessly sustainable, not energy-sapping. While people might certainly, on any given day, go home tired after doing good work, they’re rarely spiritually exhausted. When we’re into what we’re doing, giving it everything we’ve got, learning and laughing even under duress, the experience is likely to be energizing, even if, in the moment, physically tiring.

At its upper reaches, good work can be one of the most rewarding things one ever engages in. If we build our business in sustainable ways; if we treat everyone with respect regardless of title, background, race, religion, or resume; if we encourage people to be themselves and help them get there; if we work to bring out the best in everyone; if we convey to people how much difference their work actually makes and then simultaneously teach them how to make a difference in the way that their workplace is run; if we keep everyone learning and laughing; if we work the numbers so that everyone wins from a financial standpoint… then we create very good work. When we get good work right, we make a reality of Emma Goldman’s once radical and, at the time, seemingly fantastical belief in “the freest possible expression of all the latent powers of the individual… [which is] only possible in a state of society where man is free to choose the mode of work, the conditions of work, and the freedom to work. One to whom the making of a table, the building of a house, or the tilling of the soil, is what the painting is to the artist and the discovery to the scientist—the result of inspiration, of intense longing, and deep interest in work as a creative force.”

March 19th, 2012 by | Posted in Ari on Business, Business | 1 Comment »

Our Greatest Hits

What follows is a tribute to some of our most famous and best-selling dishes, the things that have helped to make Zingerman’s Zingerman’s over all these years. We have selected some of your favorite foods – based on sales numbers – from the Deli, Bakehouse, Creamery, Mail Order, Roadhouse, Candy Manufactory, and Coffee Company.

Zingerman’s Deli #2: The Reuben

The Reuben is the best-selling sandwich at the Deli. As I know from listening to customers across the country, well-cured, well-cooked, and well-sliced corned beef is hard to find. Back of the envelope math tells me we’ve probably served about 150,000 pounds of it over the years!

That said, the Zingerman’s Reuben today is a better sandwich than it was when we opened. The bread alone makes a huge difference. We’ve replaced the bread we liked so much when we opened with the nationally recognized rye of Zingerman’s Bakehouse – best in the nation according to Saveur. The corned beef still comes from Sy Ginsberg’s United Meat and Deli in Detroit, but the quality of the beef he’s buying is better. And although I’m sure we’ve inadvertently over- or under-portioned (the perils of handiwork?) any number of sandwiches over the years, the actual recipe for each sandwich is still exactly what Paul and I wrote in months before we opened in ‘82.

The main thing‐then and now‐is that there really is culinary magic involved in eating a Reuben hot off the Deli’s grill. That golden brown rye bread, the crunchy, work-your-teeth-a-bit, double baked crust of the rye bread, the tender, juicy corned beef, the full flavor of the not-quite-melted Swiss cheese and the made-in-house Russian dressing dripping slowly but steadily out the sides so that you’re usually grabbing for napkins while you’re still working on that first big bite. If you haven’t had one lately… give it a try.

Zingerman’s Bakehouse Magic Brownies

I can’t even guess how many of these we’ve baked and sold over the last thirty years. We started making them three or four years into our existence (before that we’d bought so-so brownies from other bakeries). Connie Gray (now Gray-Prigg), who worked in our catering department at the time, developed the recipe. Her creative touch led to the now-famous Magic Brownie‐thinnish crust on the outside, soft chocolatey chewiness on the inside. One regular swears that she’s used them on airplanes to finagle a free upgrade or two. We’ve shipped the brownies to pretty much every corner of the country and many shipments have gone out to American troops serving overseas. Fortunately you don’t have to go to Afghanistan or Alaska to get them‐we sell thousands right here in Ann Arbor every week.

Zingerman’s Creamery Real Cream Cheese

This is such a staple of our existence at Zingerman’s that I could easily take it for granted. But on my regular travels, I realize that I’m really spoiled by this stuff; best I can tell, there’s really no other creamery out there making it. I’m not big on those “what would you eat at your last meal?” questions, but if I had to put together a list of ten foods, this stuff would most certainly be on it! It’s so great!

The cream cheese is made from freshly delivered Calder Dairy milk, which is gently pasteurized and set with starter cultures and rennet. When the curd is ready, managing partner/cheese maker John and the crew gently cut it to release the whey. It’s ladled into cloth bags to drain, then mixed with more fresh cream and a touch of sea salt. No gums, no extrusion, no preservatives.

Like so much of what we make and sell, this is eating as it was done a century ago before industrialization and the mass-market distribution chain took charge of our food system. I think one of the things I feel best about is that thousands of Ann Arbor kids are now growing up with this cream cheese as their standard. Their cream cheese bar has been set high, and to my sense of the world, happily so.

Zingerman’s Roadhouse Mac and Cheese

Food Network guru Alton Brown called this stuff the “best comfort food in America.” It’s nothing fancy‐the base recipe is in Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating, although at the Roadhouse we make it in a sauté pan rather than baking it in the oven. What makes it so great is a) the skill of Chef Alex Young and all the sauté cooks at the Roadhouse and b) the quality of the ingredients.

We use only macaroni from the Martelli family in Tuscany‐it’s one of the only non-American ingredients we feature at the Roadhouse, but it’s so much better than any other macaroni I’ve had that we have to use it. The Martelli family uses top-notch North American durum wheat semolina and uses traditional methods that leave the pasta with a coarse texture and a flavorful grain. The result is that the sauce integrates very well into the pasta. The pasta actually tastes like wheat! In fact, the whole kitchen smells like wheat when you boil it up.

Of course the pasta is our starting point. We make a cream sauce, grate up lots of two-year old Vermont cheddar and then toss the whole thing together in a sauté pan to caramelize it just before we pour it out into warm bowls and bring it to your table. Can you make mac and cheese with other, less costly raw materials? Of course! But once you try it this way, you won’t want to go back.

Zingerman’s Candy Manufactory Zzang Bars

Our candy master Charlie Frank gets full credit for these incredible candy bars. He’s passionate about sugar and traditional methods of candy making. Charlie has often said that he wants to take candy back 100 years and I think he’s been eminently successful. Others agree‐O: The Oprah Magazine recommended them, the Food Network featured them on “Kid in a Candy Store,” and food writer and candy expert Beth Kimmerle said, “They remind me of the 1930s bars that were hand-made, slab style with candy love. Although I never tasted a bar from that era, this is what I believe they would be.” Charlie has taken candy bars out of the context of convenience stores and into the realm of really wonderfully aged cheddar, bread fresh out of the oven, or exceptional olive oil.

When I look back over the last thirty years, Zzang bars are definitely one of our greatest hits. Really, more than most anything else, they’ve helped to redefine an entire category of our industry‐candy bars before Charlie developed these babies were still doomed to a super sweet, industrialized form filled with artificial ingredients. Imagine if all we had was Cheese Whiz or Wonder Bread? The food world has come so far in the last thirty years. And thanks to Charlie, candy bars now get to come along for the high quality ride!

Zingerman’s Coffee Company Roadhouse Joe

It’s been nine years now since we started Zingerman’s Coffee Company. Coffee buyer, roaster and co-managing partner Allen Leibowitz has been working hard throughout to take our coffee offerings to new heights. Without question the two big hits of the “coffee years” have been our Espresso Blend #1 and the Roadhouse Joe.

Allen and the crew have been always been passionate about espresso, which led them to develop the Espresso Blend. According to Allen, you should be able to sip and savor a great espresso, and it must stand on its own before we’ll use it for a cappuccino or a latte. The Coffee Company uses a blend of special varietals from the Daterra Estate in Brazil, and the result is an espresso that is rich, chocolatey, and a bit nutty, with a long finish.

The Roadhouse Joe was developed when we started the Roadhouse to meet managing partner and chef Alex Young’s taste profile. Alex wanted a coffee he could drink every day‐full flavored but smooth, a bit nutty. He wanted it to be somewhere between being so intense it would get in the way of the food and so subtle that it would be lost in the mix when people were eating all that great fried chicken, pulled pork and mac and cheese.

As a result, the Roadhouse Joe is a blend of coffees that complement each other as well as our food. With the help of a Seattle NGO, AGROS, the farmers who produce the coffees that go into the blend have been making a better product every year. The farmers set their prices and in turn, they are able to buy more land and continue to improve the crop. We get to enjoy the resulting Roadhouse Joe, which features coffees from Guatemala, Papua New Guinea, India, and Brazil. Says Allen, “Roadhouse Joe is a coffee that reflects the restaurant. It’s comfortable, full-flavored, and has something to surprise you. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did creating it.”

ZingTrain: The Zingerman’s Experience Seminar

Of all that we do, ZingTrain is probably the least visible part to most folks. But in a way, ZingTrain may have some of the longest lasting impact. If the way we operate here is, as I believe it is, “a new way to work” (see the Introduction to Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 2 for details) then every time ZingTrain goes out to share our approach with other business people in the area or around the country (or, actually now, the world) that impacts thousands of people in other workplaces as well.

ZingTrain’s “Greatest Hit” is probably its two-day Zingerman’s Experience Seminar. It’s the one we started teaching in 1996, just a couple years after ZingTrain opened in 1994. It’s the entry point for outsiders into the way we approach work, life, and food. It’s a chance for other leaders to learn our approach to servant leadership, visioning, open book finance and other fun stuff.

And from that Experience, a lot of great things emerge; ZingTrain has changed the way that thousands of people look at the world and feel about themselves and their work. As I wrote in the Epilogue of the Guide to Good Leading, Part 2, “recent seminar attendee Beth Fahey, who co-owns Creative Cakes with her sister on Chicago’s southwest side, saw me pouring water at the Roadhouse the evening after we’d finished a two-day ZingTrain session on visioning. She took my hand, looked me straight in the eye and said, very seriously, “I want you to understand. The last few days were transformative. I will never look at life the same way again.”

March 17th, 2012 by | Posted in ZingLife | Leave a Comment »

A Brief History of Zing

As we at Zingerman’s celebrate our 30th anniversary this month, great memories and great enthusiasm for the future abound. As a tribute to all of the people (both those who have worked with us and those who have been our guests) and food that have made Zingerman’s what it is, here is a brief bit of history, followed by some of our most popular foods over the years.

Opening Day, 1982

I’m a history major, but I can hardly remember details of Opening Day. We really had no idea what to expect, and we were relieved just to make it through that first day. I know that it was Monday, March 15th, 1982. I remember brewing pots of coffee in the old Bunn-O-Matic Pourover machine we had, bussing tables, and making Reubens and the #13 (Sherman’s Sure Choice). Chopped liver, potato salad, coleslaw, Russian dressing, chicken salad and other staples were definitely on our prep list.

A few minutes after 8:30 that evening, we breathed a sigh of collective relief and locked up for the first time. After cleaning up, we headed home. I fell asleep, face down on my living room floor and then woke up a few hours later to do it again. I don’t sleep on the floor anymore, but we’ve more or less repeated that cycle ever since.

Flash forward to 2012. Have we “made it?”

I’m often asked when I “knew” that we were going to make it. I’ve actually never looked at it that way. Paul and I still go to work every day looking to improve everything we do, to deliver great food, great service and a great place to work. Of course, I have a different sense of time now than I did then, when getting through the week was an accomplishment. Many of you, I know, were there that first week‐it’s an honor so many people have stuck with us for this long. For those of you who weren’t there, here’s a bit of history.

That was then…

Back then, we had 4 tables, 25 seats, and 4 more at the front counter. We drove to Detroit to pick up the bread every morning. We opened at 7 and closed, 6 days a week, at 8:30. We decided to close earlier on Sundays to get an evening off. We quickly realized that was a mistake, because the dorms didn’t serve food Sunday evenings. Back then people lived on the second floor of the Deli; what is now our office space was a very nice apartment. Outside there were two lonely picnic tables. The black wooden bench out front of the Deli was there, though at the time it was painted green. It’s hard to imagine now but in the interest of bringing in enough business to survive, we sold cigarettes, gallons of milk, and the newspaper.

…This is now.

Today, we’re a bit more than half way through building an addition to the Deli and renovating the original space. It is, I hope, another example of our commitment to the Kerrytown neighborhood. Back in ’82, people warned us that it was dangerous at night and customers wouldn’t come after dark. Kerrytown is now one of the nicest neighborhoods in town and people regularly come down at night to go to the Deli, the Kerrytown Concert House or one of the other nearby restaurants.

There have been so many larger-scale positive changes too. Local produce is available every weekend at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market, and we’ve started a second local Farmer’s Market in the parking lot of what used to be Bill Knapp’s but is now Zingerman’s Roadhouse. Every supermarket in the city sells goat cheese, and national chain restaurants sell cappuccinos. Back in ’82, it was hard to imagine local produce, goat cheese, or espresso drinks being widely available.

And, yet some things, fortunately, have stayed the same. We still open at 7 and serve favorites like corned beef, bagels with cream cheese, brownies, and coffee all day. I feel so fortunate to have had the chance to do what I do, to serve so many staff and customers, to support so many great suppliers, and to have made Ann Arbor a slightly more rewarding place to live and visit. A thousand thanks to everyone who’s bought anything from us or worked with us, who’s been patient with us on football Saturdays, or who has stuck with us through our shortfalls and encouraged us to keep getting better. It’s been a pretty incredible three decades. I look forward to the next three with great enthusiasm.

March 15th, 2012 by | Posted in ZingLife | Leave a Comment »

It’s OK for employees to say no

Excerpted from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 2: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Being a Better Leader

From the outside in we need to encourage others—especially those who aren’t accustomed to working this way— to make conscious choices about what they’re doing, or not doing. Part of that means that we need to respect that others will make choices we won’t particularly like. This is inherent in encouraging people to be themselves and telling them to speak up for what they believe. Which is, I know, far easier said than done. Being a hardass is a tough habit to break; the traditional work world is all based on the belief that “we’re paying these people, of course they’re going to do what we tell them to.” The idea of letting staff say “no” in a constructive manner, where they’re not immediately stomped on for saying so, is something we spelled out sixteen or so years ago when we wrote up the stuff we teach today in our training. But it’s not the norm most places. Performance may be poor, discussions may be difficult, and employment may ultimately end anyways, but dialogue, respect and fair treatment never need to go away because someone opted not to do what we would have liked them to. Without a doubt, this approach is certainly easier to adopt intellectually than it is to really implement (believe me—wait ‘til the first employee politely tells you to take a hike) . . . but, I believe, from the bottom of my very hard-working heart, it’s imperative to growing the kind of caring, creative (anarcho capitalist) community we’re going after.

The way I see it, anarcho-capitalism in action is always based on each of us exercising free will and free choice. It is built onto a foundation of freely made, mindful choices. Quite simply, as a few of my friends are probably sick of me saying, none of us have to do anything. If we do it, we do it because—mindfully or not—we choose to do it, not because someone else “made us.” Though, I’d venture to guess that’s not the way most businesses seem to operate. “Compulsion” is the most common motivational tool.

This ever-present, if generally unacknowledged, sense of compulsion is, by the way, all over our everyday language. Take ten minutes at the next meeting you go to and count how many times someone says, “I have to,” “I can’t” or “I should.” There’s a lot of power floating around those tables, but when we’re talking like that the power is noticeably not inside of us. Feeling “forced” to do things is simply never a good feeling. No one—and no organization we’re a part of—is going to get to greatness unless each of us reclaims it and owns it in a grounded, caring, and mindful way.

February 3rd, 2012 by | Posted in Ari on Business | Leave a Comment »

« Older