Marveling at the difference a small shift in beliefs can make in every aspect of our lives

As I write, we’re in the process of putting the final touches on the first-ever “Zingerman’s Statement of Beliefs.” We’re working on getting them printed so we can give copies to our staff, and so those of you who want to can buy one as well. I’ll write more about why I believe the “Statement of Beliefs” is so important and how we plan to use it soon. But for the moment, I want to start with sharing the very first belief listed on the Statement:

“We believe leading with positive beliefs makes a positive difference.”

There are dozens of other beliefs in the document, and all are important. But, the more I work with the Statement of Beliefs, the clearer it’s becoming that that first belief is particularly important—it provides critical framing for the whole project. All the beliefs that follow on our list, are also positive. As are the stories that follow here. Like I said, “We believe leading with positive beliefs makes a positive difference.”

As many of you will already know, during the work on The Power of Beliefs in Business I began to imagine our beliefs as the root systems of our lives. What we believe—whether we realize it or not, is driving our decisions and behaviors every day. Change the belief, and you’ll likely change the behavior too. By contrast, keep the belief the same, and we will continue to get the same outcomes. In hindsight, it’s obvious. The roots below ground always dictate, 100 percent of the time, what will later emerge above the surface. One of the most important learnings for me out of all the work was this:

• Negative beliefs will lead to negative outcomes.

• Neutral beliefs won’t do much of anything.

• Positive beliefs create positive outcomes.

Negative beliefs can create action. They can create both antipathy or apathy, evoke anger, tear down buildings, get people fired, or bring relationships to an end. But they will not create calming, collaborative and creative results going forward. Which means that if we want to create long-term positive outcomes, we must lead from a positive place. It’s a short sentence and a simple concept but it’s a big statement. If we want to build meaningful, healthy, sustainable organizations, organizations that generate positive energy and leave their communities better than we found them, we need to begin our work with positive beliefs.

Like many things in life, it’s easier to understand this concept intellectually than it is to put it into daily practice. Negative beliefs are all around us. Most of us grew up, unknowingly, with plenty of them. They’re on the news, they’re in social media, they’re in notes from meetings we go to. It could be thinking ill of coworkers or customers. Or about our neighbors, our in-laws, our partners, our spouses. It could be about entire groups of people—racism, anti-Semitism, the belief that women can’t lead, or young people won’t read. Negative beliefs are so pervasive that we’re often not even aware that they’ve entered our minds—criticism and complaining, gossip and negative thinking can be so pervasive as to pass, pretty much unnoticed, as “normal.” The more we hear them, the deeper the roots go, and the harder it is to get them out of our heads. It can be done though. We have the freedom and power to choose our own beliefs. And small shifts that we make from negative beliefs to positive beliefs actually make positive differences. In the long run, a big difference.

To be clear, sticking to positive beliefs does not mean ignoring problems. We face big issues in our organizations and society at large every day. So, no, I’m not suggesting we nominate Pollyanna for President. But, it turns out, we can have negative beliefs about a problem (“There’s nothing we can do. We’re at the mercy of others.”), or we can have positive beliefs about problems (“This is a serious issue—let’s start working on how we can make things better”). Starting with positive beliefs won’t guarantee good results, but they sure will increase the odds that we can make good things happen.

What follows are a series of “short stories”—all of which have happened in the last few weeks—that have served to reinforce the power of positive beliefs for me.

DeVeaux worked at the Deli as a porter in what we would now call “the early years.” After he left the Deli, DeVeaux got into design and consulting. He’s creative, a musician, a caring thinker, a good ZingTrain customer, and very community-minded. He’s still a great customer to this day, as is his whole family. After they were in the other evening at the Roadhouse, DeVeaux emailed me the next day with thanks for their dinner and to share this story:

I’ve been working really hard to change and improve the culture where I work and have made significant progress. Although at one point I was intent on leaving the company out of frustration, I shifted gears and tried to appreciate the positives, which are many. I started with changing my own mindset on gratitude and appreciation for what I have, and then working on what was important to me that I could change. So, it was part internal change, and partly learning to sell the importance of an idea and taking initiative to make it happen. The final component was making some great hires over the past few years of people who shared my goals [and, I’ll insert my own contextually relevant comment, his beliefs] and were willing to help. I even got the owners to attend some of the ZingTrain Leadership Series last year. This all culminated with an award I received at our annual Townhall. This is only the second time it’s been given out. The partners said some really nice things about me, how I’ve challenged them to be better leaders and transformed the culture, improving the business. It all started with the internal shift of “flipping the switch.”

The second story comes from Christine at the Deli. Based on the positive belief that others might benefit, she gave me permission to share this story: “Feel free to quote me. If it helps or inspires someone else that’s great.” After the piece I did on visioning came out last week, Christine wrote to share this story:

I’ve been seriously struggling lately with navigating this new reality (like everyone). Your writing about visioning earlier this week really struck a chord. I’ve been reading and re-reading it a lot this week, getting something new each time. As a result, I’ve slowly been changing my thinking. I have been so focused on what is “wrong” or causing me anxiety that I haven’t been appreciating all the positive things going on in my life. I wrote a vision and I feel better because of it. I was feeling like I had the 80/20 rule in reverse. Like seriously 80% of the things in my life are OK, but I was taking that 20% of anger and fear and anxiety and allowing it to take up all my mental space. Yes, those emotions are still there, but there was something about writing that bigger-picture vision two years from now that put things into perspective.

Here’s a small example of how my attitude has been changing: I’ve had my front door open today while I’m working for the first time in a month. My neighbor across the street has had a large collection of yard signs and flags for a political candidate I find abhorrent. I would get SO angry every time I opened the front door. I decided to refocus my view; by putting paper up to block my view of the sign, I no longer focused on something that upset me. Instead I get to see flowers and blue sky and trees. Yes, the signs are still there, nothing has changed except where I have decided to focus my energy.

The third short story starts with Marsha, who’s been a big player in the behind-the-scenes part of my life for decades, and who’s read The Power of Beliefs in Business, because of which, she sent me this from artist Emily McDowell:

“Finding yourself” is not really how it works. You aren’t a ten-dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket. You are also not lost. Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are. “Finding yourself” is actually returning to yourself. An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering who you were before the world got its hands on you.

Positive beliefs, it turns out, are just as important when it comes to what we believe about ourselves. If we believe badly about ourselves, bad outcomes are almost certain. By shifting to positive beliefs, as Ms. McDowell so eloquently addresses, we can stay calmer, work more effectively, have a more positive impact on others around us, and remain more resilient—increasing our odds of getting to the future we envision.

The fourth story goes like this: I was sitting out front of the Roadhouse as I have been doing a lot over the last few months—a good spot in the warm sun and fresh-squeezed orange juice are hard to beat. Among the other guests arriving for breakfast was a gentleman around my age. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. In the spirit of my friend Anese Cavanaugh’s teachings, his energy struck me (even across the parking lot) as positive, creative, grounded, and authentic. It was a beautiful Michigan morning, and he and the folks he was with were waiting for the dining room to open for brunch. From my table about 30 feet away, I overheard them wondering about what would be on the menu. I went inside and got them a copy. I went back to work, and he and his group went ahead, ordered, then sat out in Roadhouse Park, and ate breakfast.

About half an hour later, the gentleman walked back over and asked if I was one of the owners. I shyly said yes. He proceeded to share this story:

I was here a few years ago with my family for dinner. When you came by our table, I didn’t know who you were. I thought you were the busboy. I had half of my steak left on my plate, and you asked me if it was OK. I told you that the first half of it was fantastic, but the temperature had dropped prodigiously, and by the time I got to the other half it wasn’t hot, and it wasn’t what I wanted to eat. I’ll always remember you went and took the steak off my bill. You listened, and you treated me like a human being. I tell people that story all the time. And ever since then, if anyone tells me that they’re coming to Ann Arbor, I tell them to go to Zingerman’s.

I only vaguely recalled the details of the interaction itself. But in the spirit of Maya Angelou’s, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel,” I most definitely remembered him. I asked his name, trying to place him. “Ernst,” he said. “Oh yeah,” I said, “we talked for a while after you ate. You live in New York, right?” “Yep. I’m from Aruba, but I live in Brooklyn.” I thanked him for reminding me of the story, gave him my business card, and told him how happy I was to have him here visiting again.

He headed back to the family’s breakfast table. As he walked away I checked my computer. I remembered Ernst Mohamed and his positive creative energy. Immediately I found the file I was looking for. After he and his family had been in for dinner a few years before, I looked him up online. In part, I did it to learn more about him, but also in the hopes that I could find an email address to send him a thank you note. I didn’t find the contact info, but I did find this inspiring article about him. When I read it, it reinforced why I’d liked his energy so much!

The whole story of our interaction, I realized while I was writing, was based on positive beliefs. About customers. About people. About diversity. Even though my inclination is to not bring up the matter of race, I realized that in honor of the meaningful work Ernst Mohamed is doing in his community, I’m going to. Because in the spirit of poet Pat Parker who wrote a piece entitled, “For the white person who wants to know how to be my friend”:

The first thing you do is to forget that I’m Black.

Second, you must never forget that I’m Black.

Ernst is Black. (He’s also, it turns out, Jewish, but I wouldn’t have known that at the time.) The service we gave Ernst when he told me about his steak was, for us at Zingerman’s, our norm. It’s all, I now see, based on positive beliefs. He was our guest. We treat all customers with dignity and are committed to giving them a great experience. He wasn’t totally happy with his steak. Solution? Simple. Do the right thing. Refund his money.

But change the underlying beliefs, and you alter the outcomes. This story, in another restaurant in another place, could have gone very differently. The manager might think to himself, “Hey the customer already ate half the steak. He’s clearly scamming. Just trying to get something for free.” Based on those beliefs, the manager might have done nothing more than mumble an apology. If the manager had a lot of negative beliefs about Black people, there would at the least have probably been a lot of internal eye rolling. Maybe even worse. And even if the words spoken to Mr. Mohamed might have been formally “fine,” skeptical, unwelcoming energy sends a message. As he says in the article I found online: “I realized that in the eyes of a racist person my skin color is all that matters. Taken one event at a time, in isolation, maybe these aren’t such big deals, at least for me. But over time, one after the other, they are that foot, exerting constant pressure.” Negative beliefs of all sorts repeated regularly for years—whether they’re from our family, the press, or our boss—are wearing.

How do we change from negative beliefs to positive? The recipe I settled on is in Secret #43 in Part 4. Few of us understood growing up that our beliefs were nothing more than changeable lenses we learned early in our lives. Or that, like childhood nicknames or our favorite stuffed animals, they may have been fine at one point but not so great later in life. But it turns out we have full capacity to opt for different beliefs. The thing is, we can’t just order up a set of new ones. When the roots of negative beliefs are 30 years old, they aren’t just going to melt into nothingness overnight no matter how good our intentions. As Edgar Schein wrote, “Learning new things is easy when there is no unlearning involved.” The key here is to understand—and believe—that we CAN change them.

Last little bit of this series of short stories. For some reason a few weeks ago, I decided I wanted to know more about Jimi Hendrix. I’ve long loved his music and I have all the albums (on vinyl) from when I was a kid. I found this clip of him on the old Dick Cavett Show. It was made shortly after Woodstock when Hendrix did that mind-blowing marvelous version of the Star Spangled Banner. At one point, Dick Cavett says something about preparing himself to receive nasty letters about Hendrix’s “unorthodox version” of the national anthem. Having read—and gotten—some of those angry letters over the years, I immediately started to imagine how harsh they might be. But rather than get pulled into an argument, Hendrix smiles, reframes the beliefs, and takes the conversation in the opposite direction: “I don’t think it’s unorthodox,” he tells Cavett with a smile. “I think it’s beautiful.”

Secret #41, “Leading with Positive Beliefs” is out in pamphlet form. It’s online here, or on display at the Coffee Company, Roadhouse, and Deli.

How an anarchist who died forty-two years before we opened the Deli has had a surprising impact on the way Zingerman’s works

“. . .  geniuses precede events. Their work often remains ineffective for an extended period, appearing to be dead. It remains alive, however, waiting for others to apply it practically…” —Gustav Landauer

A few months ago, Food and Wine magazine’s Tracie McMillan put out a piece called “19 Great Restaurants to Work For.” As you will have guessed by my citing the article, we were on the list. There are dozens of factors that may have gone into making our organizational ecosystem one that won Tracie’s kind words. Many, I’d guess, we could have in common with the other 18 places on the list: good intentions, hard work, a spirit of generosity, a positive belief in people, and a desire to help folks overcome the many social barriers that get in their way as they attempt to live healthy and rewarding lives.

One thing that’s not in common for a restaurant, and one I doubt we have in common with the other restaurants on the list, is that we’re inspired by Emma Goldman, a woman that was once known as a “dangerous anarchist.” Although she passed away long before we did our first dollar’s worth of business at the Deli, Emma’s words have had a big impact on the way I work and the way I view the world. And through all of that, on Zingerman’s as an organization.

June 27, 2019, will be the 150th anniversary of Emma’s birthday. Emma was born in 1869, in Kovno, Lithuania. In 1885 she immigrated to the U.S. fleeing her oppressive, male-dominated, Jewish home life. Four months after her arrival in New York, the Haymarket bombing took place in Chicago. Eight anarchists were convicted for the bombing—probably inappropriately—and seven of the eight were sentenced to death.

Emma was among many Americans of that era who was pushed into more radical thinking because of the seeming injustice of the anarchists’ executions. Her interest in anarchism grew quickly and before long she was speaking regularly—about anarchism, feminism (though not women’s suffrage—she didn’t believe in voting or representative democracy), birth control, education, and drama. By the end of the 19th century, she was probably the single most controversial person in the country. The details of her life are well documented so I won’t go on here—you can read her whole bio online, or in the fine books of Candace Falk, Kathy Ferguson, Alix Kates Shulman, Vivian Gornick, and others.   

I have what I think of as a “working relationship” with the woman whom the young J. Edgar Hoover once called “the most dangerous woman in America.” When Hoover made that statement, Emma was all of 24 years old.

Connection; Emma and edits   

When the books in the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading series have gone through various stages of editing, I’ve had the comment from experts that when I cite authors I don’t know personally, the correct editorial form would be to introduce them to the book first by their full name, and then later refer to them only by their last name. For example, “Irish philosopher John O’Donohue” would be used for the first reference, and then after that, merely “O’Donohue.” The only exception, I’ve been told, should be for folks with whom you’re actually friends, or have a personal relationship. While I’d adopted proper citation rules in the books, there were some spots, the editor pointed out, where I’d slipped. In particular, with Emma Goldman. I kept calling her “Emma” which might be perceived as disrespectful, or maybe even demeaning because she was a woman. It was suggested to me then that, to be proper, I ought to take out my many references to “Emma” and replace them with “Goldman.”  

While I know the advice is technically accurate, it just didn’t sit right with me. This wasn’t at all disrespect; it was about dedication. “I know it probably sounds crazy,” was my ultimate response, “but I actually feel like I have a long and real relationship with her. I’ve spent so much time reading her work and reading about her, that I feel like I know her at a much deeper level than I know a lot of the—living—people I see all the time!” “Goldman” sounds way too formal and far more distant than feels right for me. Her friends often called her E.G. — I think of her in my head as “Emma.”

Vivian Gornick, one of Emma’s many skilled biographers, said, “Every writer writes about the people they know. It’s all you really have. The life you’ve lived, the experiences you’ve had, the people you know, they’re your raw material.” Emma Goldman, and her work, are part of mine.

Somewhere, maybe in my sophomore year at U of M, I started reading the written work of historically interesting anarchists — Emma was one of the first. Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others came along as well. At some point, I began going up to the Labadie Collection on the 7th floor of the Graduate Library to look at old books and pamphlets.  

Best I can recall, my real introduction to anarchism in print came from Paul Avrich’s book, The Anarchists.  It includes, of course, a chapter on Emma. Her writing resonated deeply with me—she was speaking “truths” I wasn’t hearing from others. She had a way of saying things that struck an intellectual, and emotionally engaging, chord with me. Getting to know her through her writing was, in practice, like meeting that mentor I’d never had. Her work helped me feel . . . heard. I can most certainly imagine having a lot of long and interesting conversations with her over good meals and good coffee.

When she wrote, “What is more astonishing is the fact that parents . . .  will put the long lean finger of authority upon the tender throat and not allow vent to the silvery song of the individual growth, of the beauty of character, of the strength of love and human relation, which alone make life worth living. . . . That compulsion is bound to awaken resistance, every parent and teacher ought to know,” it felt like exactly what I (and I’m sure a few million other) teenagers had experienced. Having grown up in a rather religious setting, I’d been feeling that way in my family, and in school, since the time I was . . . maybe ten.

To get that sort of resonance from a woman who based on her timeline might have eaten potato latkes with my great grandmother, seemed a wholly unexpected, but wonderfully welcome, incongruity!  Stuff that she wrote long before I was born rang so true to me: “What is generally regarded as success-—acquisition of wealth, the capture of power or social prestige–I consider the most dismal failures.” Her statement was something like seventy-years old, but it summed up a lot of what I was thinking in 1977.  

Integration; Zingermans and Anarchy

Though Emma’s work deeply resonated with me during my studies, when I graduated from U of M with a history degree, my immediate interest was mostly in finding work that would allow me to a) not go home to Chicago, and b) pay my bills. The whole story is in the Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading books, so I won’t bore you here. Flash forward to 1982, the year we opened the Deli. Emma Goldman was mostly out of sight and out of mind that day and really for most of our first 26 years in business. Over all those years, we got a fair few awards and a host of local and national recognitions, but nothing got me thinking about her writing.

But then . . .  one day in 2008, while I was working on Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 1, I was asked to speak at the Jewish Studies department at U-M. The talk was scheduled for the following fall and I was given the title “Rye Bread and Anarchism.” The former, a reference by department chair Deborah Dash Moore to my modern-day work, and the latter to my earlier academic interest. Busy as usual, I didn’t think much about the topic at the time I received the speaking invitation. But over the course of the summer preceding the talk, I realized that although I’d recently written an in-depth article on the history of Jewish rye bread, I hadn’t looked at anything to do with Emma Goldman in ages. Not wanting to embarrass myself in front of the well-versed professors who I imagined would be in attendance, I dug out a stack of my old anarchist books and started to reread them. What I found blew me away.

The classic headline of anarchist beliefs—getting rid of government—was strongly present in what I was reading, but that’s not what caught my attention. Government isn’t something I have strong feelings about one way or another. Instead, I stumbled onto a treasure trove of creative concepts that sounded surprisingly similar to the progressive business literature I’d been reading so much of over our then-26 years or so at Zingerman’s.

So many things that were integral to old anarchist thinking seemed to already be embedded in the way we were working at Zingerman’s. The idea that the point of an organization is to enhance the lives of the people who are a part of it; that involving more people in managing the work they’re doing makes good sense; that there’s wisdom in everyone who works in an organization; that when men and women don’t believe in what they’re doing, they don’t do good work; that when people are treated like interchangeable machine parts, they aren’t inspired to reach for greatness; that anyone can learn to lead; that the point of the organization is to serve those who are part of it.

This quote, from Emma’s book, Anarchism and Other Essays—one that I’d long since forgotten about—is what sealed the deal for me. “[Our] goal is 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.”  

While she was writing about anarchism, I immediately related it to the sort of environment we’d been seeking to create at Zingerman’s since we opened in 1982. It’s at this point I would say my “working relationship” with Emma really got going. I began taking the concepts and ideas she’d written about and trying to figure out how to consciously implement them in our organization, even more than we’d already unconsciously done.

Applying Emma’s Anarchism to Business

What is it about Emma’s words that made such a big impact?  Here are a few of the things that have helped to make my own business philosophy—and in the process, our organization—what it is.  

“Anarchism aims to strip labor of its deadening, dulling aspect, of its gloom and compulsion. It aims to make work an instrument of joy, of strength, of color, of real harmony, so that the poorest sort of a man should find in work both recreation and hope.”

In a joint talk on “Individuality, Autonomy and Organization” at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907 Emma and Max Baginski said:

“There exists an erroneous conviction that organization does not encourage individual freedom and that, on the contrary, it causes a decay of individual personality. The reality is, however, that the true function of organization lies in personal development and growth …”

This is, of course, exactly what we hope to do at Zingerman’s. We’ve long believed in creating a positive workplace one in which people feel honored and respected. As I write today, that commitment is being drafted into our still-in-the-works organizational vision for 2032.  

“An organization . . . must be made up of self-conscious and intelligent persons. In fact, the sum of the possibilities and activities of an organization is represented by the expression of the single energies [of the group].”

To me, this was akin to Jim Collins’ now famous statement about “getting the right people on the bus” in your business. You can’t have a great organization without great people.  And—of equal import—the people who do the best work here are the most “self-conscious,” or I would say, “self-reflective.”

“It follows logically that the greater the number of strong, self-conscious individuals in an organization, the lesser the danger of stagnation and the more intense its vital element . . .”

We actively teach everyone how to think like a leader from the time they start—the more everyone is pushing for greatness, the less likely we are to slip into getting stuck in the status quo and the stagnation Emma and Max were talking about.

“In short, anarchism struggles for a form of social organization that will ensure well-being for all.”

This has been a part of our philosophy at Zingerman’s since we opened in 1982—creating a business committed to helping everyone it touches!  

Emma and Emotional Intelligence

Part of what resonates so strongly for me with Emma’s work is that she emphasized the internal and emotional well-being as much she did external and economic issues:

“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings to man the consciousness of himself.”

“No formulaic change in social conditions [is] a guarantee against subjugation to one’s inner tyrants.”

“The problem that confronts us today, and which the nearest future is to solve, is how to be oneself, and yet in oneness with others, to feel deeply with all human beings and still retain one’s own characteristic qualities.”

These are just a few of her many references to the import of self-awareness. She understood what most people still don’t—that freedom is an inside job, not something to be “won” from a “ruling power.”  

Anarchism “is the spirit of youth against outworn traditions.”

A critical voice in support of innovation and creative energy. And also a clear, and I believe accurate, statement that getting stuck in the status quo is not tied to age. We’re all about traditional food, but I don’t ever want Zingerman’s to become an “outworn tradition!”

“Every sensitive being abhors the idea of being treated as a mere machine or as a mere parrot of conventionality and respectability, the human being craves recognition of his kind.”

This is embedded in all of our work.  To treat everyone who works here—and I would suggest everyone, anywhere—as a unique, creative individual, never to assign them an identity based on job title, age, gender, race, etc. I was sharing this essay with Amanda Peters who works in the kitchen as Miss Kim, who commented.  “It’s true! This is the first job I’ve had where I wasn’t treated like a machine part!”

“When we can’t dream any longer, we die.”

The death that most people in most businesses “die” is a spiritual one.  I call it the “working dead.” People show up, but they have no hope for a better future, no belief that they can make a difference. To avoid that . . . we do a number of things, probably most importantly, we teach our visioning process—a technique for effectively talking about inspiring but still strategically sound futures—to everyone who works here!

Emma and me

Bringing past and present, fantasy and reality, books and business together . . . a whole bunch of questions come quickly to mind. Would Emma and I have actually gotten along?  Would we have been able to make it as business partners? I mean, clearly we have all these beliefs and values in common. She was a relentless worker who never stopped learning and pushing towards her vision. She wasn’t afraid of taking on challenging situations and she was certainly more than willing to speak her mind in awkward situations. She was definitely a kick-ass communicator. She liked a good party and loved to orchestrate social scenes, an important skill in the restaurant business. She liked to cook, and clearly had an affinity and a palate for great food. And she did that have experience in the ice cream shop . . . hmmmmmm . . . .

Transporting her mentally into the modern world, I can imagine her taking on “Big Ag” and industrial growing methods, advocating with great passion for small farmers and small business; being an outspoken advocate for local agriculture. Really, it’s not all that hard for me to imagine her sitting around the table at our Partner’s Group meeting, alienating some of the others at the table, pushing us to do better, arguing her case, bringing energy and insight to the organization.  

In the words of Emma’s biographer Vivian Gornick, “anarchism [as Emma knew it] prepared one for nothing on the ground.” In other words, “nice idea, but completely impractical.”

But, sitting here in 2019, in the months before what would have been Emma’s 150th birthday, working in what the world would probably call a “successful” and certainly a “progressive” business, I would say the opposite. I think the philosophies Emma was eloquently and passionately putting out in the world were all about working “on the ground,” about the practical approaches to human interaction—on which all business relies—to work in inspiring and effective ways.  

What I can say is that I’m one of the only modern day business owners who regularly draws on Emma Goldman’s work for inspiration and organizational insight. I’m pretty certain I’m the only person who regularly quotes her on stage when speaking at business conferences, or who references her regularly in books on leadership and business. And I feel fairly confident that I’m on the only U of M commencement speaker to quote her (and anarchist Ashanti Alston) from the stage at the “Big House” in front of 50,000 people. (For the transcript of the speech see Part 4 of the Guide to Good Leading.) And I can say with great certainty—as you’ve seen above—is that we have absolutely taken Emma’s ideas into business in very real, and very meaningful ways.

Living, for a few minutes at least, in the imaginary, I’d like to think that had she been a part of the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, maybe, just maybe, should would have shared her enthusiasm as she did when she experienced the (short-lived) success of the anarchists during the Spanish Civil War. “I am walking on air,” she wrote. “I feel so inspired an so aroused that I am fortunate enough to be here and to be able to render service to our brave and beautiful comrades. . .  One completely forgets oneself and everything of a personal character amidst the life of [this] collective spirit.” It’s certainly how I feel.

Imagination aside, we’ll never really know what would have, or could have happened were Emma to appear magically in our own era to be a partner at Zingerman’s. But I’m comforted by this closing thought, a motto I admire and can relate to, from Emma that I found in Paul Avrich’s Anarchist Voices: “When things are bad,” she said, “scrub floors.” That’s a business philosophy we’ve lived by at Zingerman’s since the day we opened!  

Daily Fuel offers inspiration videos from a wide range of successful people, on topics like entrepreneurship, marketing, and leading, that run two minutes or less. Ari is featured in three new clips–in them, he encourages normalizing mistakes in business, makes a case against military-style leadership, and talks about creating a company culture that fosters creativity.

Check out all three here.

Seed Selection, Feeding the Soil and Sustainable Price Structures

Wendell Berry, who keeps an insightful eye on the American landscape (both literally and figuratively), once wrote, “When you find a farmer or a forester who has united the inescapable economic concern with an equally compelling interest in ecology, that is when you had better stop and take notice.”  I am lucky to work with one of those people.  I’ve tried to stop and pay attention.   This piece is written in the hope that a few others might pause and take notice, too.

That might, in a way, be easier said than done.  Everywhere we turn, there’s a lot going on.  Politics, kid’s soccer games, shopping lists, violence, social change. I can’t think of anyone I know—here at Zingerman’s or in the world at large—who’s walking around wondering if they’ll have enough to keep themselves busy tomorrow. As insightful writer and presenter Virginia Postrel posits, “The fundamental economic fact of contemporary society is that attention is scarce.”

To some extent I agree.  But then again, I don’t.  It’s a bit of a paradox, I suppose.  I’d argue that while it’s often hard to get people to devote their attention to anything in particular, the truth is that most of us have plenty of attention available to put to use in making our lives into something truly special. If, I should add, we decide we’re going to.  As Sam Keen writes in Inward Bound, “We are seldom too tired to do what we really want to do.” When we want to focus, I’m fully confident it can still be done.  In fact, I’d argue you’re proving the point that focus is still possible in a positive way merely by reading this article!

Still, it’s not always easy to find the things we might benefit from paying attention to.  Even here within our own little Zingerman’s Community, there’s so much going on that it’s easy to miss any number of important elements of our ecosystem.  Cornman Farms—the agricultural part, at least—is easy to overlook.  Unlike the majority of the places in which we do Zingerman’s business, our ten acres of agriculture get no daily visitors.  You can’t come by to grab a loaf of Bakehouse bread and you can’t get a cup of Cornman blend coffee.  You can’t easily bring your friends from out of town for lunch, and you don’t stop by on your way home to pick up a couple of heirloom tomatoes.  While we hold magnificently marvelous weddings in the beautifully restored barn and farmhouse at Cornman Farms, no one’s actually trekking the half mile through the trees to our fields to get next to one of our tomato plants.  The truth is that unless you pay close attention when you’re eating at the Roadhouse, or you’re really up to speed on the “secrets” of the Zingerman’s community, it would be easy to miss the fact that we even have a farm.

Farms generally don’t get famous, so we’re not alone.  Best I know, there’s no James Beard award for “farm of the year” and the press doesn’t publish “Top Ten Farms Not to Miss in 2016” lists. In the grand scheme of everything we have going—Presidential visits, articles in USA Today, renovation projects at our Southside businesses, a new book on Beliefs, another book coming from the Bakehouse, ZingTrain classes being taught in Bratislava – some raised beds and a few bushels of heirloom tomatoes may not be the first thing that catches your attention.

And yet, I believe, ever more strongly every day, that the agricultural work at Cornman Farms is truly one of the most meaningful organizational accomplishments we have had in our nearly 35 years of doing business.

A Suburban Look at Sustainable Agriculture

Personally, I grew up with only a bit of the two things Wendell Berry was writing about bringing together.  Economy and ecology were, I guess, present, but hardly front and center.  Our middle class was much more focused on school, politics, and community activity than it ever was on money.

Ecology back then was barely a word, at least in the world I was moving in. Though my mother was, I now realize, a bit ahead of her time—she was recycling long before there was curbside pickup.  My grandmother, in her own, old world way, was as well.  She saved everything it seemed like, though probably more out of experience with poverty than frugality.

Doorknobs were regularly replete with used rubber bands and drawers were filled with saved plastic bags, other people’s pens, safety pins and bobby pins.  However, farming was really far out.  To me, as a child, food came from the grocery store.

I don’t think I ever gave much thought as to whether one tomato was any different than any other.  The farm I knew best was the scientific one at the Museum of Science and Industry. It was the era, perhaps the peak, of industrial farming. Chemicals, straight lines, pesticides and power from dams and nuclear plants were going to save the world.

The Fall of American Farming

While the idea of farming as we do it at Cornman Farms has been getting more attention of late in the artisan food world, the truth is that most of the last 150 American years have been spent trying to get away from the farm!  In the 1830s, when the house and barn were built, over three quarters of the population of the United States lived on a farm.  In 1882, the year that Rocco Disderide arrived in the U.S. from Italy, about half the country’s population lived on a farm.  By the time he opened his shop in 1902, in the current Zingerman’s Deli space, that number was down to a third of the people in the US.  By the time we opened the Deli in 1982, it was down to a tenth of that—only about 3.4% of Americans lived on a farm.  By the time the farmer I’m going to talk about started farming in the early aughts, it decreased by half again. To make the picture even bleaker, by the time we started farming at Cornman, nine out of ten American farmers were dependent on off-farm income to make their living.

All of which helps make clear that, back when we opened the Deli, college graduates were not racing to establish themselves as farmers. Getting a small sustainable farm started is not now, nor was it then, a quick way to find fame or fortune.  In a society fixated on speed, old school agriculture works the other way around.  The pace of “feet in the soil” agriculture is slow. A snail’s pace compared to most economic activity.  However, to move faster would be incongruous; out of sync with the natural systems we all admire.  As Wendell Berry writes, “the gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think.  Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’  Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”  In that sense, maybe it makes sense that it’s taken me so long to put explore my thoughts on our farm.

The Story of Cornman Farms

The farmer I’m taking notice of here—per Wendell Berry’s beliefs—is also a chef, and also the managing partner at the Roadhouse.  Alex Young came to work with us fifteen years ago—one year of transition into the organization by serving as the kitchen manager at the Deli, then, as planned, moving on to be the chef and partner at the Roadhouse.  I don’t think that Alex grew up in a farm setting either, but at least he spent much of his youth in northern California where local produce and nature are a lot more prevalent than they were for me in the squared off streets of Chicago.   Alex moved his family here to settle down in Dexter where his wife’s family had been farming since the early part of the 19th century.  While his own upbringing was one of near constant shifting, the Arnold family had been on the same land for nearly two hundred years!

This September, the Roadhouse will celebrate its 13th anniversary.  Alex and crew have won a James Beard award for their work; they’ve been written up in numerous publications, the most recent of which was a rather large and gorgeously glowing piece in USA Today by best selling author Larry Olmstead.  (Check out Larry’s great new book Real Food, Fake Food!)  The Roadhouse has been on TV half a dozen times, in the local press many more than that.

Food writers from across the country come to speak at special dinners featuring their cookbooks. While the agricultural work on the farm gets a few lines in all the articles, it rarely takes top attention.  I guess the agricultural work is a kind of like the drummer in a famous band.  The chef is the lead singer.  While the drummer sits in the back and keeps the beat going, the singer gets all the attention.

The funny thing here is that in our case, the drummer and the singer, the chef and the farmer, are the same person.  Alex does both.  The chef at the Roadhouse didn’t just decide to buy from local farms (also a great thing mind you), he actually started one!

What is now an entire farm started as a hobby. Alex used it as something to take his mind off the stress of figuring out how to run a very large, very high-quality, restaurant. At the time he started, I remember Alex catching flak for taking his attention off the restaurant by doing something “unrelated.” But for Alex—it gave him a whole new perspective on what it meant to be a chef and run a restaurant.

Even still, farming wasn’t high on Alex’s bucket list. He was a chef. He loved to cook. He’d cooked all over the U.S. and Europe. He was good at it. He told me that one of the first times he cooked for other people was when he was 13 and his parents went out of town and he invited a few hundred people over for a BBQ.  (That was the event at which the barbecue sauce we now all know as Alex’s Red Rage had its beginnings.  He’s been tweaking it regularly ever since). In the early years of the Roadhouse, he used to sit on his porch, just up the road from where his wife’s relatives had started farming.  he told me “That was my wishing tree. I used to sit out there and think about what it would be like to have a farm. I thought it would be cool to have a farm one day.”  At that point though, it was probably more about the idea of having a farm than it was of doing the actual farming.  Not that he was opposed to hard work—running restaurant kitchens is hardly a leisure activity.  But he’d never farmed, never had a real sense of what was involved.

Somehow, early on in the stressful times that accompany nearly every restaurant startup, Alex had the idea to go out in his backyard and start growing some tomatoes.  Over time he added a few other vegetables as well.  One day he brought a few things in to the restaurant and started doing what he knew how to do best, which is cook with them.  Spotting a regular customer sitting up front at the chef’s counter, he brought out some of what he’d prepared with the fresh produce.  He still talks about that moment—when he experienced the emotional and culinary connection of watching a customer eat what he’d grown.  Reflecting back on the good Mr. Berry, it strikes me that this was the moment—or at least one of them—when Alex first “united the inescapable economic concern with an equally compelling interest in ecology.”

Mark Baerwolf remembers those days: “I’d worked as a cook around town for years, and I came to the Roadhouse because I’d read Alex’s description of what he wanted the Roadhouse to be in an article in the Ann Arbor Observer.  He’d explained how he wanted to explore American foodways by using local and organic produce, if possible.  He and I started talking veggies and tomatoes because we both had gardens.  He invited me out to see his backyard garden – and I never left.  I’ve worked with Alex and the garden since 2006 while also working as a cook at the Roadhouse.  I’d work during the day at the and head off to the restaurant for the evening.   But I’ve been full-time on the farm the last three years.  I am the best version of myself out in the garden, and I’ve met the nicest people from farming.”

Over the last decade, what started as digging a few rows of tomatoes has turned into a ten-plus-acre farm which produces multiple tons of produce for the restaurant. Cornman Farms is an integral piece of what we do at the Roadhouse. I don’t conceive of Cornman Farms as a purveyor to the Roadhouse—I imagine it as the back prep kitchen of the restaurant. To me, it’s not much different than the pit or the cutting table where we prep fish, or cut up whole sides of beef.  It’s just part of the process—our process—of producing really good American food.

The connection between simultaneously growing our own vegetables in order to cook them in our own restaurant is a big shift in beliefs.  This is not the way it’s been done, at least not in the second half of the 20th century.  That’s not an overnight shift to make.  As biologist Julian Huxley, the brother of Aldous Huxley, author of the aptly-titled for the purposes of this piece, Brave New World, said in 1961: “It is hard to break through the firm framework of an accepted belief-system and to build new and complex successors, but it is necessary.”

Alex’s insight, his willingness to twist the viewing lens, to shift his beliefs, makes very good sense.  In an industrial restaurant, most of the food arrives already prepped, in boxes, cans or bags.  One step up (in my judgment) would at least take whole commercial produce into the kitchen to work with.  A better kitchen—the kind we would want to work with—would take the fresh produce, where possible, from farms with whom they have a relationship, and work with them to offer what was best in season.  Certainly there are now a fair few places around the area, and many more around the country, who are doing that.

What Cornman Farms has become for the Roadhouse is, in my mind, merely taking that process one step further in the quality chain.  The Roadhouse doesn’t just prep fresh produce—it grows it!   In my fantasy, the farm would literally be located right out the back door so that people from the prep kitchen could walk out and talk to the folks growing in the fields.  I think about asking the prep cook to run out back to pick some more tomatoes!  But since we aren’t likely to be able to turn the Westgate Mall parking lot into a patch of organic produce, I think this is about as good as we’re gonna get for the moment.  And I’ve been in some big hotel kitchens where it takes as long to walk from one side of the building to the other as it takes to drive all the way to Dexter.

Flowers and French Peppers

Turning all this passion into a financially workable model isn’t, as you can tell already, all that easy.  The key has been finding things to grow that we feel great about, things that taste special enough to allow us to charge what we need to charge, that get the attention of food lovers who eat them. One way is flowers.

Amanda is all about them. Amanda Maurmann grew up in Ann Arbor (her father, Gene Hopkins was one of the architects who worked on the first Deli expansion back in 1986).  After a number of years out east, she moved home and started working at the Roadhouse. Her passion for agriculture soon shifted her to working on the farm.  You can see, and feel, her commitment in every conversation.  She’s growing nearly 100 varieties of flowers on the farm.

Finding old school, organic flowers, flowers that aren’t laden with pesticides, flowers that look beautiful and are sustainably grown, is harder to do that, one might think. Most flowers you and I see outside the farmer’s market are the floral equivalent of industrial food. “I get so upset when I see industrial flower growing,” Amanda said. “Flowers cry out for bees and other pollinators, but to get those perfect blooms in mass plantings often times they spray, and end up killing the good with the ‘bad’, not to mention spraying it on the farm workers, too…”

While few consumers realize it, 80% of flowers sold in the US are imported, often from places with a lot looser and more dangerous agricultural policies than ours.  What Amanda is experimenting with on the farm is something that’s aligned with the way we approach our food.  Old varieties that look lovely, that enhance the look of the land, and if you buy them, your table, too.

Agriculture and Economy – Paying the price

All of this, I would imagine, sounds rather inspiring.  It certainly does to me!  The challenge—aside from the enormous amount of work it takes to restore the soil, choose the seeds, grow it all and harvest it—is trying to figure how to make the money work.  It’s again, easier said than done.  I’ve been turning this over in my head, gently, without sending myself into a total tizzy, much the way the crew at Cornman work the land.  Thoughtfully, purposefully, with care, and with the intent of sorting out what’s really best over the long haul.  It’s not about quick fixes.  It’s about sustainability of food and finance.  About bringing every element of existence into alignment, leaving our world—both in business and with raised beds—better than we found it.

Here’s what I wrote a few years ago in Part 1 of Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading:

Well, I’ve now worked in the food world for nearly 40 years, but there’s nothing else in what I wrote then that I’d change now.  In fact, I might even say it more forcefully.  What’s the point of doing all the work if we aren’t going to charge enough to cover what it costs us to do the work in the first place?  

It’s a key part of Wendell Berry’s beautiful statement up at the top of this piece.  “When you find a farmer or a forester who has united the inescapable economic concern with an equally compelling interest in ecology…”  It’s the combination of the two that’s so special.  Just having a high interest in economics alone leads to the unsustainable stuff that most anyone reading this essay has already long since come to view with suspicion. Having a compelling interest in ecology alone might lead you to appropriately recycle, reduce your carbon footprint, and support ecologically-minded non-profit organizations. The point here though is to “unite” the two.  Ecology and economy.  Each without the other is unlikely to get us very far. At least not very far in the direction we want to go.  

While the country is happily moving up minimum wage and helping entry level folks move closer to making a manageable living (there’s still a long way to go, mind you), the reality is that most small farmers don’t even get that.  When you own your own place, your own business, you don’t get paid by the hour.  I think that’s a good thing—a vocation, a passion, something you really care about isn’t something you punch in and out for. While most of the folks in this country who care a lot about food, are all for increasing the amount of acreage managed by sustainable farmers, the reality is that most of those have a hard time making ends meet.  

I’m determined to change that.  Or, at least, I want to try.  I believe that we can, in the same way that we’ve worked to make artisan bread baking, cheese-making, sandwich-making into a sustainable business, I don’t know why we can’t do the same with farming.   The work that Alex, Mark, Amanda and everyone on the farm is doing is exceptional.   When we started at the Deli in the early ‘80s, let’s just say that artisan cheeses and olive oils were selling for a lot less than they are now. We pay a lot more and, consequently, we also charge a lot more. The same is true for other traditionally made foods.  People started to price their products not on “the market price,” but on some reasonable estimate of what they actually cost to produce.  Did they push the envelope of what many folks “thought” that a piece of cheese or a bottle of olive oil ought to cost?  Of course they did.  But they did it anyways. If we really value what they’re producing, then it only makes sense to pay a price that allows them to make a modicum of a living.

Growing heirloom tomatoes doesn’t win headlines but it might just make a huge difference in the way we eat, and live, what happens on the planet and inside our bodies.  When I talk about charging enough to cover costs we’re not talking about covering some huge salaries.  Just the same sort of “good-for-our-industry, not-that-high, compared-to-many-other-industries,” kind of pay rates we try to pay here.  And benefits like health care, paid time off and other things that most professions pretty surely take for granted.

Farms and Finance

To be clear, I’m not remotely the world’s expert on small-scale, sustainable agriculture.  I’m just an outsider: the city kid who likes to cook and still feels comforted by the smell of warm asphalt in the sun, trying to figure all this out.  Best I can tell though, the reality of most farming work is that it’s based on a couple of economic models that I don’t really want to emulate:

• a) pay migrant laborers below minimum wage
• b) get interns who will do the work for room and board – this isn’t a terrible model. It allows new folks to learn so they’re basically getting important education without having to pay for it.  
• c)  families living on off-farm income then doing a LOT of work on-farm for no real pay because they believe in what they’re doing, believe in agriculture and are deeply committed to maintaining their craft and their land.

With all due respect, I’d like to try a different model. One in which maybe no one gets rich, but in which the economic framework is as sustainable as the soil and the produce we’re working to grow in it.  To set the strangeness of that structure into context: take out “farmer” and plug in pretty much any profession you want – attorneys, actuaries, accountants, automakers – imagine that they all had other jobs in order to make their profession work financially.  Even the thought of it makes me laugh, though not really for good reasons.

It’s not an easy box to get out of. In her introduction to the New Farmer’s Almanac, Severine von Tscharner Fleming wrote that, “yes, labor is expensive and yet too cheap, food prices are higher than people can afford and yet lower than reasonable cost of production.”  It’s all a bit paradoxically problematic.  Which, frustrating as it seems at first, isn’t necessarily such a terrible thing.  As Alfred Kazin wrote: “Man’s life is full of contradiction . . .  a contradiction that is faced leads to true knowledge.”  I look forward, then, to the creative energy we can unleash if we can sort out a healthier set of beliefs. Together, I’m convinced, we can figure this thing out.

Socially-conscious chocolate maker, Shawn Askinosie shared Ari Weinzweig’s latest business book with his partners in Tanzania today!

For more information on the book visit: https://www.zingtrain.com/power-beliefs-in-business

The energy was palpable. Between the unveiling of a new venue and the buzz around a highly anticipated new book, the energy in the room was electric. The bustling city views of Ann Arbor and its passersby served as the perfect backdrop to explain what was happening in that room.

The attendees came from all walks of life. Jane and Paul Jones had travelled from Grand Rapids. “We’re probably aren’t the ones who had to travel the farthest; people come from all over the country to hear Ari speak!”, Judy told me. There were entrepreneurs and sociologists and social workers and professors. There were people from all walks and stages of life. The youngest attendee, Luell, came with his dad, who helped Ari with the book. When asked why he was excited to attend the event, Luell said: “I get to be someone. I get to be the youngest person here and I get to see what older people do!” Luell’s father, Teddy Araya, is the founder of the Center for African Leadership Studies and is mentioned in the new book. A few other attendees were also referenced in the new book including Hannah McNaughton, founder and Chief Envisionary at Envision Marketing.

The sleek lines of the Greyline, Zingerman’s newest, downtown event space, were reminiscent of the Art Deco style of the historic Ann Arbor Bus Depot it now occupies. The style of the Art Deco era used lines to create a sense of speed, of movement. It’s a perfect match for the Greyline, a new space that represents the movement of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses – expanding and moving into the future with a recognizable and influential style.

The event held at the brand new venue was a public introduction to co-founder and CEO of Zingerman’s Community of Businesses Ari Weinzweig’s newest book; the fourth in a series of books expounding Zingerman’s unique approach to business.

As the attendees were taking their seats and discussing the space and what brought them to the event, a woman from the University of Michigan relayed that what she was curious about Ari’s choice to focus on the concept of beliefs. She asked aloud: “Why did he pick the word belief instead of any other words? I’m just curious because I think that’s what’s most powerful. Beliefs are more than values, it’s about something more empowering in yourself. And feeling an external spiritual connection to something outside of yourself.”

Ari’s newest book, Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 4: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to the Power of Beliefs in Business, is a new approach and a breath of fresh air in the world of business writing. The book is a detailed analysis of how our personal beliefs color our personal world and affect the changeable outcomes of our work. “Beliefs are the root system. They are what’s happening beneath the surface, that directly impacts what’s happening above ground.” Ari describes his newest work as his most personal yet. His early personal beliefs in the late 1970’s about business were negative until he realized that business is just a tool “that can be applied with harm or kindness”. Four years later he would be starting his first business.

The interview was facilitated by Vic Strecher, author of On Purpose: A Graphic Novel, and a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. “Why beliefs? Why not things that people hold very dear to them, very close to them like their core values?” Vic asked. To which Ari responded: “All values are beliefs, but not all beliefs are values.” Ari went on to describe how even the information around us is colored by our preconceived or unconscious beliefs: the data we take in is radically altered by our beliefs.” Vic confirms the notion that humans are swayed by beliefs and experience: “We filter out information that doesn’t fit with our beliefs. We live in a ‘filter bubble'”. Ari pointed out that although many of us regularly say, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’… it’s actually the other way around. “We’ll see it when we believe it.

After discussing the book and its roots with Vic, the event was opened to audience questions. A young entrepreneur, Holly Rutt of The Little Flower Soap Co. and Sweet Pea Floral Design, thanked Ari for giving her the courage to pursue her entrepreneurial passion while disregarding all of the negative feedback people had tried to feed her about business. “I think as a business owner and a woman, the powers that be wanted to tell me that I couldn’t be myself. I’m very philosophical and very hopeful, that’s definitely a part of me. But I’m also interested in business and a business owner, and I felt like I was being told, other peoples’ beliefs, that those things were mutually exclusive. I feel like all of your books, and I’m excited to read this one, are giving me the permission to be all of those and fuse them together.”

Walking away from the event that evening, I could feel how Ari had not only touched on an important part of growing and steering a company (the beliefs with which they are founded and maintained), but I felt he was tapping into a theory about our cultural moment in time. How do our collective beliefs, or perhaps more importantly, the beliefs all of smaller groups hold maintain or change the status quo? How could we as individuals work to change our beliefs to create the outcomes we’re seeking? It’s an incredibly large question that Ari has tried to distill into 600 pages. I have a feeling there’s probably a second volume on his computer.

However, the opportunity to learn from Ari, one of Ann Arbor’s preeminent thought leaders is not limited to reading his work. From his employees to his customers to the people he meets throughout his travels, Ari is an open book. And he writes books. A winning combination.