Putting the Principles of Nonviolence into Our Everyday Work
What MLK Jr., Gandhi, and Gene Sharp can teach us about doing business
The Irish philosopher, poet, and author John Moriarty once wisely pointed out, “There are some things you can only see in the dark.”
Moriarty was writing about the beauty of the stars and the night sky in the west of Ireland; invisible during the day, they can be quite remarkable after dark. For me, though, Moriarty’s insightful observation has been most helpful in a metaphorical sense. As autocracy is being increasingly implemented in our country, and as cruelty and unprovoked violence are becoming common tactics for those in power, we are, to my eye, experiencing an emotional darkness. One of the only upsides of living through that darkness is that more and more good learnings have become clear because of it. My understanding of democracy, and our shared role in its application, is one of them. It’s detailed in a pamphlet on the subject that I’m working on finishing soon. The learnings in this essay are another. I never would have seen them if so many of us weren’t struggling to find our way as this metaphorical darkness dominates our days.
Russian democracy advocate Vladimir Kara-Murza, a history major who has survived two near-miss assassination attempts by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and served many years in the Russian prison system before being freed in a prisoner swap a year ago last summer, says, “History doesn’t have only tragic lessons in store for us—it has some very hopeful ones as well.” What follows is one of the latter. Hopeful and, I hope, helpful as well. It’s about my belated glimpse of the obvious that nonviolence can be effectively put into practice in the day-to-day work of our organizations.
I didn’t put together all the pieces in this essay until the last couple of weeks. Now, though, the connections all seem so incredibly clear that I can hardly believe I didn’t see it all sooner:
- In our own imperfect and often unconscious ways, we have put many of the principles of nonviolence to work within the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB). We’ve done it informally over the course of our nearly 44 years in business. We’ve never used the term “nonviolence” to describe what we’re doing, but looking back, I see the elements of it being applied many times over the course of our history. It is, I see now, a big part of how we have managed to become who we are.
- Although violence is what grabs the headlines, any number of studies show that nonviolence makes for more effective organizations. Drama decreases, there is far less unnecessary destruction, stress drops, quality of life goes up, and more gets done. Practicing nonviolence is not easy. But there’s really no question: in a nonviolent context, dignity, kindness, love, compassion, positive beliefs, and generosity abound.
- Nonviolence applied in businesses and in organizations of any sort increases the odds of us collectively creating a less violent, kinder, and more collaborative country.
- With all that in mind, we would be wise to study and apply nonviolence in more intentional ways going forward within our workplaces.
To be clear, I have an enormous amount to learn about the subject from those who have studied nonviolence and those who have bravely lived it out long before I understood its organizational importance. I’ve always, of course, thought that nonviolence is an inspiring and uplifting idea, and admired people like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enormously for the ways they used nonviolence to alter the course of history in their respective countries. My belated understanding, though, is that the sort of emotional nonviolence they taught for use in society at large is of equal import inside our organizations.
I know that nonviolence is not a mainstream approach to doing business. The subject, I’m pretty sure, is not taught in business school. And yet, with the all-important anarchist belief that the means we use must be congruous with the ends we want to achieve in mind, the import of this new (to me) understanding is suddenly incredibly clear. Yes, of course, we can absolutely vote for different people and advocate for better laws to be passed, but if we want less violence in our society, the best place to begin is where we spend so much of our time every week: in our organizations. Less violent, kinder, and more collaborative societies start with less violent, kinder, and more collaborative workplaces.
In the opening pages of her 2009 book, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Fanny Howe recalls a friend teaching her early on in her writing career that “Poetry is backwards logic.” If poetry is backwards logic, then perhaps the application of nonviolence inside an organization would be a bit of backwards business logic at its uplifting, peace-loving best. In a mainstream business world that equates leading to “taking no prisoners,” “dominating the market,” “competing at all costs,” “undercutting the competition,” and so on, nonviolence leads us in a more positive and more peaceful direction: toward better listening, more love, a deeper understanding of dignity, and a compelling application of compassion. Sure, there may, at times, be fewer dollars to distribute in the short term, but in the long run, nonviolence seems far more sustainable—for the business, the people who are part of it, and the communities and countries where it operates.
By contrast to the kind of takeovers, force-outs, leveraged buyouts we read about in business sections, nonviolence plays out quietly in the actions of our organizations. There’s less drama and more dignity. Like poetry, it calls on us to pay more attention to the metaphorical equivalent of line breaks, rhythm, and word spacing—a well-placed pause in a meeting, a skillful shift in facilitation, a personal note of apology or appreciation, the willingness to thoughtfully consider subtle adjustments in approach. None of these things make the news, but they are ways to make nonviolence part of our everyday activity. After all, as Fanny Howe puts it, “Philosophy should only be written as poetry.” Here we go then. I know I have a long way to go, but if I do my work well, I can bring about what Howe says of her poetry: “It’s just built into my life patterns.”
The inspiring “backwards logic” of a nonviolent approach is evidenced by how alien nonviolence seems to be to most of this country. Erica Chenoweth, political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School and an expert on the impact of nonviolence, says that when they speak in class or at conferences about violent social resistance, their remarks typically go unchallenged. By contrast, their comments about the effectiveness of nonviolence—for instance, that “nonviolent resistance campaigns are 10 times as likely to result in democratic change”—evoke a lot of pushback.
I wasn’t pushing back, but neither was I paying proper attention. As is so often the case, I have missed many clues on the way to this peaceful and inspiring conclusion about the positive impact nonviolence can have on our organizations.
Sometimes, I’ve learned, the clues appear long before we come to a clear sense of what they all mean. I can’t remember exactly when this first clue occurred, but as is often the case with restaurant people, I know exactly where it took place: table 409 at the Roadhouse, the rounded banquette of a booth all the way in the far back corner of the building. Dr. Bob Wright, who has been working in the field of leadership transformation for 40-something years (and who kindly wrote the foreword for Managing Ourselves), was visiting us from Chicago to attend a ZingTrain seminar. I think it was somewhere around, I’ll say, 2014. I know for sure that it was far from Bob’s first visit. He’d already spent a fair bit of time with Paul and me and the other ZCoB partners, including guest speaking at one of our annual offsite retreats.
Bob is no novice to this sort of thing. By the time we all came together at the corner booth that evening, he had probably talked to and helped thousands of people, including a long list of very successful CEOs and upper-level managers. Bob is quite skilled at both self-management and conflict resolution—years of coaching couples helps—and with his wife, Dr. Judith Wright, has written and taught extensively on both. He was certainly a good sounding board for us as we tried to sort out the situation at hand. Which is why Paul and I began bouncing ideas around about how to best deal with some particularly challenging situations we were facing with Bob after he’d eaten dinner.
In the weeks and months leading up to that evening, Paul and I, both together and separately, had tried to make things work with the various parties at hand. Somehow, though, the situation still hadn’t gotten sorted out. We were pretty clear on where we wanted to end up, but we were struggling mightily in trying to get others on board.
While we definitely wanted to get things resolved, as we have done countless times over our years of working together, without any (verbal, of course) pushing or shoving. In truth, as Bob pointed out to us more than once, we were likely in the right, both ethically and legally. If push had come to shove, we probably would have had the upper hand, but neither of us was interested in taking that route.
Bob, who’s quite a calm, wise, and peace-loving guy, suggested some typical and slightly more “aggressive” strategies to consider, too. All were things that I suspect had worked for some of his other clients. But, in a way that might have frustrated or fascinated Bob just a little bit, neither Paul nor I was willing to bite. At some point in the conversation, Bob paused, chuckled, looked from one of us to the other, and then back again, and then, with a big smile on his face, said, “You guys are the most nonviolent organization I know!”
At the time, we chuckled, but in truth, I didn’t give his comment much thought. I was too focused on figuring out how to handle the situation at hand to understand the wisdom in Bob’s words. Sitting here all these years later—as I listen to “Cruel” from the new Caitlin Canty album and reflect on the overt cruelty and determined efforts at retribution that are in the news right now—violence and the alternative path of nonviolence are both very much on my mind. I’ve only now started to see that there was a lot more to Bob’s comment about our organizational inclination to nonviolence.
With all of this front of mind now, I recently recalled a second clue that I could well have picked up if I’d been paying more attention. Twenty-one years ago this month, I attended my second Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) symposium. The theme that year was “Race and Food,” and it was one of the most impactful conferences I’ve ever gone to. One of the speakers was someone I had heard of but, at the time, knew relatively little about: Bernard Lafayette. Then 64 years old, he delivered a talk titled “Beloved Community: The Civil Rights Movement and Food.” Lafayette has dedicated his whole life to nonviolence.
Lafayette grew up in Tampa in the 1940s, which was still segregated at the time. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Nashville, where he studied nonviolence formally at the Highlander Folk School and learned from nonviolence experts such as James Lawson. Lafayette participated in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins in the winter of 1960 and was part of the group that helped co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that spring. Lafayette’s talk at SFA that afternoon was terrific. I took it all in, took lots of notes, and, unfortunately, sort of left it at that. I never quite made the connection between his incredible knowledge of nonviolence and the kind of culture we were working so hard to create here at Zingerman’s. My mistake. In a TED Talk delivered 10 years later in Atlanta, Lafayette said:
Nonviolence is as old as the history of mankind, and yet it’s a foreign term to many people. … People must learn the strategies of nonviolence as a skill for use in their homes, their work, and in making social change. … Violence is an inarticulate language.
Today, I know much more about the man who was, in his early 20s, one of the most important followers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and an amazing leader and writer in his own right. In a 2017 conversation for Coursera, Lafayette talked about some of his learnings:
The nonviolence philosophy, which is espoused by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has proven to be very effective as a way of life, rather than just a tactic or method that’s used to respond to conflict and violence. It has a transformative effect … When we talk about violence, it’s not just about physical confrontations. Sometimes, words can be just as violent, and often much more permanent, because of the invisible pain and scars people suffer. … With this knowledge, they can prevent it from escalating. Violence starts on the inside.
Violence doesn’t just start on the inside—it can also impact us on the inside. Emotional pain can be inflicted without causing any immediate physical harm. Lafayette tells a moving story about this in his book In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma. When he was seven years old, he went to board a cable car with his grandmother. Segregation rules required Black citizens to pay in the front of the vehicle but then get back out in order to board in the back. Lafayette and his grandmother politely got on to pay and then stepped off to go around to the rear entrance. As soon as they stepped off, the driver purposely pulled away. No one was physically hurt, but the driver’s decision to drive off was very definitely an act of emotional violence.
This sort of thing can, and does, happen in less obvious ways inside any organization. I will never forget the ZCoB staff member who, after working here for a few months, shared his reflection: “This is the first job I’ve had where I don’t go home angry every day.” I’ve heard countless stories of workplaces where the people in charge don’t make eye contact or even acknowledge the existence of folks in front-line jobs. And you don’t have to be a boss to inflict this sort of violence. Rude snubs, cynical eye rolls, purposely leaving people out of conversations, cutting sarcastic comments in meetings. All are subtle, emotionally violent actions that, far too often, go by unremarked. I’m certain that I’ve unthinkingly done all of them over the years. My intentions were never bad, but, in small and ultimately unhelpful ways, my behavior certainly was.
All of these clues about the organizational role of nonviolence began to come together over the last couple of weeks when I started to study the work of Gene Sharp. I got to reading Sharp’s work because his books and thinking have been such a huge influence on nonviolent resistance movements everywhere, from Burma to Serbia, through Ukraine and across South and Central America, across the Arab world and of course the U.S. Wherever autocracy is on the rise—as it appears to be here—Sharp’s writings serve as primary reference materials for those who want to peacefully and effectively resist.
Sharp might be the most important contributor to nonviolent thinking that hardly anyone outside of experts in nonviolence has heard of. Those in the know, though, are well acquainted with his writing. In 1960, he released his first book, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, for which he managed to get the great Albert Einstein to write a foreword. Over the course of his life, Sharp authored more than 30 books and was nominated for four Nobel Prizes. This quiet, very humble man has been referred to as the “founder of academic nonviolence,” the “Machiavelli of Nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of Nonviolent Warfare.” As Ruaridh Arrow, his biographer and author of Gene Sharp: How to Start a Revolution, writes, “For more than 30 years, if you wanted to start a revolution, you went to see Gene Sharp for help.” Arrow adds: “It’s not Che Guevara they’re tweeting in South America. It’s Gene Sharp.”
Twenty years or so before Bob Wright had dinner at table 409, Sharp released his now-classic book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. He wrote the book to honor a request for help from Burmese democracy activists, and it was originally published in Bangkok by Burma’s Committee for the Restoration of Democracy. It was quickly translated into Burmese and, over the years, into about 50 other languages as well. At the time, Sharp wrote, “It was circulated surreptitiously inside Burma and among exiles and sympathizers elsewhere … Even until 2005, a decade after the small book came out, Burmese were being sentenced to seven-year-long prison terms just for carrying it.”
In 2015, Sharp was interviewed on the British news show “HARDtalk.” The interviewer opened the conversation by asking about the nature of nonviolence: “You’re very clear that this is not about an ethical choice. It’s a pragmatic choice. Explain.”
Sharp’s response was this:
People get very confused about nonviolence. … They used to tie this up with pacifism. … They think that this kind of struggle takes forever. … But nonviolence is not something that’s derived from ethical religious perspectives. Nonviolence is something that people have done for many centuries, going way back to the beginning of human beings. … Violence is something which plays into the hands of the strong, of the dictators. Nonviolence is actually a much more effective strategy.
Working as we have to bring dignity into our day-to-day lives, to make the love and care in our Mission Statement a meaningful reality, to live our Guiding Principles and practice what’s in our Statement of Beliefs, violent actions are not the norm in the ZCoB. But they do happen.
The sooner we can get that unacknowledged violence out of our organizations, the more effective we will be. Adopting nonviolence in our organizations isn’t just the right thing to do ethically. Extrapolating business strategies from Sharp’s insights on nonviolence, which are built on his in-depth study of Gandhi, King, and others, is simply more effective.
Sharp’s work is supported by an in-depth statistical assessment by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. You can find some of their extensive research in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works. In an interview published by Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Chenoweth shared an interesting statistic about the effectiveness of nonviolence:
Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns—whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.
Their more recent research reinforces Sharp’s writings. In 1959, he published an article in the Ann Arbor-based Journal of Conflict Resolution. (It’s the same journal at which the mysterious and magical musician Connie Converse became the editor a few years later.) The essay, entitled “Totalitarianism and Non-Violent Resistance,” demonstrated Sharp’s strong belief that nonviolence is the more effective way to combat any kind of authoritarianism. Over and over, Sharp demonstrates that the violent nature of retribution and retaliation—physical or emotional or both—doesn’t really work. As Sharp says, “As soon as you choose to fight with violence, you’re choosing to fight against your opponents’ best weapons, and you have to be smarter than that.” In the business world, arguments become more and more forceful, usually ending with people being painfully pushed out, long and costly legal struggles, and an array of other antagonistic outcomes. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes clear, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.”
Sharp’s writing has given me a new sense of perspective on my work to make apricots an effective symbol of dignity and democracy. I see now, six months after I started this project, that number 19 on Sharp’s list of 198 nonviolent tactics is “Wearing of symbols.” Better still, Sharp shares the story of the surprisingly effective nonviolent resistance to the Nazis that took place in Norway in 1942. It started when teachers refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the new Quisling puppet government the Nazis had installed. Teachers who chose to resist began to wear paper clips on their lapels as a sign of sticking together. Sharp quotes Haakon Holmboe, one schoolteacher he got to know, who said, “What was done often seemed ridiculous, but it had the effect of uniting all the opposition forces.” It created a sense of solidarity. And as Erica Chenoweth, the contemporary scholar of resistance mentioned above, says, “To know you’re not alone, that’s the key.” That knowledge has certainly been a big factor for me in figuring out how to make my way as a leader in these challenging times—thank you for all your kind notes and comments.
In order to really make nonviolence a reality in our daily work, I have a lot more to learn about the subject. As Bernard Lafayette says, “It won’t work unless you know how to work it!” In an early training pamphlet written for demonstrators, Sharp lays out six key points for people who want to practice nonviolence. “If you believe in the objectives of this demonstration,” he writes, “we ask you to abide by the following discipline. If you cannot comply, we ask you not to take part in this demonstration and withdraw quietly.” Over half a century later, they seem like a great way to get started practicing nonviolence within our workplaces. Here are the points:
- Do not use any language or take any action that is likely to provoke violence by others. A dignified bearing and courteous determination will greatly contribute to victory for this cause.
- If you are jeered at or called names, do not yell back or jeer at those who have views different from ours. Silence and a friendly smile are the best ways to reply to hostility.
- If anyone attempts to pull down your banner, seize your sign, remove an armband, or destroy leaflets, let go at once. Do not struggle with the attacker. … Stand silently with your hands at your sides, looking straight ahead, or continue marching as before with hands at your sides.
- Do not, under any conditions, use violence, regardless of provocation. If you are struck, keep your hands at your sides and do not strike back. … Dignity, restraint, courage, and a friendly smile are the best answers
- If anyone else is attacked, do not use any violence against the attacker. Each demonstrator must himself or herself be responsible for standing up to such violence and suffering for achieving our objective.
- If a fight or struggle does begin near you and there are no police to deal with it, you must be prepared to separate fighters by standing between them, even if you are thereby injured.
Obviously, we would need to adapt the wording to fit the workplace, and the injuries at work would be emotional, not physical, but the principles are a powerful, nonviolent way to go into a tense situation or awkward conversation. In fact, I’m going to add them to my mix for meeting management!
I’m realizing now that we unconsciously practiced nonviolence within the ZCoB over the course of some awkward negotiations last year. Things could have gone very badly. Intentions were good, but, nevertheless, meetings grew tense. Money was involved, which generally evokes awkward emotions. Conversations and attempts to come to an agreement stretched out longer than all involved had hoped. Outside experts warned us repeatedly that we were being overly generous with what we were offering. Many of the experts, who are used to working with more mainstream organizations, told us that with “right” on our side, we could and probably should draw a hard line in the metaphorical sand. I wasn’t surprised by their approach. Western culture constantly warns us to guard against others taking advantage of us, and advocates “standing our ground,” “taking charge,” and “forcing your opponent to back down.” This stuff is tempting, but I’m glad to say we didn’t fall for it.
In the end, we didn’t cave, nor did we get sucked into conflict during the negotiation process. It all went down very smoothly. In the short term, yes, we probably gave up a bit more than others think we should have. But rather than getting stuck in endless arguments and a long court case, we chose a positive path forward. Coming to a calm, nonconfrontational conclusion let us put our collective energies back into what we wanted to work on. It was, I see now, nonviolence in organizational action. Backwards logic by mainstream standards, but pretty magical by ours here in the ZCoB.
Bernard Lafayette worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for many years. On April 3, 1968, the two talked on the phone. As Lafayette recalls it, the conversation was wrapping up when King said, “Now Bernard, the next thing we’re gonna work on is to institutionalize nonviolence.” Lafayette pauses at this point in the story, then says, “The next day he was shot.”
Perhaps each of us can, within our own small spheres of organizational influence, pick up that piece of Dr. King’s legacy. To work to institutionalize nonviolence. In our case, that work happens in the business community.
There are some things you can only see in the dark.
Peace, love, kindness, and dignity to all.
