Paying homage to one of Ann Arbor’s great historical leaders

On Monday, April 7, 1975, as Irina Ratushinskaya approached the end of her third year as a university student in Kyiv, Albert Wheeler was elected Mayor of Ann Arbor. Wheeler’s election was historic—he was the city’s first, and so far only, Black mayor.

Many non-Black residents of the city may not realize that, in the years leading up to his election, Ann Arbor remained segregated through a series of largely unspoken social norms. As the Ann Arbor News later wrote,

Far away from the segregated lunch counters and water fountains of the Deep South, Ann Arbor was wrestling with its own brand of racism in the 1940s and 1950s. Blacks moving to town were only shown houses in the North Fourth Avenue area, a grimy neighborhood heavy with the odor of slaughterhouses and coal-fired plants. Jobs for African Americans at the University of Michigan usually got no better than cleaning floors or operating elevators.

Mayor Wheeler was born in the city of St. Louis in 1915. He studied biology at Lincoln University, an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in Pennsylvania. He came to Ann Arbor in the late 1930s to study at the School of Public Health at the time that the Great Depression was winding down and the geo-political tension in Europe that was about to turn into WWII was increasing. In 1945, when Wheeler and his wife Emma attempted to purchase a house, the banker continually pushed them to look at buying only in Black neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the couple persevered. In 1952, Dr. Wheeler became the first Black professor at the University to be tenured. The Wheelers would go on to be instrumental in the founding of the Ann Arbor chapter of the NAACP. He first ran for mayor, unsuccessfully, in 1970, but ran again in 1975 and won.

As mayor, Wheeler worked to change beliefs about what a city government was supposed to do—working in the opposite of what we read about right now in national news, he advocated significantly increased services for its citizens. Wheeler’s path was not an easy one. Even in our fairly “liberal” city, he faced verbal and physical threats. He pushed forward anyway, working to help disadvantaged members of the community, create effective public housing, and more. He has been credited with instilling the idea that city government should be involved in human services, helping disadvantaged citizens, and that’s something the city continues to do. The Ann Arbor News noted that “a pattern of scattered public housing on small sites throughout Ann Arbor is another Wheeler legacy,” and that he “worked to avoid the large, isolated housing projects that other cities built with public funds.”

As Wheeler explained his deep dedication to working for Civil Rights in the city, “I thought I was working for what I was entitled to as a human being.” His daughter Mary McDade, an appellate court judge in my home state of Illinois, talks about how her father led with positive beliefs: “He recognized that as women and as Black people, it was going to be an uphill struggle to do anything in this life.” And yet, McDade says, “He was constantly reminding us that if you used your brains, if you applied yourself, there was nothing that you couldn’t do.”

In 1987, five years after we opened the Deli, the name of what had long been called Summit Park, a few blocks to the north of us, was changed to Wheeler Park. The plaque at the park says it well: “The city of Ann Arbor is a better place to live because of the Wheelers.” Albert Wheeler passed away at the age of 78 in 1994.

In order to honor Albert Wheeler’s good work, and mark the 50th anniversary of his accession to become mayor of Ann Arbor, the Coffee Company has created what we call “The Wheeler Latte.” It’s a super tasty coming together of the Coffee Company’s Espresso Blend #1, a housemade Demerara brown sugar syrup, and steamed milk that comes in from Calder Dairy in Carleton, Michigan.

As we see it, the Wheeler Latte is a tribute to Al Wheeler’s wonderful work here in the 20th century, and also a recognition of what we can all do to build on his caring community contributions. Order one up this week and make a toast to the mayor’s memory as a salute to the social improvements that he worked so hard to make happen, and that all of us remain responsible for today in the winter of 2025!

To sweeten the deal, and in support of Albert Wheeler’s life work, the Coffee Company is donating a dollar from every Wheeler Latte to the local chapter of the NAACP.

Have one ready and waiting

A light touch of citrus to sweeten a winter day

This stuff is super! Light, refreshing, bright, delicate, and delicious. In the dark dog days of winter, we can all use a bit of brightness—this super tasty sorbet serves up a little bit of metaphorical culinary sunshine!

If you aren’t familiar with the satsuma, it’s a variety of Chinese mandarin that came to the U.S. via Japan. Its original Chinese name means “honey citrus of Wenzhou,” a fitting description of its gently sweet flavor. “Satsuma” is a more modern name, taken from a former province of Japan (now Kagoshima Prefecture) on Kyushu Island. The region holds significance in what I wrote about 20th-century art critic and philosopher Soetsu Yanagi’s The Beauty of Everyday Things and his passion for mingei—the beauty of the many small, handcrafted items commonly found in Japanese kitchens and workshops of the time. (Kagoshima: Stories in Craft from South Japan, published a couple of years ago, explores the story of mingei in the Satsuma region.)

Satsumas today are well established in the United States. Satsumas came originally to a Jesuit plantation up the river from New Orleans early in the 19th century, and from there spread across the South and out to California. The towns of Satsuma in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Louisiana were all named after the fruit. By 1920, Jackson County in the Florida Panhandle started to call itself the “Satsuma Capital of the World.”

You can serve the satsuma sorbet for a dessert or a light afternoon pick-me-up. Better still, take advantage of the slightly warmer weather that means spring really is coming, swing by the Cream Top Shop at the Creamery, and get a small cup to share with a friend. Pair it with vanilla gelato to make a dreamy Dreamsicle. You can play around with it at home, too—its citrusy, not-too-sweet brightness makes it a nice touch to serve a small bit on the side with some fresh oysters! Or top small scoops with a garnish of chopped fresh tarragon—it’s an interesting combo and a great palate cleanser between courses. It’s great, too, with a twist of really good black pepper on top, like maybe the Elephant Valley pepper we have from the folks at Épices de Cru in Quebec!

Procure a pint

Creating a culture where people act like they care and care enough to act

Roya Hakakian was born back in 1966, into a Jewish family in Iran. Hakakian was 13 in 1979 when the ultra-orthodox Moslem regime took power and many previously well-accepted freedoms were taken away. She remembers women, suddenly unable to dress as they wished, going into the streets to protest. It was a time when speaking up or saying what needed to be said would likely land one in jail, or at the least earn you a summons to the local police station. When Hakakian was 19, she escaped Iran with her mother, and after a year of moving around Europe, made it to the U.S. Today, Hakakian is a well-known poet, author, and journalist, a woman who Harry Kreisler, in Political Awakenings, called one of  “the most important activists, academics, and journalists of her generation.” In recent weeks, Hakakian has found herself again watching women demonstrate on the streets of her homeland, prompted this time by the tragic death in prison of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.

Hakakian’s first book, which came out in 2004, was entitled, Journey from the Land of No. While Hakakian was writing about what she had experienced in Iran, her title had me thinking about how many modern organizations have created their own less-extreme-than-Iran versions of the “Land of No.” Places where those who hold power prefer passivity from those on the front lines, where higher-ups hold decision-making for themselves, and where new staff will almost never take initiative. Workplaces where people are afraid to take action to do what they know full well needs to be done.

Reflecting on this got me wondering: what can we all do to keep from making our businesses into “Lands of No?” How can we, instead, create workplaces in which taking the initiative is encouraged and expected? Where people take direct action rather than holding back while they wait for direction. Organizations in which, as we wrote in our 2032 vision, we can “Start with Yes.” A place where people understand and believe that when they decide, of their own volition, to take small actions of dignity, kindness, helping others, and building hope can add up to have hugely positive, even revolutionary, implications in the long term. Where, in the best possible way, most all of us regularly have Roya Hakakian’s insightful statement in mind: “No one can predict how a revolution starts.” I believe Hakakian is correct. The next good deed someone at Zingerman’s does could change the course of our organization. Only hindsight and history majors many years from now will know.

Why have some people stood aside while others opted to act? Why do some speak up for dignity when others do nothing? Why do so many people act helpless instead of being helpful? Writers, like Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Erich Fromm, and others have written volumes about the subject. I’ve been reflecting on how we take those lessons from the literally life-threatening situations in which they’re happening and transpose them, at of course a smaller and less risky scale, into what we do at work every day. How do you create companies where people don’t tolerate untruths? Where people understand what Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko shared during the Soviet era: “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie,” and as a result, most people will take a deep breath, embrace their understandable discomfort, and still effectively say what needs to be said.

It’s clear to me that living in harmony with the Natural Laws of Business contributes. Certainly teaching #7—“Successful businesses do the things that others know they should do … but generally don’t”—encourages folks to “go the extra mile.” It’s clear to me too that people with high hope, positive beliefs, who are believed in, treated with dignity and respect, who are clear on their organization’s vision and how they fit into it, people who work with strong systems, are getting effective training, who are led by Servant Leaders, etc. are simply much more likely to want to engage and take positive action. Here in the ZCoB, we have, imperfectly, created a culture in which, more often than not, most people who work here will do the right thing, even in the face of anxiety or adversity. There are many other organizations, and communities, around the world, in which this is also the case. Why? Why are so many in Iran continuing to risk their lives protesting in public but in Russia, it’s only a tiny minority? Why does Russian society seem to lean towards disengagement and apathy, when, by contrast, Ukraine’s culture has devoted itself to the revolution of dignity and engages in positive activism? Why do staff in so many organizations look the other way or wait for their boss, when so many here in the ZCoB will take a deep breath, think things through, get help, and then go out and break the rules when they need to do what’s right?

One of the many long-time marketing techniques we use here at Zingerman’s is what we’ve come to call “primary message.” As we define it, it’s the one thing—taken from what is usually a long list of positive attributes—that we believe will be most likely to make someone decide to purchase a product. We try to do them for each of our biggest selling offerings. We also chose one, many years ago, for our organization overall: “You really can taste the difference” is the primary message for what we make and sell. It’s an expression of our belief that anyone interested can tell the difference between good and bad, great, and good. And that, although our industry has often suggested that customers can’t tell the difference, we believe people are smarter and more capable than many “experts” give them credit for.

We also chose a “primary message” to share internally: “You really can make a difference.” Our hope, both explicitly and implicitly, is to effectively get this message into the hearts and minds of everyone who comes to work here. It’s not a trick. We really believe it. Everyone matters, their work matters, and seemingly small decisions very often add up to have very big impacts. We want to get across our belief that one doesn’t need to be in charge or have a fancy title to have great insight. That even on your first day what you do can make a big difference. And that a good idea or a deep concern, regardless of where it came from could, as Roya Hakakian has written, start a revolution.

Reflecting on all this, I can see now that we have a wealth of ways in which we systemically support this sort of proactive approach to work. Open book management, open meetings, Bottom Line Change, effective facilitation in meetings so everyone’s voice will be heard, and ways for people who have concerns to systemically (aka, “due process”) appeal to someone else all contribute. We have “Four Steps to Going Direct,” and a class on Courageous Conversations. We talk about emotion regularly and about going forward in the face of understandable fear to do the right things. One of the big contributors to this cause is the decision we made early on to allow—actually to encourage—every staff member, from their first day forward, to do whatever they needed to do to make things right for a customer. It’s the third step of our long-standing “Five Steps to Handling a Customer Complaint.” While getting help is encouraged, of course, for all of us (I ask for it regularly), no one needs permission from anyone else to replace a product, give a refund, authorize a redelivery, etc.

I remember very vividly, like thirty years ago, when I was teaching the Welcome to ZCoB orientation class. One of the participants was in his teens and his previous job had been at a big chain box store. As I was going over this approach to handling complaints, he spoke up. “You’re joking right?” he said with dismay. I insisted I meant it. “Seriously?” he asked skeptically. “Yes, seriously,” I responded. He still wasn’t convinced that I actually meant what I was saying. Finally, I asked why he was so skeptical. “In my last job,” he said, “I knew what to do to fix customer problems. But if I would have done it, I’d have gotten fired.” I shook my head and laughed a bit. “Here,” I answered, “you’ll probably get promoted!”

The place he had previously worked was one more example of what Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin refers to as “The Pyramid of Power,” a place in which power and authority are consolidated at the top, where front-line people have little or no say, and if they do speak up, they get in a more socially acceptable form of trouble than what usually happens to people who speak out for peace and human rights in more physically dangerous settings. Instead of spreading dignity, the Pyramid foments fear and uncertainty. It disempowers and encourages passivity. It’s a model, Sorokin says, in which

Power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship it. And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.

From everything I have experienced, the Pyramid of Power is a terrible way to run an organization. Bosses get rich and become famous, but everyone around them—and the ecosystem as a whole—surely suffers. Instead of positive action, people on the front lines wait for orders to come, and respond to problems with apathy and shoulder shrugging. (This model of centralized power and authority is pretty clearly one of the Russian army’s big problems as it struggles in Ukraine.) Doing what you’re told takes priority over doing what’s right or telling the truth. The only people who make a difference in the Pyramid are the ones at the top, the ones who hold all the power. Over time, staff members grow cynical and cite their helplessness in the face of “policy.”

Here we want to create the opposite. Our approach, as you know, is about dignity and equity.  Instead of the Pyramid, we want partnership. Our ideal is to help people make decisions quickly and effectively. In the case of a customer complaint or a potential problem where there’s clearly urgency at hand, the last thing we want to do is make a smart staff member and a frustrated customer wait a day or two for a manager to weigh in. We want to create an ecosystem in which doing the right thing becomes routine. It takes good systems, training, practice, an embrace of imperfection, and persistence. As Octavia Butler once said, “First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”

To understand why this happens in the ZCoB but is hard to find in so many other organizations, I started asking folks who work here. In a good way, even though they do this work well every day, most took a minute to respond. It was a good example of Maurice Telleen’s wise observation that “A funny thing about cultures is that they produce people who understand more than they know. Sort of like osmosis.” All of them gave thoughtful answers, most of which revolve around the culture, and what it feels like to be encouraged to think creatively and take action rather than to shut up and wait for orders. To know that they really do make a difference every day. It’s probably not a coincidence that the other day, I got this email from Samantha Misiak at Mail Order: “I’m grateful to work for a company that encourages, supports, and gives employees ways to get involved at all levels!!”

Certainly, we have hired people who were raised with the belief that being proactive about problems and opportunities was a natural and appropriate way to show up in the world. Unfortunately, many others have been raised with the opposite, socially trained NOT to take action. As I see it, it’s our responsibility to help them understand that here at least, we want them to speak up and take the initiative! As Peter Block points out:

The leadership task—indeed the task of every citizen—is to bring the gifts of those on the margin into the center. This applies to each of us as an individual, for our life work is to bring our gifts into the world. This is a core quality of a hospitable community, whose work is to bring into play the gifts of all its members, especially strangers. 

Our use of organizational recipes is one way that we encourage people to take action. Recipes of this sort—our 3 Steps to Great Service, 5 Steps to Handling a Customer Complaint, Four Elements of an Effective Vision, etc.—are not the same as Standard Operating Procedures. The latter are meant to be done the same way every time. This is how we do our sanitation checks, quality checks, safety procedures, paperwork for new staff members, etc. Organizational recipes are also clear, but leave a lot more room for the “cook” to make appropriate decisions in the moment. While they do give good guidance, they also require the individual to decide in situ how to make them happen successfully. They are not panaceas but they certainly are systems that support a proactive approach to life. If we do our work well, we create a culture in which, as Tuhunnu, Pesio, and Ebilotoh, write in Indigenous and Black Wisdub, “You are free to move, free to be creative.”

One thing that helps to encourage an active stance are the philosophical frameworks we have created over time. Our Mission Statement (about bringing great Zingerman’s experiences to everyone and doing it with love and care), our 2032 vision (see “The Story of Visioning” for much more), and our Guiding Principles all offer relatively clear, hopefully reasonably coherent, mutually agreed upon, boundaries within which it is far easier to take an unscripted action or give an effective answer to an unfamiliar question. Our “Statement of Beliefs” is also helpful. Nearly every one of the 34 beliefs on the list is supportive of this, some very specifically so:

We believe small actions make a big difference.
We believe a diverse group makes better decisions.
We believe each person is a creative, unique individual who can do great things in life.

Whether it’s in a country or a company, what this seems to come down to is helping people learn to be good citizens. To think of the whole without forgetting themselves or their families. To treat everyone with dignity while trying to do the right thing. To learn, as Paul has taught me, to disagree without being disagreeable. In his book Citizens, Jon Alexander writes:

We must see ourselves as Citizens—people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to their community and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, who care and take responsibility, and who create opportunities for others to do the same.

Crucially our institutions must also see people as Citizens, and treat us as such. When they do, everything changes.” If we can step into the Citizen Story . . . We will be able to build a future. We will be able to have a future. That is what is at stake here. 

What can do to create Citizens of the sort that Alexander is alluding to? Back in 1960, Ron Lippitt and Ralph White published a book entitled Autocracy and Democracy; An Experimental Inquiry. Lippitt, of course, was the man who taught us what we now know as visioning. White was a pioneering social scientist, peace activist, and the first president of Psychologists for Peace. White and Lippitt speak of a “psychological core of democracy”—the psychological underpinnings of creating a culture in which people will become effective citizens, embracing the paradoxical challenge of respecting norms while, at the same time, questioning those that don’t work well. There are six prerequisites, they say, to creating a positive sense of citizenship:

1. Open-mindedness to influence from others;

2. Self-acceptance or self-confidence in initiating one’s own contributions and expressing one’s needs.

3. Realism about the objective nature of task situations and interpersonal situations. 

4. Freedom from status-mindedness.

5. Fairness about equality of rights and opportunities.

6. Friendliness and good will in attitudes and actions toward others.

Lippitt and White point out that to have a healthy organization in which people regularly voice ideas, observations, and concerns requires good listening skills. After all, if no one is listening, people stop sharing. It’s not easy to do well (here’s more on listening). As they describe:

The psychological feat of receptively listening to a new point of view, while not abandoning one’s own viewpoint, calls for a kind of inner strength which is by no means universal.  It is more difficult than docile listening to simple orders which is characteristic of the apathetic reaction to autocracy, and also much more difficult than the stubborn clinging to one’s own point of view. 

Harrison Gardner has a great new book entitled Build Your Own; Use What You Have to Create What You Need. Harrison (who I met because he took the initiative to reach out after reading Part 1 of the Guide to Good Leading series) has become a big proponent of teaching people how to go back to building their own homes. Manchán Magan, who met up with the Zingerman’s Food Tours group in Dublin earlier this week, wrote the foreword. The book, Manchán says, helps people push past anxiety and uncertainty, to learn to take action to do what needs to be done, and do it well. Manchán’s message, I believe, speaks to the sort of mental shifts and skill set building that we want to create in our organization to encourage us to speak up and do the right thing.

It’s a revolutionary book, challenging the many subtle ways that those in power lead us to believe that building is beyond our abilities and that we should enslave ourselves  . . . Ultimately, it has the knowledge to empower you to shape and craft your own living space, and to alter and adapt the space as your needs change through life. . . .

Cast your fears aside—the revolution starts now. 

I have shared these next two references relatively recently, but I can’t get the images out of my mind. Ukrainian poet, Lyuba Yakimchuk, who fled the Donbas with her family back when Russia invaded in 2014 (in what came to be known as the Revolution of Dignity), wrote in one of her poems in her book Apricots of Donbas,

Where no more apricots grow, Russia starts.

Cultures where folks no longer speak up, where they opt out of taking action even when they know what to do, where people look the other way instead of doing what they know is right, become the organizational equivalents of Russia. Life continues on apace, but almost no apricots are likely to be found.

By contrast, we can actively create organizations in which apricots are everywhere. Writer and poet Volodomyr Rafeenko, who was born in Donbas, relates a bit more context from his childhood:

Apricot trees were in abundance: both growing wildly and domestically. When the blooming time would come, paths of my childhood . . . were covered with a carpet of pink-white petals that were slowly circulating in the air during quiet days of falling on the ground under currents of the first warm Spring thunderstorms. 

I would like to help create an organization in which metaphorical apricots abound, a place where customers write to tell me stories of staff members taking the initiative, stories like this one:

Today a friend and I got carry-out food, and went to the Vets Park pavilion to have lunch. We realized when we got our meals out, that no utensils had been provided. Since I’m in a wheelchair, my friend called to inquire as to whether someone might bring some over to us. The person on the phone actually volunteered to send someone over before my friend asked. Within minutes a young man came running—literally—with utensils and some brownies. In a very winded state, he refused a beverage and a tip. Then he ran off just as quickly as he’d appeared.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko said that “In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.”  Poets speak up to say what needs to be said when others are unwilling or unable. Poets like Roya Hakakian. Or Linton Kwesi Johnson, who once pointed out, “poetry [is] a cultural weapon.”  Poets—both potential and real—like the people who work in organizations, more often than not unempowered and unrecognized, all over the world. Hakakian writes, “Iran has reached its Ukrainian moment, the time when a people realize that they are willing to pay the price for their freedom.” My hope here at Zingerman’s is that we can create an organization where we won’t ever have to arrive at a Ukrainian moment; a place where people take action on the little things, raise ideas and concerns regularly, step up to help customers and colleagues all day without being asked. Where everyone believes that they really do make a difference, and takes action accordingly to make that difference a daily reality. Where the poetry of small actions can regularly start revolutions of the most positive sort.

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Approaching our work as art can change our worlds

Designer Debbie Millman once wisely shared this life advice: “If you imagine less, less will be what you undoubtedly deserve.” Inverting Debbie’s insight into a more positive frame, I arrive at this: “Imagine ourselves as artists and it’s amazing what can come of it.”

When I think back on all that I’ve learned over the past forty years, I have to laugh. The list of tools, mental shifts, and changes in mindset is long! I knew so little back in 1982. Many of the approaches I’ve adopted have changed my life. Practicing visioning, embracing the power of beliefs, finding open book finance, starting to live servant leadership, creatively applying the tenets of anarchism, and the more recent exploration of the organizational ecosystem metaphor lead the list. Zingerman’s, and my own life, is almost impossible to imagine here in 2022 without them. Although I’ve sometimes given it less attention, the idea of approaching my work and my life as if they were art, poetry, or music has, quietly, been equally impactful.

While the idea of living an artful life had in some sense probably been an intellectual undercurrent for me for quite some time, the idea clicked one day when I was looking at the website of my friend Patrick-Earl Barnes—whose new painting, “Blacks in Culinary,” I wrote about last week. From the day we first met back in 2004, I have been drawn to all of Patrick-Earl’s work. The day I was looking at his website, though, one piece completely caught my attention. It was a painting of one of his classic folk art characters, wearing a t-shirt with the message: “Art is how you think.”

True to his message, Patrick-Earl’s art immediately got me thinking. It was, in essence, an epiphany. The painting took a subconscious, meandering thought I’d been having and framed it in a way I could intentionally and mindfully approach my life. Nearly twenty years later, art is very much how I think, work, look, listen, and live.

Can a small subtle shift like that really make that much difference? For me, the answer is absolutely. Integrating this artful approach to—well, everything—has helped me to see more clearly, deal with the world more effectively, and appreciate everyone and everything around me in a more engaged way. It’s nudged me to notice nuance and to attend more actively and caringly to details I would likely have otherwise missed. The small shifts add up in a big way. As playwright David Mamet put it, “Art is an expression of joy and awe.” When art is how I think, sure enough, to Mamet’s well-made point, I feel joy far more frequently. And, without a doubt, I’m amazed at how often awe shows up in what I might many years ago have mistakenly imagined as mundane.

Seth Godin did a post a while back that sums up this work:

Poets use words (and silence) to change things. They care about form and function and most of all, about making an impact on those that they connect with.

Every word counts. Every breath as well.

In a world filled with empty noise, the most important slots are reserved for the poets we seek to listen to, and the poet we seek to become.

As this approach evolved, and as I began to work at thinking artfully rather than just looking at art, I began, as I so often do, to write about it. A few years after I saw Patrick-Earl’s piece, we published “The Art of Business” pamphlet. Its 30-plus pages are based on the suggestion that no matter what we actually do for a living, we will benefit from starting to imagine ourselves as artists. You can plug in “poets,” or, if you’d prefer, make it “musicians,” or “songwriters,” but the point is the same. When we start to move through our worlds as artists, the shift is easy for an outside eye to miss, but ultimately, the impact can be enormous. Done well over time, thinking and living artfully is life-altering.

“The Art of Business” is based on what I had begun to understand and wrote about in The Power of Beliefs in Business—when we change what we believe, we experience the world differently, we act differently, and others around us are, in turn, impacted, influenced, and inspired in the process. Here’s a snippet of what I suggested at the start of the pamphlet:

Next time someone asks what you do for a living, try telling them you’re an artist. Watch their response. My forecast? They will pay far more attention when you start to share more about your life. So, I’m pretty sure, will you.

  . . .

When we choose to live our lives creatively, to make the most of the days and months and years we have on the planet, to be true to ourselves as best we can and as often as possible, then our lives—and our organizations—are truly art as well. Most of us, I know, haven’t conceived of ourselves as artists. But I’m guessing that if we start imagining ourselves in this new light, our lives will likely become richer and more rewarding. Excellent, if imperfect, works of art in the making.

The impact, while subtle, has been significant. It’s pushed me to approach every small interaction I have with the same sort of care and commitment to craft that I work on in my writing. To put as much thought into how I end an email as I do to where to place paragraph breaks when I’m working on a book. Whether I’m greeting a new staff member, working the floor at the Roadhouse, creating an agenda for a meeting, or making dinner, actively thinking as if I were an artist:

• Pushes me to pay radically more attention. I still slip regularly. But my attentiveness to the world around me has absolutely increased. Artists notice nuance. Many of us have been raised to focus on the finish line; thinking and working more artfully has taught me to tune into and appreciate the process.

• Helps me call up my creativity all day, every day.

• Makes me more appreciative. Beauty in the organizational ecosystem metaphor is akin to gratitude—both, I’ve learned, are there to easily be appreciated if we’re paying attention.

• Gives me a gentle way to raise issues, initiate conversations, and express care and concern; art allows us to do what arguments almost never can.

• Helps me feel better about myself since I, like most humans, feel at my best when I’m flowing with my creative abilities.

• Makes my life better by bringing beauty more intentionally to the fore.

Perhaps the most important part of this shift is the realization, the belief, that everyone can do it. This is not about elite experts crafting world-class paintings—it’s about being the world-class human being everyone is capable of becoming. When I do the work well, it’s very much as artist, author, and former physicist Enrique Martínez Celaya writes:

Being an artist is not a posture or a profession, but a way of being in the world and in relation to yourself. An artist is revealed in his or her choices. Watch your actions as well as what you like and notice who is the person suggested by them. Understanding who you are as an artist should be thought of as a life-long process inseparable from your work.

What follows are half-dozen ways that I believe anyone who’s interested can put this into practice. I continue to work to get better at each of them every day.

1. Creatively manage your creative inputs.

If we are, we know, radically influenced by who—or what—we spend the most time with, then it only makes sense that our inherent, naturally occurring artistic abilities will be brought out most by spending more time around art, artful thinkers, and being in creative conversations. As I shared in Secret #39 in Part 3, “It turns out that the biggest thing anyone can do to increase their innovative ability is to go hang around in a creative environment.” This can be in person, on the phone, in our workplace, or in the café we hang out in. It might be in music, books, films, podcasts, going to plays, or reading poetry. The energy and inspiration I get from all that creative connection is a bit like living on solar power. My energy stays high most of the time. It’s much like what musician Rachel Baiman says of music producer Tucker Martine: “He runs his life in service of maintaining inspiration at all times.”

One of the chefs who appears in Patrick-Earl’s art piece is the late Leah Chase who, with her husband, and later, with her children and grandchildren, ran the legendary Dooky Chase restaurant in New Orleans. I’ve had the pleasure of eating in the restaurant, and I had the honor of meeting Leah Chase twice. She was, for me and many others, an inspiration. When you dine at Dooky Chase, you will be surrounded by incredible artworks by some of the country’s best Black painters. Historian and author Jessica Harris, who is also featured in Patrick-Earl’s piece, writes:

While the kitchen may have been her heart, art was her soul: It was a world where she found her true self, and where she delighted in being. The art in Dooky Chase’s restaurant reflects that love and connection.

The little things matter—we can draw inspiration from fresh flowers on the counter or taking a few minutes to read a poem every morning. I keep six vintage Bakelite Scottie-dog-shaped pencil sharpeners in my pocket everywhere I go—one for each of the dogs at our house. When I feel stressed, they serve as grounding, creativity-evoking touchstones. Rachel Baiman said of Tucker Martine’s studio: “Even the bathroom is majestically wallpapered and smells like designer soap. This is an environment in which magic will be made.”

2. Actively find the beauty in everything. 

Although I spent much of my life ignoring it, most of the time there is, I’ve come to understand from this work, beauty to appreciate all around me. If we learn to look—or listen, or taste, or touch—as an artist, it’s amazing what we notice. Kazuo Ishiguro says, “An artist’s concern is to capture beauty wherever he finds it.” I saw it in the reflection on the glass bottle of sparkling water that was sitting on the table next to me the other morning while I journaled. I’ve experienced it with the color, aroma, and superfine flavor of the Thorburn’s Terracotta tomatoes that Tammie is growing this year for the first time. Flipping through the most recent Mail Order catalog, I noticed the beauty of Ian Nagy’s amazing illustrations and the craft that went into the placement and the copy. I appreciate that the U.S. Post Office is now selling stamps that feature mariachi musicians. I paused for a few minutes to take in the personalities of the people portrayed in the first wall piece Patrick-Earl did for the Roadhouse in early 2020, and the poster that Ian Nagy did of Patrick-Earl. And I just noticed the other evening—Ian’s poster is on the opposite side of the room, “looking” straight across at Patrick-Earl’s piece. That now makes me smile every time I enter the room!

3. Artfully make a difference.

Great art in this context is not for decoration; it’s about making a meaningful difference. Playwright Aaron Sorkin says, “If you feel that strongly about something, you have an obligation to try and change my mind.” Artful action—whether it’s in a painting or in person—draws us in. This is, in great part, why my eye went to Patrick-Earl’s paintings in the first place when I saw him selling them on Spring Street in Soho nearly twenty years ago, why I walked over to look more closely, and why I bought three of them to carry home in my luggage. It’s what made me want to hang his art—alongside the amazing work of Ian Nagy and Ryan Stiner—in the Roadhouse. It’s absolutely what gave me the thought to commission the new “Blacks in Culinary” piece. We can make a difference in people’s lives, and bring beauty to our communities. Elizabeth Catlett, whose painting of Leah Chase is now hanging in the Smithsonian, once said, “We have to create an art for liberation and for life.”

3. Be more attentive to what’s happening in your head and your heart.

If I don’t keep myself centered, it’s unlikely my art will be effective in its impact. Journaling, as I wrote about in “Working Through Hard Times,” has been a huge help. Running every day nearly always brings unexpected insights. Talking to friends, teaching, reading, etc. all help me tune into what’s in my heart. The folks at Indigenous Resistance write about the importance of “taking care of one’s inner dub in order to the work of the outer dub.” Managing Ourselves (which we really, really hope will get past the paper supply chain issues soon!) has 400-plus pages of my thoughts on this broad and important subject.

4. Go for mindful greatness.

No artist wants to put out below-average art. No poet calmly settles for so-so. Tucker Martine says, “If we aren’t doing this to make the best record that we can, then what’s the point?” When art is how I think, I take that mindset into every small interaction I have—taking time to thank the postal carrier with a heartfelt smile. To add a bit more meaningful appreciation to what starts out to be an otherwise mundane email. To listen more closely when someone tells me their name so that I actually remember it in the understanding that even our brief introduction can be done superficially, or, instead, with an artful intent to attain excellence in the exchange.

5. Nurture other artists.

The other day I got interviewed by Jonathan Fields on the Good Life Project podcast. At the end of the conversation, he always asks, “What does living a good life mean to you?” I began my answer by referring back to many of the things we had talked about—increasing hope, enhancing positive beliefs, paying attention to purpose, etc. A sentence or two into my response though, I realized the obvious answer I was working my way back to: “Living a good life is helping other people to live a good life.” Sharing this approach with everyone, noticing the beauty in their work, and encouraging them to do the same with their own surroundings, helps a lot. As Seth Godin says, “Art isn’t painting or canvas or prettiness. Art is work that matters.” The amazing, difference-making artist Samella Lewis, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 99, was mentored as a young woman by Elizabeth Catlett who was eight years her senior. Who can we help this week to see themselves through this sort of artful lens?

6. Make a positive difference.

Elie Wiesel writes, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.” The point of this piece is, ultimately, to help enable anyone interested to make their life richer, their ecosystem more connected and caring, and to tap into their creativity and purpose more purposefully. Despite laws that said it couldn’t happen, the upstairs at Dooky Chase became the first integrated restaurant in New Orleans. And as Leah Chase said, “In my dining room, we changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken.”

Approaching our work and our lives as artists is not in conflict with doing what we need to do to make a living. The key is that we do it in ways that are true to us, true to our values, infused with dignity, and done daily with grace. Here’s a snippet of a bit from “The Art of Business”:

Poet Gary Snyder came to visit Ann Arbor a few months ago for a reading. He’s studied Japanese drawing and Chinese poetry, and he used to hang out with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He’s been called “the poet laureate of deep ecology,” does environmental work, and has also published a good bit of insightful prose, including an essay that particularly resonated with me called “Buddhist Anarchism.” As I write, he’s in his 85th year. He was born ten months after Robert Henri died. I’m honored that Gary chose to eat at the Roadhouse (as he did on his previous visit as well) on the evening of the event. Over 500 people came to hear him read poetry on a farm 10 miles west of town. Wow. Snyder shared his belief that “[c]ommercial art is when you do something to respond to a demand in the marketplace. That’s not a bad thing. But when you do something because it’s what you love, and then you figure out how to get people to buy it, even though they didn’t know they wanted it until you made it, now that’s really great art.” It’s what we’ve tried to do here at Zingerman’s for 34 years now.

The poet Guante says, “Don’t write a poem about war. Write a poem about what it’s like to stand in your brother’s empty bedroom.” When I’m engaging with the world as an artist, it reminds me to look more closely, notice more, hear more, and in a regenerative way, do better. It pushes me to see not just at the plate of food being served to the guest but to focus equally on the energy of the person who’s putting it down in front of them.

What we know now about neuroplasticity makes clear that this artful approach, practiced regularly over a period of years, will literally change our minds. Not only will that change help us, and those around us, it also serves to help inoculate us against the fear, negativity, and unnecessary drama that dominates so much of the world’s daily conversation. As scientist Norman Doidge describes, “Once a particular plastic change occurs in the brain and becomes well-established, it can prevent other changes from occurring. It is by understanding both the positive and the negative effects of plasticity that we can truly understand the extent of human possibilities.”

In the urgency of the world’s current crises, it would be easy to ignore this call for thinking and acting more artfully. I could have walked right past Patrick-Earl selling his paintings in Soho all those years ago. But look at the impact of that seemingly small decision to honor my instinct, to engage artfully with his art, and to build a friendship and find ways to connect creatively and caringly. Every person we see, every interaction we have, has the potential to also make this kind of difference. These acts of artfulness get little attention from others, but they might just save the planet.

John O’Donohue wrote many years ago that the world was suffering from a crisis of ugliness: “In a sense, all the contemporary crises can be reduced to a crisis about the nature of beauty.” Stepping back and working at approaching our lives and work like artists or poets or painters helps us to gain much-needed perspective. “Perhaps,” O’Donohue says, “for the first time we gain a clear view of how much ugliness we endure and allow.” I don’t have any statistics to prove it, but I’m confident that there are more artfully-minded folks doing good work in the world, and that most of those doing ill (though I know not all) are not spending time on palindromes, poems, or careful selection of paint colors.

Learning to think in artful terms has shifted the way I see the world, and I hope, through that shift, also altered my impact for the better as well. Dooky Chase has posters on the wall by the artist Jacob Lawrence. Leah Chase told Jessica Harris:

I learned to look at his work, and from there on, I just learned to look at things. Sometimes you don’t understand it. Sometimes you look at it, you say, “Oh my goodness, this is so ugly.” Look again. Look again and you’ll see something. 

Chase’s artfully spoken comments reminded me to return my attention to the ending of “The Art of Business,” where I shared a similar lesson from a story that James Baldwin told, a story that took place maybe a mile to the west of where I first met Patrick-Earl:

I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was the water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.” Baldwin’s story sticks in my head. Every time I start to skip past something unthinkingly, I try to turn my mind back to look—or listen, or taste—again, to see what I missed the first time around. It’s amazing how much more interesting the world gets when we take the time to pay careful attention. Beauty begins to appear in the most unexpected places.

If you’d like to purchase a bunch of copies of “The Art of Business” pamphlet to get your organization moving in a more artful direction, email Jenny at [email protected].

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