A caring reflection on a curious question

This all began, as so many good learnings are wont to do, with a question.

Last week I was talking for a while to Sarah Harris, the musician and caring creative force behind the band Dolly Creamer,  whose music I wrote about near near the end of last week’s enews. She and I were sharing assorted stories while she had supper at the Roadhouse. Since Sarah is reading some of the stuff I’ve written, and I, in turn, have been listening to a lot of her music since we met at the Deli the week previous, there’s a whole lot of philosophical and artistic material for us to talk through.

As the conversation continued, we swapped learnings, trying to find philosophical framings for what we do and firmly agreeing, more than once, I think, that we both like to work a lot. I think it’s safe to say that Sarah and I would each align with what artist, sculptor, and author Anne Truitt writes: “We agree that work is the backbone of a properly conducted life, serving at once to give it shape and to hold it up. Of like mind, industrious by nature, we work even as we talk.”

As the conversation progressed, the two of us began talking about the import of curiosity. At some point, Sarah paused for a second and put her own curiosity into immediate practice by throwing an out-of-context, slightly off-kilter (in the best possible way) question at me. One minute we were talking about loving to learn and leadership, and then, out of the blue, she quietly asked me this:

What keeps you going?

It was, at first glance, a casual sort of question, a tiny bit of an aside asked seriously but gently, the result of a small shift in a smart and creative woman’s brain in the middle of a conversation that covered a couple dozen other topics that probably seemed far more important. It was a curious wondering-aloud that would have been all too easy to miss. Anne Truitt had it right about a half a century ago when she wrote, “Everything that happened was a matter of curiosity to be explored and examined with hearty directness.” And, sure enough, a casual, completely spontaneous conversation turned out to provide a positive prompt for some serious self-reflection, the result of which appears in this essay. Four simple words spoken quietly and wrapped up with a question mark launched a week of meaningful self-exploration.

Sarah’s question, to be quite honest, stumped me at first. What she was asking hadn’t really crossed my mind. Her question couldn’t have been any clearer, but it took me 10 days to find an answer. What follows is my first attempt to offer her a clearer, more coherent, and more helpful response than the “Wow, that’s a good question” and “I don’t really know” sort of stuff I stumbled through that evening.

The reality of my life is that—to state what has to be obvious to everyone reading this—I happily and eagerly do keep going, as I have for well over 40 years now. Still, simply doing is not, for me, a substitute for serious understanding. Which is why I’ve spent so much of the last week wondering:

• Why, indeed, do I keep going with such diligence and determination?
• What keeps me moving forward so consistently every day when there are 44 other directions I could easily alter my path to pursue?
• Why am I still excited to go to work every day after all these years when so many people I know would rather do anything but?
• Although “keeping going” is not on Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny list of 20 lessons to practice to resist the imposition of autocracy, it seems clear that if we don’t keep going, we lose democracy. Democracy may or may not die in darkness, but it definitely dies if the people who are part of it stop working hard to make it happen. So, how does one keep going in the face of autocratic adversity?
• What does keep me going, when all is said and done? Day in and day out, when coolers break, plans go awry, orders fail to show up, and leadership is difficult to do even moderately well, how do I keep pushing forward?

Approaching life with an abundance of curiosity in hand, as Sarah Harris also seems to do, I spent a fair bit of time turning her good question over in my mind. I started to sort out the answers through my usual research process. Reading always reveals interesting insights, and I almost always get my own thinking going by learning from others. It didn’t take me very long, though, to realize the absurdity of that approach. Other people’s inspiration, in this context, was pretty irrelevant. I mean, how in the heck was looking up other people’s answers to Sarah’s good question going to help me know why I keep going?

Self-reflection, it quickly became obvious, was really the only research I needed to do as I tried to ascertain an answer. I needed to do what Anne Truitt talked about: “contemplate all this with curiosity and wonder.” And that is indeed how I’ve spent a good part of the last week—wondering to myself, wandering through the back corners and creative crevices of my curious mind, making my best attempt to ascertain an answer. That sort of self-examination is not always easy work. As Truitt tells it, “The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.”

My initial inclination is to answer Sarah’s question with a right-on response from another musician, a man who made his mark on a different genre and a different generation than Sarah. Pharoah Sanders was a free spirit who played free jazz, a saxophonist who set a high bar for any other aspiring jazz musician. Born 85 years ago this past week in Little Rock, Arkansas, Pharoah Sanders, quite simply, was something else! A lot like Anne Truitt and Sarah Harris, Sanders was, to my ear and eye, an artist driven by a lifelong creative quest and a commitment to making his art, all the while remaining determinedly true to himself.

Jon Pareles wrote the following in Pharoah Sanders’ New York Times obituary three years ago last month:

The sound Mr. Sanders drew from his tenor saxophone was a force of nature: burly, throbbing and encompassing, steeped in deep blues and drawing on extended techniques to create shrieking harmonics and imposing multiphonics. He could sound fierce or anguished; he could also sound kindly and welcoming.

When reviewing one of Sanders’ shows for The New York Daily News in the summer of 1977, music critic Stan Mieses wrote:

There was a moment Tuesday night when I felt like yelling out loud and launching my head through the ceiling—that’s the kind of feverish pitch that Pharoah Sanders and his group hit me. … They have to be seen and heard to be believed.

With his music, Pharoah Sanders seems to have attained what I’ve come to think of—thanks to the writing of creative business thinker Carol Sanders, who kept working until weeks before she died of ALS in her 80s last December—as Deep Understanding. He took his playing to places no one else had been, in ways that helped him to be himself and brought beauty to anyone who leaned in to listen. As the late, legendary Danish jazz journalist Boris Rabinowitsch noted in a 1977 review in the newspaper Politiken:

The music [Sanders] made … drew from the jazz tradition, but elevated the form so as to embrace gospel, soul, African folk, R&B and what would soon be deemed world music, weaving it all into a tapestry that spoke of African-American identity, spiritual realization and world peace. … It is the tone, its sonorous—and emotional, expressive possibilities, that Sanders has succeeded not only in cultivating … with a deep personal commitment, that today he himself stands out as one of jazz’s great individuals.

I share Sanders’ story here in part because more people ought to know about him, but mostly because my initial answer to Sarah’s question is what he said, simply and directly, in a January 2020 interview with The New Yorker:

If you’re in the song, keep on playing.

For me at least, what he said is so right-on that I can only smile, reread, and repeat. The eight words in Pharoah Sanders’ statement are essentially an honest answer to Sarah’s question. I have been deep in the song for decades now, determined to keep playing day in and day out! When you’re “in” whatever you do in that way every day, “What keeps you going?” doesn’t really come up. Upon further reflection, it occurred to me that Sarah answered her own question, at least partially, five years ago. This answer—“Just make your art!”—is in the inspiring song “Icicles” on her stripped-down debut, Best of Luck. I think it’s a remarkable, vulnerable, and insightful album. After all, as she accurately observes a few lines later in the song, “Your art made you!”

And much as I love Sarah Harris’ and Pharoah Sanders’ short and to-the-point statements of creative fact, I know full well that there must be more to the answer. I challenged myself to sort out and then share my answer to Sarah’s question. Not because my answer will necessarily bear any resemblance at all to yours—we all keep going, after all, for our own reasons—but because it’s a really good question and because it seems like something we would all do well to answer for ourselves.

Anne Truitt noted that the “truth of an intuitive leap is pure and straight.” For me, finding an answer to Sarah’s curious question was more of a slow, meandering mountain path than anything pure or straight. More like a Pharoah Sanders’ free jazz show than some corporate chatbot’s quick, off-the-shelf answer to a frequently asked question. Wandering, wondering, reflecting, writing, reading, and back through again about 18 times over the course of the last week.

Increased attention of this sort, I know from experience, nearly always unveils new evidence. And, sure enough, as soon as I started reflecting more meaningfully, clues began to crop up all over the place. Like Sarah’s question, the evidence arose out of the kind of wholly unplanned and completely unexpected interstitial events that unfold in all of our lives. If and when we’re paying attention, we can catch them like falling stars. There is, I believe, magical inspiration in those moments.

This past Monday morning was a turning point for me in understanding the answer to Sarah’s question. I had just arrived at the Roadhouse after working at home for a few hours. I grabbed a cup of Tree Town coffee and a glass of water. As I’ve done many hundreds of times now over the years, I plugged in my computer and opened my doc to continue working on this enews on the day of my usual “get-your-darned-draft-in” deadline.

Before I’d typed more than 20 words, I looked up and saw a customer for whom I have an enormous amount of respect. She’s a longtime Roadhouse regular, so that’s the first way I think of her. We met many years ago while I was pouring water at her table, the kind of encounter with an exceptional creative thinker that happens in the Ann Arbor ecosystem with surprising frequency. In the years since, I’ve come to see her as a scholar, a philosophically minded expert in global finance, a friend, a fellow Russian studies major, and a Russian speaker (her Russian is much better than mine these days) as well. She’s also a caring human who has accomplished amazing things in her life. She remains humble, determined, thoughtful, and joyful while overcoming a host of challenges. She is, for me, an inspiration and a source of wisdom who appreciates what we bake and cook as well as the caring, dignity-centered spaces we’ve worked so hard to create in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) over the years. From the outside looking in, it sure seems like she’s “in the song,” and, best I can tell from the outside looking in, she’s determined to keep playing.

That morning, this longtime guest had just finished a breakfast meeting with her minister, also an amazing human being and also, like her, a regular customer. Before I could really ask how she was doing, curious and caring soul that she is, she asked a question of me: “Are you writing your newsletter?” As I started to answer in the affirmative, she looked me in the eye and said with quiet gravity:

Keep writing. It makes a difference. Right now, more than ever. I read it every week, and I’m sure a lot of other people do, too.

I was touched, humbled, and inspired anew. Remembering that I had a handful of apricot pins with me that I had ordered for occasions just like this one, I reached into my shoulder bag and pulled one out to offer it to her as a gift, a small symbol of support in the challenging times she continues to work through in her own workplace with so much grace and determination. I began to explain what the apricot’s about, but since she reads this enews every week, she already knew about the apricot’s role as a positive symbol of dignity and democracy. “Thank you!” she said. “I have a bag I’m bringing with me to tough meetings. I’m gonna put this in there.”

After she left to go on with her day, I started to type again. One aspect of the answer to Sarah’s question was now immediately clear to me. There’s now no doubt in my mind that I keep going, in great part, because the work that I do for so much of every day makes a meaningful difference to people who mean a lot to me.

Before I got even two sentences into the writing, that first observation was confirmed anew when a second guest walked over to say hello. He had a big smile on his face, and I sensed that he was someone I knew but wouldn’t be able to place immediately. Happily for me, he reintroduced himself. His younger sister has been part of the ZCoB off and on for about 20 years now, and he himself has been a customer pretty much since we opened the Deli in 1982. He proceeded to thank me profusely for providing a positive place for his sister to work, and also for all we have done in the community over the years. I thanked him back for his support and assured him, from the heart, that it makes a huge difference to know that the work we do really does resonate. “It’ll be 44 years in March,” I shared. “Wow! You look like a young man still,” he said. And, with a big smile, he added, “I guess when you do what you love, it keeps you young!”

Having made both of our mornings better, he then headed off to have breakfast while I got my head back into writing, reminded for the second time in something like six minutes that we really do make a difference. My energy increased, I started clicking typewriter keys, much in the way, I imagine, Pharoah Sanders did with keys of his saxophone back in the ’60s and ’70s. Sure enough, if you’re in the song, keep playing.

I managed to make it about two paragraphs further before yet another regular customer came over to say hi. This is the amazing advantage of the “edge” that I wrote about last month—spending time in spots where customers, coworkers, and others can just come up and tell you things that they wouldn’t likely seek you out to share. Anyway, though this customer is far less famous than the first guest I got to talking to, she is nevertheless remarkable. She retired long ago, but she keeps playing her song happily—last year, she treated herself to a long-dreamed-of cruise that crossed much of the world over the course of about six months. That morning, she shared with me that she’ll soon be moving into independent living. She explained the thinking behind the move and shared what she was looking forward to. It turns out she’s going to teach watercolor painting to the other folks in her new place. Her determination to stay positive and curious, and to continue contributing to her community, is an inspiration. Very different life story, but the song remains very much the same. If you’re in the song, keep on playing!

This last customer’s story gave me a second clue in my search for an answer to Sarah’s question: Whether I’m reading, listening, looking, or interacting with someone in another way, spending time with people who are “in the song” and “keep playing” inspires me to do the same! Together, we create our imperfect version of what Anne Truitt once called “experiments in space, color, and form,” a beautiful way, I might add, to imagine our lives.

So, after all that, what does keep me going? I’ve already shared two important parts of my answer:

• Being determined to make a difference
• Hanging around with other people who keep going when the going gets tough

Here’s half a dozen other pieces of my answer:

Honoring my drive to learn. Back on September 10, Sarah Harris posted a newsletter piece that included, amongst a host of other good thoughts, a photo she’d taken of some words—possible pieces of songs, poems, or just journal prompts—that she’d thrown down on a white legal pad while reflecting over the course of the previous week. The caption under the photo reads “none of these lines were used lol.” That, though, is no longer true since I’m about to use one of them here and now. The second set of words on Sarah’s photographed page says, “U ain’t gonna find it by doin the same old thing.” I know for sure that that bit of wisdom is totally true for me, too. Learning from folks like Pharoah Sanders, Sarah Harris, Anne Truitt, and a host of others whose names I don’t even know is a very significant part of my answer to Sarah’s question. No doubt about it, learning keeps me going. The way I have designed my life and the way I try to live it have pretty much guaranteed that I rarely go more than a few minutes without learning something new!

Immersing myself in self-study. As Pharoah Sanders said, “Everything comes from within. It all comes from inside. [I] try to bring the best of myself or the best quality of myself and try to grow and try to develop and be a man of quality.” I completely concur. I have been working to study myself since somewhere around the time I turned 30. That study—which I wrote about extensively in Managing Ourselves, and which is evidenced, I suppose, by this essay—will not end until I leave consciousness at some unknown date down the road. I am not alone in this self-exploration—it seems a common theme for most people who are “in the song.” Though Anne Truitt made her name as a sculptor and artist, she created a whole new role for herself through journaling. In 1984, when she was already in her 60s, Truitt published her first book, called Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, a collection of pieces taken (as was Sarah Harris’s above-mentioned essay) taken from her written reflections. Over the years that followed, Truitt continued to publish her private thoughts, which evolved into a series of highly recommended books. She took on the challenge as a way to better understand herself. As critic and essayist Megan O’Grady writes, “Journaling also allowed [Truitt] to refine her sense of purpose in making art.” It has, without question, done the same for me. Journaling has helped me to face my fears, find focus, learn and grow, and go forward even when I don’t feel like it.

Figuring out how to make my art without losing my heart. Writer Toni Cade Bambara says that “a people entrenched in another people’s fiction is an endangered people!” I’ll take this beautiful statement further: A person entrenched in other people’s fiction is an endangered person. I am determined to figure out what it means to be true to myself and to make a difference for others, without losing who I am, to own my life in ways that are aligned with my essence and my ethics. The same, it seems, is true for Anne Truitt, Sarah Harris, and Pharaoh Sanders.

Noticing more, seeing more, tasting more, hearing more. This entire essay—plus all the reflection that went with it and the work that will come from it—came out of one standalone question in the middle of an hour-long conversation that wasn’t really at all about the subject at hand. These sorts of learning opportunities, I’ve come to see, are all around us all the time. With that in mind, I spend much of my day prospecting, mining for metaphorical gold, seeking tiny snippets of stuff that have significance far beyond what any observer looking only at the surface would ever see. I hope to be like Pharoah Sanders, who once said in a 2020 interview in The New Yorker: “I listen to things that maybe some guys don’t … listen to the waves of the water. Train coming down. Or I listen to an airplane taking off.”

Continuing to grow as a person. This is what Anne Truitt wrote about and practiced. It’s what Sarah Harris sings and writes about regularly—on her album Purple Bonnet Phase, she sings what I see as true: “You are always becoming.” This is also the work that Pharoah Sanders did so well for decades. He continued to evolve throughout his 82 years. When an interviewer asked Sanders, “Do you feel it is important to keep searching, and possibly changing?” he offered a response that seems right to me: “How would I create without changing?”

Perpetually finding curiosity. Curiosity is, in a sense, what got this whole conversation and self-reflection going in the first place. I am endlessly fascinated by the virtual and virtuous cycle that I wrote about last winter, the overlay and interplay of history, theory, and practice. Because we have created a workplace in which that framework is at the center of what we do every day, I am rarely more than a few minutes removed from it. For me, it is an inspiring source of infinitely renewable energy. And, I’ve come to understand, almost anything I start to study in depth will pretty quickly draw me in!

One more thought came to mind as my curiosity kept bringing me back to Sarah’s question: Effective energy management is definitely needed to “keep playing.” I’ve written a lot about this in Secrets #20 and #21 in Being a Better Leader. In brief, though, anyone who is able to hold course, to keep going as Anne Truitt, Pharoah Sanders, and Sarah Harris have all done, must have some effective ways to manage their energy. For me, that means spending nearly all of my time in energy-building activities like those I’ve listed above and very little in work that drains me.

All of this, of course, is only the start of my attempt to answer Sarah’s question. I will continue to ponder it all in the weeks, months, and years to come. Which is, I realize now, another reason I keep going—because when one does the work in this way, the work will never be “done.” Living a good life isn’t something one can cross off a list. If you’re in the song, as I pretty clearly am, continuing to play my music is just what I do. And, I have come to believe, if one plays well enough and long enough, we can arrive at what I wrote about poet Nikki Giovanni after she died last December: Deep Understanding of Ourselves. How well will we do it? Only time will tell.

Though music is her main focus, Sarah Harris also works part-time at a small craft brewpub in Los Angeles so that, like most musicians I know, she can keep current with her bills while crafting the art she cares about so much. In a Dolly Creamer newsletter essay entitled “Ready is not a feeling, it is a decision,” Sarah noted that she tends bar two nights a week. Here’s her message in case you find yourself in L.A., wanting to talk with this curious artist and collaborate on ways to keep ourselves going as we walk together through whatever we are walking through together right now:

[I’ll] be at Solarc every Tuesday and Wednesday night so come by and hangout we can talk shop. There we can change the world. And here too. 🙂

Thank you.

You are a miracle don’t forget.

It could well be that the answer to “What keeps you going?” was, as is so often the case, already embedded in the question itself. One good way to keep going—for me and maybe for Sarah and you as well—is to hang around with other people who also keep going. Spending time with folks who keep pushing through adversity, who stay focused even when the world around them feels like it’s coming apart, is more reason to keep playing when others head off to do other things. I learn whenever I lean into even small bits of time with people who keep pushing themselves in healthy, positive, and self-reflective ways. Their answers and, of course, their questions, inspire more often than not. Together, we conspire to contemplate our compatible curiosities, we support and share and encourage each other to put one foot in front of the other, and, in our world at Zingerman’s at least, put another plate of great food on the table, pull another loaf of artisan bread from the oven or pack another box to send to someone special in some city or small town a long way from where we live.

Sarah Harris summed all this up wonderfully well in her newsletter piece, in a straight-to-the-point way that’s both true and true to who she is:

We are breathing into the worry and we are showing up to the moment as imperfect and sloppy. … WE ARE HERE AND ALIVE AND ITS A FUCKING MIRACLE.

Anne Truitt, Sarah Harris, Pharoah Sanders, me, you, your neighbor, and your Aunt Nancy, we each have our own way to keep going. All of these approaches, though, seem to be some variation on an endlessly variable but always energizing theme. Which is why I’m now curious to hear what you think. Here’s what I want to know:

• How would you answer Sarah’s question?
• What, after all is said and not really done, keeps you going?

In closing, I want to say again that I appreciate you all enormously. You help keep me going. And I never take that for granted! Here’s to good things to come! As Pharaoh Sanders said in an interview with @ All About Jazz:

I just love to work. I would rather work three hundred and something days out of the year. I would rather be working. They don’t know. I love playing. Then I can really get my music together. … I want to play as long as I have my horn, a long, long time.

Manage your energy better than ever

Why the willingness to take a pass is so important

It’s taken me something like 60 years to see it, but sure enough, smack dab in the center of the word “know” is another word we all know well: “no.” To know, we also have to know when to say no. To be poetic about it: No “no,” no know.

The news this past weekend was, among other things, a good reminder of how important it can be to say no at significant moments in our lives. On Saturday, as you likely know, about 7 million Americans came together to make the rest of the country hear their collective “no” loud and clear.

While our own individual “nos” are generally less attention-getting than that, they are, nevertheless, of great import. Knowing when to say no and how to do it in thoughtful, intentional, caring and dignity-centered ways is a life skill that, to my knowledge, is really never taught in school. We’re taught a lot about “knowing,” but the art of “no-ing” is mostly taken for granted. It might be time to up our ante. Embracing strategic “naysaying” can help us create the kinds of lives and businesses that we want.

This sort of naysaying is not about repeating “no” the way a tired 2-year-old might. Rather, it’s meant as a thoughtful, strategically sound, and ethically oriented action step. Author, friend, speaker, and leadership thinker Nataly Kelly described this work wonderfully in a LinkedIn piece she published this week:

I make choices. Each and every day. So do you.
The question isn’t whether you’re making trade-offs.
You are. Everyone is.
The question is whether you’re making them intentionally or by default.

I fully agree with Nataly. When we’re making choices intentionally and thoughtfully, it is both inevitable and appropriate that the decision will sometimes be not to do something that we might well have done. Others might argue that the option in front of us is a great idea, but for us, it is not. Saying no in the face of near-universal advice to the contrary can be incredibly difficult. I regularly revisit 20th-century psychologist Rollo May’s words: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it’s conformity.”

The point is that the “nos” I’m describing here are done knowingly, as a way to live out our vision, mission, values, and intentionally chosen beliefs. They are not done out of overwhelm and reactivity. Here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB), we’ve shared our commitment to “Starting with ‘yes’” in our 2032 Vision, and I’m a big believer in “Leading with Positive Beliefs.” However, there are critical moments when leaders must have the courage to say no. We can honestly start with “yes,” but after careful consideration come to the conclusion that “no” remains the right answer.

The story of Zingerman’s, as many of you know well by now, is woven around the long-term vision, mission, values, and beliefs to which we committed long ago. All are positive statements about the future we are dedicated to creating, about the ways we will work together and interact with the world around us as we do it. While we don’t talk about it as much as we do the positive parts, implicit in the commitment to a clear vision, mission, values, and beliefs is what we’re not going to do. In a sense, we are defined as much by what we consistently say no to as what we have built and embraced. A lot of “nos” have been said in order to create the knowledge that forms the basis of our shared philosophy.

One close-to-home example that comes to my mind regularly: In our 2032 Vision, we restate our now-44-year-long commitment to staying rooted in our community. The fifth of 12 sections of this Vision is called “Community Roots; Staying Put in Order to Grow.” Here’s an important part of it:

By choosing to stay local, we have opened up opportunities we never imagined. We understand the wisdom of Zen poet Gary Snyder’s words: “First, don’t move; and second, find out what that teaches you.”

By enthusiastically saying yes to staying local, and by opening Zingerman’s businesses only in the Ann Arbor area, we are saying no to a steady stream of offers to open in places that range from Kalamazoo to California, Detroit to Denver, Nevada to New York. I just received another one this past weekend. The conversations are always kind, appreciative, and dignity-focused. Other doors often open in the process, like “We’d love to wholesale you our candy bars,” or “You might want to come to a ZingTrain seminar.” The answer, though, is always the same: “We’re honored, but our vision is that we only open businesses here in the Ann Arbor area.” It matters not how much money is being offered, how great the demographics might be, or how cool the project is. The response remains a polite, calm, caring “no, thank you.”

We all, consciously or not, make choices of this sort. The key, per Nataly Kelly’s well-taken point, is to make them mindfully, considering how they fit into our vision, mission, values, and beliefs. Trappist monk, writer, and mystic Thomas Merton says it well about his own choices:

By my monastic life and vows I am saying no to all the concentration camps, the aerial bombardments, the staged political trials, the judicial murders, the racial injustices, the economic tyrannies, and the whole socioeconomic apparatus which seems geared for nothing but global destruction in spite of all its fair words in favor of peace.

At times when, or perhaps especially when, we are struggling with uncertainty and self-doubt—as was the case for so many of the folks who were out carrying signs in city centers, town squares, and streets across the country this past Saturday—a purposeful, well-thought-out, and clearly elucidated “no, thank you” can be one of the most important contributors to quality of life we ever make. Knowing what we really want nearly always means also saying no to what we do not.

Even when no one else is saying no, when we’re worried about being out of step or standing out too much, a thoughtful “no” can make an enormous difference. Once one person sees someone else speaking the truth they have in their own heart but have been reluctant to say aloud, a community of thoughtful naysayers can come together. In the process, people can work together to create what Czech philosopher Jan Patocka once called “the solidarity of the shaken.” We may each be struggling on our own, but when we come together, we can accomplish amazing things in our companies, our communities, and our countries. Someone sharing a carefully considered, values- and vision-aligned “no” over here, and a couple of others following suit, can alter the course of what comes next. As Patocka says, this is “What history is about.”

When one person sees someone else say no to something they’re also uncomfortable with, the odds that they, too, will speak up increase significantly. One thoughtful “no” here, another well-articulated “no” there, and before you know it, as Arlo Guthrie sang in “Alice’s Restaurant,” you’ve got three people together and therefore have “an organization.” When you’ve got 50 folks in alignment, as Guthrie sang back in 1967, “you have a movement.”

This is what happened with what the progressive business world now knows as “small giants.” It began when one thoughtful journalist and editor, Bo Burlingham, wrote about Zingerman’s in a 2003 Inc. magazine story. Bo highlighted how we had consistently decided to turn down the chance to franchise, as well as the opportunity to open other delis all over the country. That cover story, titled “The Coolest Small Company in America,” was about one modestly sized organization in a modestly sized Midwestern city and how it said no to the business world’s widely traveled roads of expansion. Two years later, that one “no” spoken aloud in Ann Arbor, evolved into what became Bo’s best-selling book Small Giants. That, in turn, developed into the Small Giants Community, which now has hundreds of members and a packed conference at the end of April every year.

This story of a single individual being inspired to say no, and then others coming in to support them, is not a new one. For example, it’s encapsulated in an old Circassian folk song that Jrpej, the musical collective I wrote about last week, plays. Other traditional musicians in the region perform the tune, too. The “Song of the Dog and the Boar” is a beautiful lesson in this long-standing life pattern. A wild boar and a hunting dog find themselves face-to-face in the forest. A fight commences. The boar, of course, is much bigger and stronger than the dog. The dog, though, is a quicker thinker and more collaborative. It says no to the one-on-one fight but not to the bigger battle. As the members of Jrpej explain the storyline:

The dog goes away to the village and gathers all the dogs she can find. The strong dogs, the fast dogs, and even the blind dogs, the dogs that can’t run. But they all go to the forest together and kill the boar.

In Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, fellow history major Rebecca Solnit writes that “the Angel of Alternative History tells us that our acts count, that we are making history all the time, because of what doesn’t happen as well as what does.” Here at Zingerman’s, we are what we are in great part because of what we consistently have said no to. What hasn’t happened is actually hugely important to our ability to live and work in ways that are true to our essence. I’ve realized there’s a “no” in “economic” as well. Yes, good businesses begin with vision and values, but what they say no to is just as essential to making them meaningfully healthy. No one will do well when they try to be everything to everyone.

Here’s a quick list of “nos” that have helped define who we are at Zingerman’s:

• No to opening multiple units of our “successful Deli”
• No to franchising
• No to opening shops outside the Ann Arbor area
• No to going public and collecting on the big payoff of an IPO
• No to buying lower-quality ingredients when costs go up
• No to letting our name be used to promote products made by people whose values we don’t share
• No to abandoning our Guiding Principles at times when they might be inconvenient or uncomfortable
• No to consolidating ownership—we now have 19 Managing Partners and 319 staff who own what we call a Community Share
• No to selling the business to some big-ticket buyer who wants “the brand”
• No to changing our Vision when crises like the pandemic come
• No to breaking up my now-44-year-long partnership with Paul Saginaw when things get awkward, as they do at times in all relationships (I always remember the response of George Harrison’s second wife, Olivia, when she was asked to share the secret of a great, long-term marriage: “Don’t get divorced.”)
• No to opening in Disney World (Orlando, after all, is not in Ann Arbor.)
• No to taking things for granted, coasting, or resting on our laurels

There’s a common pattern among organizational outliers like us—businesses, bands, progressive schools, artists’ collectives, etc.—that opt to walk their own way. Organizations and individuals that choose to live mindfully and purposefully, those that exist on the edge, consistently turn down offers and suggestions to shift towards the mainstream. It’s a pattern that Bo Burlingham identified years ago in Small Giants. Leaders in those businesses, Bo writes, had to

overcome the enormous pressures on successful companies to take paths they had not chosen and did not necessarily want to follow. The people in charge had remained in control, or had regained control, by doing a lot of soul searching, rejecting a lot of well-intentioned advice, charting their own course, and building the kind of business they wanted to live in, rather than accommodating themselves to a business shaped by outside forces.

One of the most famous “nos” of modern history happened four years ago this coming winter. On Thursday, February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Vladimir Putin, and for that matter, many Western experts, expected the “war” to be over in less than a week. Fearing the worst, the American government offered to get Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky out of Kyiv on a quick airlift. In one of the more poignant “nos” of recent years, Zelensky turned down the offer with what has now become a line for the ages: “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.” Nearly three years later, Ukraine is getting stronger, and to many experts’ eyes, it has gained momentum as it defends against the invasion that Russia still refuses to end.

Learning to say no at the right time is, I believe, an important skill for life and leadership. I know I, for one, often have a hard time actually doing it. And I know I’m not alone in resisting saying no, even when I know in my heart that “no” is the right response for me. Hungarian and part-Jewish writer László Krasznahorkai, who’s also the newly awarded Nobel Prize winner, says that it’s “very difficult to say no.” It takes work to learn to do it well. It also takes courage to defy the expectations of others. As Sunita Sah, professor of organizational psychology at Cornell, points out:

Defiance is a practice, not a personality. Defiance is a skill that’s available and necessary for all of us to use. … To defy is simply to act in accordance with your true values when there’s pressure to do otherwise.

László Krasznahorkai has said no in strategically important ways many times in his life. This, I’ve come to believe, is a pattern that everyone who’s lived a life that is true to their essence will inevitably have followed. People like this consistently opt out of things that are out of line with their vision and values. They leave money on the table or take a pass on lucrative opportunities that don’t feel true to who they are. It is often difficult, but they do it anyway. In an interview earlier this year about his own country, Hungary, Krasznahorkai discussed autocratic leader Victor Orban’s decision to stay “neutral” about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Krasznahorkai made this statement:

A dirty, rotten war is unfolding before my eyes. The world is starting to get used to it. I cannot get used to it. I am incapable of accepting that people are killing people.

We never know what one “no” will lead to until that first “no” has been brought forward. Given his international recognition, Krasznahorkai’s “no” carries a good deal of weight in the world. As Walt Hunter, a poet, writer, editor, and professor at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, says:

Krasznahorkai’s work throws an obstacle in front of our habituation to violence and war by showing us that what should be surreal or impossible has, in fact, become our reality.

One “no,” affirmed by others in the know, can carry the whole thing even farther. Hunter writes:

In its choice to honor [Krasznahorkai’s] prophetic body of work, the Nobel committee has broadcast a reminder that the political relevance of art lies, paradoxically, in its sense of feeling apart from time.

This work of saying the strategic no out loud is of equal import in our personal lives. Author Anna Holmes shared this story in an Atlantic essay entitled “How About Never?”:

A few years ago, on the eve of my giving a commencement address at Emma Willard, a girls’ boarding school in upstate New York, the mother of one of the graduates approached me with a question: “If you could go back to your younger self—say, six years after you’d graduated from high school—what would you ask?”

I thought about it for a second and then said, “I’m not so sure I’d ask my younger self anything, but here’s what I’d tell her: that she needs to remember to listen more carefully to the voice inside her head, especially the one saying no.”

Successfully owning and designing our lives requires the effective application of well-conceived, strategically placed “nos.” We each can and need to say no to different things. As Nataly Kelly writes:

To make room for the things I prioritize most, I don’t really: go out that much, watch much TV, or spend much time scrolling news feeds or social media, which I’m fairly careful to timebox.

The trade-offs are real. And they’re highly individual to each person.

I have many of my own “nos” that fit into Nataly’s good framing. I stopped watching TV long ago. Uncomfortable as I am in group social settings, I simply decided to stop going to parties and, for that matter, nearly all social events. I don’t go to movies. I decided to stop watching and going to sports events, too. I use social media mostly for research. I opt not to offer the books and pamphlets I publish through Zingerman’s Press on Amazon. None of these are rules I follow religiously—I bend and break them when and where I choose to. But, for the most part, those “nos” have helped me to learn, grow, and “know” so many other things that I have given myself time to study. That said, when I’m speaking on stage, I do actively share my email address and, at times, my cell phone number because I’ve found that great connections and conversations that would likely not happen otherwise come out of it. I’m not suggesting that any of these choices are remotely right for anyone else. They are, though, working well for me.

In every “no,” then, there is also an invitation to a “yes.” When, after graduating from the University of Michigan, I decided not to move back home to Chicago, it opened the door to what became the rest of my life. My “no” to going to law school, as my mother so determinedly believed would be best, gave me the chance to be a line cook. Later, this choice made it possible for me to partner with Paul and help build the ZCoB. More recently, my purposeful decision to turn away from the antipathy and negativity in the news, to say no to the apparent attempts to impose autocracy, has created new opportunities. Specifically, it has opened the door to an affirmation of dignity and democracy, and my efforts to turn apricots into a positive symbol of that work. (For those who haven’t seen them, new apricot t-shirts and sweatshirts are now for sale thanks to Underground Printing. The backstory is here, and proceeds go to the nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization Democracy Now!)

Speaking of democracy, it seems clear that the freedom to say no without being immediately, rudely punished or summarily removed from an organization—or a company, family, or country—is a key sign that we are living in a functioning, though ever imperfect, democratic kind of construct. As author Peter Block says, “Partners have a right to say no.”

How do we learn to be these kinds of constructive naysayers? Saying no—and I’m going to assume for the rest of this piece that we mean a well-thought-out, values- and vision-focused “no”—is a skill that takes practice. Five years ago this week, Romanian-born, Alabama-dwelling poet and writer Alina Stefanescu published a piece entitled “21 ways to end a poem or leave your lover.” Number 11 on Alina’s list is about learning to say no more effectively:

Practice saying NO at different pitches. In different places. With different props. … Aim for the most irresistible no you can manage, and give it texture, sonics, beat, passion, lyric. The most magic no.

Stefanescu also suggests that we can say no by putting our thoughts and feelings “in a poem about refusing.” The thought of it makes me smile. I know. No “no,” no know.

Italian writer Umberto Eco reminds his readers that examining what we have chosen not to do in our lives is often as interesting as looking at what we have opted to do. As an author, Eco appropriately focuses the conversation on books. Nearly everyone who reads a lot (certainly me!) must have dozens of books they bought with good intentions but have not actually read (yet). Eco calls this “a library of the unread,” and it is an interesting way to understand our lives. It’s also an intriguing journal prompt: Consider for a couple minutes all the life options you’ve said no to. Expand them into short stories to create your own “library of the unlived.”

Author Leslie Jamison has done something similar. She says she decided

to make something I called the “Notebook of Noes.” On every page, I wrote down an opportunity I had decided to decline: a speaking gig, a magazine commission, an invitation from a friend. Then I drew a line across the page. Underneath, I wrote what saying no had made room for.

The benefits of well-placed, values-aligned “nos” can be hugely beneficial to our personal health. The Mettinger Clinic, in a collaboration with Psychology Today, tells it straight: “Saying no can create more mental health stability by helping with self-care and build your self-esteem and confidence by setting boundaries. Saying no may be daunting, but there are ways to do it.”

To be clear, saying no can be done with dignity. We don’t need to disrespect the person who asked. We can be courteous, caring, and thoughtful in how we turn something down. I try to, more often than not, offer a chance to continue the conversation in ways that work better for me. About nine years ago, I decided not to join any more boards. I do, though, offer “yes” by sending my cell phone number to anyone who asks me to join their board. When they need help, I suggest they simply call me.

All of this emphasis on choice works well only when we are making our choices freely, and when we wholeheartedly own all the decisions we make. I’ve written extensively on this in Secret #32 in Managing Ourselves, “It’s All About Free Choice.” Author Courtney Martin, writing for The On Being Project, reinforces the import of making choices that are right for us:

Forget balance. Balance is bullshit. What I mostly crave is integrity and joy—a sense that I’m doing what I do excellently and getting a lot of pleasure out of it, that I’m used up and useful.

You say no so you can say yes. It’s sad in the way that all limitations are, but also liberating. You are human and finite and precious and fumbling. This is your one chance to spend your gifts, your attention, most importantly your love, on the things that matter most. Don’t screw it up by being sentimental about what could have been or delusional about your own capacity. Have the grace to acknowledge your own priorities. Prune and survive.

Learning to say no, has certainly made my life far richer. I feel freer, and I spend almost all of my time doing things I actually want to do! Nataly Kelly’s wise words are a good way to frame the work that’s involved in doing this sort of naysaying skillfully:

Choose what you love. Choose what matters.

Whatever you do, don’t choose because of what you see someone else doing.

They are not you. You should not want to be them.

…

When you stop trying to be all things to all people, you free up enormous mental and emotional energy. You stop feeling guilty about what you’re not doing and start feeling proud of what you are doing.

My good friend, the Irish writer Gareth Higgins, taught me that you’ll “never know where a story will end, especially when you’re in it.” In this context, we never know where one well-placed, carefully considered, and life-affirming “no” can lead. Someone has to start so others can follow. One person who decides to deliver a well-considered, principle-centered “no” can change the course of a company, a community, or even a country.

In the spirit of which, I’ll close here with a mention of Rosa Parks, who delivered one of the most important “nos” in American history. Parks passed away 20 years ago this week, at the age of 92. Born into the then-segregated state of Alabama in the winter of 1913, Parks was active in civil rights work throughout her life. In the 1940s and early ’50s, she was an active member of the NAACP, serving as secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter for many years. In the summer of 1955, Parks attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee—one of the only spots in the South in which integrated meetings could be conducted. It was also a leadership training center for civil rights activists and the alma mater of civil rights activist and nonviolence expert Bernard Lafayette, who I wrote about last week. Parks’ now-famous “no” came 70 years ago this fall.

Parks was not the first Black citizen of Montgomery to say no on a segregated city bus. Earlier that year, a 15-year-old high school student named Claudette Colvin had also refused to give up her seat to a White rider. The incident passed without much hubbub, but Parks’ situation later that year got far more attention. At about 5:00 on December 1, 1955, Parks left work and, after stopping at the store to pick up a few things, boarded the bus to head home. In that era, Black people were required to sit in the seats in the back part of the vehicle, while up front it was “Whites only.” When the “White seats” filled up that evening, the driver directed the Black riders in the middle of the bus to move further back. Parks famously refused. The driver went to a pay phone and called his bosses, who directed him, in turn, to phone the police. Shortly after, local law enforcement officers boarded the bus and arrested Parks.

Rosa Parks’ “no” that Thursday evening, almost an hour after dark on that late autumn day, was not reactive; rather, it was well-thought-out, carefully considered, and very much values-centered. As she explained later:

I felt that, if I did stand up, it meant that I approved of the way I was being treated, and I did not approve. … People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.

That simple, determined, dignity-centered “no” initiated what became the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In court, Parks pleaded not guilty, but she was convicted and fined anyway. About a year after Parks’ arrest, the Supreme Court overturned her conviction and ordered that Montgomery buses be desegregated. The boycott ended the following afternoon, after 381 days. The BBC called Parks’ decision “the ‘no’ that sparked the civil rights movement” and a “courageous act of defiance [that] set in motion a chain of events that ended segregation in the U.S.”

Rosa Parks’ remarkable courage and values-based “no” illustrates the importance of what historian Timothy Snyder writes: “A tiny bit of courage, a tiny bit of truth, can change history.” Nobody knows which history-changing “no” could be next. I do know that we have the power. A wisely spoken and deeply felt “no” next Wednesday, or any other day, just might alter the world.

Let me k-no-w what you think!

More ways to manage yourself

What MLK Jr., Gandhi, and Gene Sharp can teach us about doing business

The Irish philosopher, poet, and author John Moriarty once wisely pointed out, “There are some things you can only see in the dark.”

Moriarty was writing about the beauty of the stars and the night sky in the west of Ireland; invisible during the day, they can be quite remarkable after dark. For me, though, Moriarty’s insightful observation has been most helpful in a metaphorical sense. As autocracy is being increasingly implemented in our country, and as cruelty and unprovoked violence are becoming common tactics for those in power, we are, to my eye, experiencing an emotional darkness. One of the only upsides of living through that darkness is that more and more good learnings have become clear because of it. My understanding of democracy, and our shared role in its application, is one of them. It’s detailed in a pamphlet on the subject that I’m working on finishing soon. The learnings in this essay are another. I never would have seen them if so many of us weren’t struggling to find our way as this metaphorical darkness dominates our days.

Russian democracy advocate Vladimir Kara-Murza, a history major who has survived two near-miss assassination attempts by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and served many years in the Russian prison system before being freed in a prisoner swap a year ago last summer, says, “History doesn’t have only tragic lessons in store for us—it has some very hopeful ones as well.” What follows is one of the latter. Hopeful and, I hope, helpful as well. It’s about my belated glimpse of the obvious that nonviolence can be effectively put into practice in the day-to-day work of our organizations.

I didn’t put together all the pieces in this essay until the last couple of weeks. Now, though, the connections all seem so incredibly clear that I can hardly believe I didn’t see it all sooner:

1. In our own imperfect and often unconscious ways, we have put many of the principles of nonviolence to work within the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB). We’ve done it informally over the course of our nearly 44 years in business. We’ve never used the term “nonviolence” to describe what we’re doing, but looking back, I see the elements of it being applied many times over the course of our history. It is, I see now, a big part of how we have managed to become who we are.
2. Although violence is what grabs the headlines, any number of studies show that nonviolence makes for more effective organizations. Drama decreases, there is far less unnecessary destruction, stress drops, quality of life goes up, and more gets done. Practicing nonviolence is not easy. But there’s really no question: in a nonviolent context, dignity, kindness, love, compassion, positive beliefs, and generosity abound.
3. Nonviolence applied in businesses and in organizations of any sort increases the odds of us collectively creating a less violent, kinder, and more collaborative country.
4. With all that in mind, we would be wise to study and apply nonviolence in more intentional ways going forward within our workplaces.

To be clear, I have an enormous amount to learn about the subject from those who have studied nonviolence and those who have bravely lived it out long before I understood its organizational importance. I’ve always, of course, thought that nonviolence is an inspiring and uplifting idea, and admired people like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. enormously for the ways they used nonviolence to alter the course of history in their respective countries. My belated understanding, though, is that the sort of emotional nonviolence they taught for use in society at large is of equal import inside our organizations.

I know that nonviolence is not a mainstream approach to doing business. The subject, I’m pretty sure, is not taught in business school. And yet, with the all-important anarchist belief that the means we use must be congruous with the ends we want to achieve in mind, the import of this new (to me) understanding is suddenly incredibly clear. Yes, of course, we can absolutely vote for different people and advocate for better laws to be passed, but if we want less violence in our society, the best place to begin is where we spend so much of our time every week: in our organizations. Less violent, kinder, and more collaborative societies start with less violent, kinder, and more collaborative workplaces.

In the opening pages of her 2009 book, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, Fanny Howe recalls a friend teaching her early on in her writing career that “Poetry is backwards logic.” If poetry is backwards logic, then perhaps the application of nonviolence inside an organization would be a bit of backwards business logic at its uplifting, peace-loving best. In a mainstream business world that equates leading to “taking no prisoners,” “dominating the market,” “competing at all costs,” “undercutting the competition,” and so on, nonviolence leads us in a more positive and more peaceful direction: toward better listening, more love, a deeper understanding of dignity, and a compelling application of compassion. Sure, there may, at times, be fewer dollars to distribute in the short term, but in the long run, nonviolence seems far more sustainable—for the business, the people who are part of it, and the communities and countries where it operates.

By contrast to the kind of takeovers, force-outs, leveraged buyouts we read about in business sections, nonviolence plays out quietly in the actions of our organizations. There’s less drama and more dignity. Like poetry, it calls on us to pay more attention to the metaphorical equivalent of line breaks, rhythm, and word spacing—a well-placed pause in a meeting, a skillful shift in facilitation, a personal note of apology or appreciation, the willingness to thoughtfully consider subtle adjustments in approach. None of these things make the news, but they are ways to make nonviolence part of our everyday activity. After all, as Fanny Howe puts it, “Philosophy should only be written as poetry.” Here we go then. I know I have a long way to go, but if I do my work well, I can bring about what Howe says of her poetry: “It’s just built into my life patterns.”

The inspiring “backwards logic” of a nonviolent approach is evidenced by how alien nonviolence seems to be to most of this country. Erica Chenoweth, political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School and an expert on the impact of nonviolence, says that when they speak in class or at conferences about violent social resistance, their remarks typically go unchallenged. By contrast, their comments about the effectiveness of nonviolence—for instance, that “nonviolent resistance campaigns are 10 times as likely to result in democratic change”—evoke a lot of pushback.

I wasn’t pushing back, but neither was I paying proper attention. As is so often the case, I have missed many clues on the way to this peaceful and inspiring conclusion about the positive impact nonviolence can have on our organizations.

Sometimes, I’ve learned, the clues appear long before we come to a clear sense of what they all mean. I can’t remember exactly when this first clue occurred, but as is often the case with restaurant people, I know exactly where it took place: table 409 at the Roadhouse, the rounded banquette of a booth all the way in the far back corner of the building. Dr. Bob Wright, who has been working in the field of leadership transformation for 40-something years (and who kindly wrote the foreword for Managing Ourselves), was visiting us from Chicago to attend a ZingTrain seminar. I think it was somewhere around, I’ll say, 2014. I know for sure that it was far from Bob’s first visit. He’d already spent a fair bit of time with Paul and me and the other ZCoB partners, including guest speaking at one of our annual offsite retreats.

Bob is no novice to this sort of thing. By the time we all came together at the corner booth that evening, he had probably talked to and helped thousands of people, including a long list of very successful CEOs and upper-level managers. Bob is quite skilled at both self-management and conflict resolution—years of coaching couples helps—and with his wife, Dr. Judith Wright, has written and taught extensively on both. He was certainly a good sounding board for us as we tried to sort out the situation at hand. Which is why Paul and I began bouncing ideas around about how to best deal with some particularly challenging situations we were facing with Bob after he’d eaten dinner.

In the weeks and months leading up to that evening, Paul and I, both together and separately, had tried to make things work with the various parties at hand. Somehow, though, the situation still hadn’t gotten sorted out. We were pretty clear on where we wanted to end up, but we were struggling mightily in trying to get others on board.

While we definitely wanted to get things resolved, as we have done countless times over our years of working together, without any (verbal, of course) pushing or shoving. In truth, as Bob pointed out to us more than once, we were likely in the right, both ethically and legally. If push had come to shove, we probably would have had the upper hand, but neither of us was interested in taking that route.

Bob, who’s quite a calm, wise, and peace-loving guy, suggested some typical and slightly more “aggressive” strategies to consider, too. All were things that I suspect had worked for some of his other clients. But, in a way that might have frustrated or fascinated Bob just a little bit, neither Paul nor I was willing to bite. At some point in the conversation, Bob paused, chuckled, looked from one of us to the other, and then back again, and then, with a big smile on his face, said, “You guys are the most nonviolent organization I know!”

At the time, we chuckled, but in truth, I didn’t give his comment much thought. I was too focused on figuring out how to handle the situation at hand to understand the wisdom in Bob’s words. Sitting here all these years later—as I listen to “Cruel” from the new Caitlin Canty album and reflect on the overt cruelty and determined efforts at retribution that are in the news right now—violence and the alternative path of nonviolence are both very much on my mind. I’ve only now started to see that there was a lot more to Bob’s comment about our organizational inclination to nonviolence.

With all of this front of mind now, I recently recalled a second clue that I could well have picked up if I’d been paying more attention. Twenty-one years ago this month, I attended my second Southern Foodways Alliance (SFA) symposium. The theme that year was “Race and Food,” and it was one of the most impactful conferences I’ve ever gone to. One of the speakers was someone I had heard of but, at the time, knew relatively little about: Bernard Lafayette. Then 64 years old, he delivered a talk titled “Beloved Community: The Civil Rights Movement and Food.” Lafayette has dedicated his whole life to nonviolence.

Lafayette grew up in Tampa in the 1940s, which was still segregated at the time. When he was 20 years old, he moved to Nashville, where he studied nonviolence formally at the Highlander Folk School and learned from nonviolence experts such as James Lawson. Lafayette participated in the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins in the winter of 1960 and was part of the group that helped co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that spring. Lafayette’s talk at SFA that afternoon was terrific. I took it all in, took lots of notes, and, unfortunately, sort of left it at that. I never quite made the connection between his incredible knowledge of nonviolence and the kind of culture we were working so hard to create here at Zingerman’s. My mistake. In a TED Talk delivered 10 years later in Atlanta, Lafayette said:

Nonviolence is as old as the history of mankind, and yet it’s a foreign term to many people. … People must learn the strategies of nonviolence as a skill for use in their homes, their work, and in making social change. … Violence is an inarticulate language.

Today, I know much more about the man who was, in his early 20s, one of the most important followers of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and an amazing leader and writer in his own right. In a 2017 conversation for Coursera, Lafayette talked about some of his learnings:

The nonviolence philosophy, which is espoused by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has proven to be very effective as a way of life, rather than just a tactic or method that’s used to respond to conflict and violence. It has a transformative effect … When we talk about violence, it’s not just about physical confrontations. Sometimes, words can be just as violent, and often much more permanent, because of the invisible pain and scars people suffer. … With this knowledge, they can prevent it from escalating. Violence starts on the inside.

Violence doesn’t just start on the inside—it can also impact us on the inside. Emotional pain can be inflicted without causing any immediate physical harm. Lafayette tells a moving story about this in his book In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma. When he was seven years old, he went to board a cable car with his grandmother. Segregation rules required Black citizens to pay in the front of the vehicle but then get back out in order to board in the back. Lafayette and his grandmother politely got on to pay and then stepped off to go around to the rear entrance. As soon as they stepped off, the driver purposely pulled away. No one was physically hurt, but the driver’s decision to drive off was very definitely an act of emotional violence.

This sort of thing can, and does, happen in less obvious ways inside any organization. I will never forget the ZCoB staff member who, after working here for a few months, shared his reflection: “This is the first job I’ve had where I don’t go home angry every day.” I’ve heard countless stories of workplaces where the people in charge don’t make eye contact or even acknowledge the existence of folks in front-line jobs. And you don’t have to be a boss to inflict this sort of violence. Rude snubs, cynical eye rolls, purposely leaving people out of conversations, cutting sarcastic comments in meetings. All are subtle, emotionally violent actions that, far too often, go by unremarked. I’m certain that I’ve unthinkingly done all of them over the years. My intentions were never bad, but, in small and ultimately unhelpful ways, my behavior certainly was.

All of these clues about the organizational role of nonviolence began to come together over the last couple of weeks when I started to study the work of Gene Sharp. I got to reading Sharp’s work because his books and thinking have been such a huge influence on nonviolent resistance movements everywhere, from Burma to Serbia, through Ukraine and across South and Central America, across the Arab world and of course the U.S. Wherever autocracy is on the rise—as it appears to be here—Sharp’s writings serve as primary reference materials for those who want to peacefully and effectively resist.

Sharp might be the most important contributor to nonviolent thinking that hardly anyone outside of experts in nonviolence has heard of. Those in the know, though, are well acquainted with his writing. In 1960, he released his first book, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, for which he managed to get the great Albert Einstein to write a foreword. Over the course of his life, Sharp authored more than 30 books and was nominated for four Nobel Prizes. This quiet, very humble man has been referred to as the “founder of academic nonviolence,” the “Machiavelli of Nonviolence” and the “Clausewitz of Nonviolent Warfare.” As Ruaridh Arrow, his biographer and author of Gene Sharp: How to Start a Revolution, writes, “For more than 30 years, if you wanted to start a revolution, you went to see Gene Sharp for help.” Arrow adds: “It’s not Che Guevara they’re tweeting in South America. It’s Gene Sharp.”

Twenty years or so before Bob Wright had dinner at table 409, Sharp released his now-classic book From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. He wrote the book to honor a request for help from Burmese democracy activists, and it was originally published in Bangkok by Burma’s Committee for the Restoration of Democracy. It was quickly translated into Burmese and, over the years, into about 50 other languages as well. At the time, Sharp wrote, “It was circulated surreptitiously inside Burma and among exiles and sympathizers elsewhere … Even until 2005, a decade after the small book came out, Burmese were being sentenced to seven-year-long prison terms just for carrying it.”

In 2015, Sharp was interviewed on the British news show “HARDtalk.” The interviewer opened the conversation by asking about the nature of nonviolence: “You’re very clear that this is not about an ethical choice. It’s a pragmatic choice. Explain.”

Sharp’s response was this:

People get very confused about nonviolence. … They used to tie this up with pacifism. … They think that this kind of struggle takes forever. … But nonviolence is not something that’s derived from ethical religious perspectives. Nonviolence is something that people have done for many centuries, going way back to the beginning of human beings. … Violence is something which plays into the hands of the strong, of the dictators. Nonviolence is actually a much more effective strategy.

Working as we have to bring dignity into our day-to-day lives, to make the love and care in our Mission Statement a meaningful reality, to live our Guiding Principles and practice what’s in our Statement of Beliefs, violent actions are not the norm in the ZCoB. But they do happen.

The sooner we can get that unacknowledged violence out of our organizations, the more effective we will be. Adopting nonviolence in our organizations isn’t just the right thing to do ethically. Extrapolating business strategies from Sharp’s insights on nonviolence, which are built on his in-depth study of Gandhi, King, and others, is simply more effective.

Sharp’s work is supported by an in-depth statistical assessment by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. You can find some of their extensive research in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works. In an interview published by Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Chenoweth shared an interesting statistic about the effectiveness of nonviolence:

Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns—whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.

Their more recent research reinforces Sharp’s writings. In 1959, he published an article in the Ann Arbor-based Journal of Conflict Resolution. (It’s the same journal at which the mysterious and magical musician Connie Converse became the editor a few years later.) The essay, entitled “Totalitarianism and Non-Violent Resistance,” demonstrated Sharp’s strong belief that nonviolence is the more effective way to combat any kind of authoritarianism. Over and over, Sharp demonstrates that the violent nature of retribution and retaliation—physical or emotional or both—doesn’t really work. As Sharp says, “As soon as you choose to fight with violence, you’re choosing to fight against your opponents’ best weapons, and you have to be smarter than that.” In the business world, arguments become more and more forceful, usually ending with people being painfully pushed out, long and costly legal struggles, and an array of other antagonistic outcomes. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. makes clear, “The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.”

Sharp’s writing has given me a new sense of perspective on my work to make apricots an effective symbol of dignity and democracy. I see now, six months after I started this project, that number 19 on Sharp’s list of 198 nonviolent tactics is “Wearing of symbols.” Better still, Sharp shares the story of the surprisingly effective nonviolent resistance to the Nazis that took place in Norway in 1942. It started when teachers refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the new Quisling puppet government the Nazis had installed. Teachers who chose to resist began to wear paper clips on their lapels as a sign of sticking together. Sharp quotes Haakon Holmboe, one schoolteacher he got to know, who said, “What was done often seemed ridiculous, but it had the effect of uniting all the opposition forces.” It created a sense of solidarity. And as Erica Chenoweth, the contemporary scholar of resistance mentioned above, says, “To know you’re not alone, that’s the key.” That knowledge has certainly been a big factor for me in figuring out how to make my way as a leader in these challenging times—thank you for all your kind notes and comments.

In order to really make nonviolence a reality in our daily work, I have a lot more to learn about the subject. As Bernard Lafayette says, “It won’t work unless you know how to work it!” In an early training pamphlet written for demonstrators, Sharp lays out six key points for people who want to practice nonviolence. “If you believe in the objectives of this demonstration,” he writes, “we ask you to abide by the following discipline. If you cannot comply, we ask you not to take part in this demonstration and withdraw quietly.” Over half a century later, they seem like a great way to get started practicing nonviolence within our workplaces. Here are the points:

1. Do not use any language or take any action that is likely to provoke violence by others. A dignified bearing and courteous determination will greatly contribute to victory for this cause.
2. If you are jeered at or called names, do not yell back or jeer at those who have views different from ours. Silence and a friendly smile are the best ways to reply to hostility.
3. If anyone attempts to pull down your banner, seize your sign, remove an armband, or destroy leaflets, let go at once. Do not struggle with the attacker. … Stand silently with your hands at your sides, looking straight ahead, or continue marching as before with hands at your sides.
4. Do not, under any conditions, use violence, regardless of provocation. If you are struck, keep your hands at your sides and do not strike back. … Dignity, restraint, courage, and a friendly smile are the best answers
5. If anyone else is attacked, do not use any violence against the attacker. Each demonstrator must himself or herself be responsible for standing up to such violence and suffering for achieving our objective.
6. If a fight or struggle does begin near you and there are no police to deal with it, you must be prepared to separate fighters by standing between them, even if you are thereby injured.

Obviously, we would need to adapt the wording to fit the workplace, and the injuries at work would be emotional, not physical, but the principles are a powerful, nonviolent way to go into a tense situation or awkward conversation. In fact, I’m going to add them to my mix for meeting management!

I’m realizing now that we unconsciously practiced nonviolence within the ZCoB over the course of some awkward negotiations last year. Things could have gone very badly. Intentions were good, but, nevertheless, meetings grew tense. Money was involved, which generally evokes awkward emotions. Conversations and attempts to come to an agreement stretched out longer than all involved had hoped. Outside experts warned us repeatedly that we were being overly generous with what we were offering. Many of the experts, who are used to working with more mainstream organizations, told us that with “right” on our side, we could and probably should draw a hard line in the metaphorical sand. I wasn’t surprised by their approach. Western culture constantly warns us to guard against others taking advantage of us, and advocates “standing our ground,” “taking charge,” and “forcing your opponent to back down.” This stuff is tempting, but I’m glad to say we didn’t fall for it.

In the end, we didn’t cave, nor did we get sucked into conflict during the negotiation process. It all went down very smoothly. In the short term, yes, we probably gave up a bit more than others think we should have. But rather than getting stuck in endless arguments and a long court case, we chose a positive path forward. Coming to a calm, nonconfrontational conclusion let us put our collective energies back into what we wanted to work on. It was, I see now, nonviolence in organizational action. Backwards logic by mainstream standards, but pretty magical by ours here in the ZCoB.

Bernard Lafayette worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for many years. On April 3, 1968, the two talked on the phone. As Lafayette recalls it, the conversation was wrapping up when King said, “Now Bernard, the next thing we’re gonna work on is to institutionalize nonviolence.” Lafayette pauses at this point in the story, then says, “The next day he was shot.”

Perhaps each of us can, within our own small spheres of organizational influence, pick up that piece of Dr. King’s legacy. To work to institutionalize nonviolence. In our case, that work happens in the business community.

There are some things you can only see in the dark.

Peace, love, kindness, and dignity to all.

Dig in with dignity

Participative democracy and a page out of dinner party planning

In her 1987 autobiography, activist Assata Shakur, who passed away last week at the age of 78, reminds her readers, “When you don’t know what’s going on in the world, you’re at a definite disadvantage.”

Although I rarely obsess about the news, I am diligent about keeping current. As Assata Shakur says, I need to know what’s happening in the greater ecosystem around me in order to lead effectively and ethically through whatever challenges the world puts in front of us—especially in recent months, when the winds of change seem to shift direction with startling frequency.

This past weekend, assessing the national onset of autocracy, attorney Jennifer Rubin writes, “We are no longer at a ‘tipping point’ or ‘an inflection point’ … but we still have agency … Let’s get to work.” That work, for me, lines up with the words of theologian Richard Rohr that I keep coming back to: “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” Small things, done with dignity and democracy, are how we make the better world so many of us dream of a reality.

Last week, I wrote about why well-run meetings make such a meaningful difference. This week is more about the “how.” Together, the why and the how are far more powerful than most people might imagine. Assata Shakur would often say,

Part of being a revolutionary is creating a vision that is more humane. That is more fun, too. That is more loving. It’s really working to create something more beautiful.

Given how many people still hold strictly negative beliefs about how “bad” meetings are, it might sound strange to suggest that meetings are a way to bring Shakur’s uplifting image to life. I’ve learned over the years, though, that it is indeed possible: We can make meetings into positive, grounded, collaborative, inspiring human interactions—uplifting contributors to the strategic work of our organizations. They can be both inclusive and dignity-centered, becoming, in the process, small acts of resistance to the authoritarianism that Jennifer Rubin warns us about. A great meeting, in this context, makes real what many only imagine. As Assata Shakur writes, “Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.” Making meetings work well is exactly that—a practical way to live out ideals that are widely shared but rarely practiced in the mundanity of everyday work.

Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master who later became a leader in the resistance to Vladimir Putin, described his experience after finally leaving Russia in 2013 due to fear of persecution for his beliefs: “I experienced for myself that life felt different in a democracy.” Kasparov’s point resonates. Most of us know the drag of having been in a bad meeting. We’ve also, though, felt the difference when dignity and respect fill the room as they can when a meeting is both effective and inclusive.

Kasparov’s point of difference was driven home for me last week when I invited Akin Arslan to the ZCoB huddle I wrote about earlier. Akin is living in Ann Arbor with his wife, Anoush Tamar Suni, an anthropologist and scholar of Armenian studies. The two met in Turkey, where she was doing fieldwork on the early 20th-century Armenian persecutions. About five years ago, Akin—who grew up in the Kurdish communities of eastern Turkey—and Anoush moved to Ann Arbor to be near her family. Like me, he has been inspired by what the Kurdish communities of Rojava are making happen—democratic experiments in self-governance, gender equity, and respect for human dignity—though as a Kurd himself, he of course has a far deeper emotional connection to the shared history, language, and culture as well as the possibilities for the future.

When Akin and I met for coffee earlier in the week, I told him about the upcoming huddle and suggested he would be welcome to join us. He took me up on the offer and sat in the whole three-hour meeting. Later that day, he wrote me a note that reaffirmed my own belief—that small sparks of dignity and democracy can inspire others, and that, as Garry Kasparov says, you can feel the difference in the energy in the room. And that Richard Rohr’s words of “practice of the better” aren’t just emotionally comforting, but a practical strategy for slowly changing our world:

It was wonderful to be part of the meeting yesterday and so inspiring! I’m honestly amazed at the way you’re running the business—seeing that it’s possible gives me real hope for the Kurds, especially those in Rojava. It feels powerful to know there’s an American business inspired by them and actually making it work here. I really believe that your example would inspire and encourage them.

In badly run meetings, which I have certainly been part of (and when I’m not on top of my self-management, certainly made worse by being a suboptimal participant) most people leave feeling disconnected and discontented. There are so many poorly run meetings in the world that many have come to believe this “badness” is inherent in the very form. Dr. Seth Frey, a computational social scientist at UC Davis who studies cooperation and self-governance, highlights the impact that the frequency with which bad meetings are convened in this country has had, in his blog enfascination:

[This] offers a counter-narrative to the modern “meetings are bad; fewer meetings” atmosphere that work culture creates. I think what’s happened is that there has been a change in the meaning of the word “meeting.” … [As] a bottom-up gathering of community members to discuss a matter of shared concern. That is so much different from what the word means today. If I were weaving conspiracy theories, I’d say that part of the project of undermining democracy has been capturing and corrupting the word. I think there’s a case to be made that meeting, not voting, is the fundamental unit of democracy.

When meetings go well, they do far more than move work forward—they create connection, insight, and, at times, a kind of quiet magic. They initiate cooperation, help bring out people’s potential, and open up creative connections. All of which, I believe, is akin to what Akin Arslan experienced last Thursday at the ZCoB huddle.

None of this was clear to me many years ago, when we first started setting up meetings at the Deli in our then-small business back in the early ’80s. Like Dr. Frey points out, I was stuck in a “meetings are bad” mindset. That began to change in a big way when I read Peter Block’s The Empowered Manager in the late ’80s. His statement that “staff meetings are the family dinners of organizational life” transformed how I thought about meetings. Instead of something to tolerate, I started to see meetings as opportunities to come together—to bond, share stories, catch up, honor one another, and support each other’s struggles.

This idea of a meeting as a family dinner came back to me a couple weeks ago when I read the wonderful food writer Samin Nosrat’s piece in the Food Section of The New York Times. She writes about how she hosts a series of weekly dinners that successfully bring friends together to connect and support each other. Her tips on how others might do the same struck me as remarkably similar to what one might do to make a good meeting happen. Nosrat shares,

It took nearly eight months of Monday dinners for me to realize I’d inadvertently built the ritual I’d so craved. … At our Monday dinners, I’ve learned how to share both responsibility and credit. I’ve learned that if I let other people care for me, they will. I’ve learned how it feels to build something sacred with people I love. … Four years in, this ritual and the community that sustains it are at the heart of my life. These friends have taught me what it means to belong. And I’ve finally found the sense of meaning … that I’ve sought for so long.

For anyone who’s only endured poorly run meetings, comparing these dinners to a well-run meeting might sound silly. But I’ve been in many meetings—especially in recent months—where I’ve felt that same sense of meaning.

These are the tips Nosrat shares:

• Choose a day and time and stick to it
• Choose one location and stick to it
• Perfect is the enemy of good
• Make it feel holy
• Consistency is key
• Make room for everyone
• Say the quiet parts out loud

I recommend pretty much the same if you’re trying to get a good meeting going—here’s a bit of my take on the application of each in the context of convening a regular business meeting:

Choose a day and time and stick to it. Scheduling meetings here in the ZCoB is not easy—collectively, we’re working pretty much around the clock, and we’re open seven days a week. Which means that picking a time and sticking to it is the only way to really get the meeting going. As Nosrat writes, “Over time, the day will begin to feel sacred.”

Choose one location and stick to it. While moving around does have some upside, it’s generally easier to make a regular meeting happen, I’ve found, in the same spot, so everyone knows where to show up.

Perfect is the enemy of good. Trying to get the ideal meeting to happen is a worthy pursuit, but in reality, we are all human and imperfect. It is more important in my experience that the meeting happens. As Nosrat reminds us knowingly, “This is real life.” Meetings, like any other construct, are a good place to practice continuous improvement. After each ZCoB huddle, the facilitation team diligently gets together to review what worked, what didn’t, and to make plans for what they might want to do differently next time.

Make it feel holy. “Holy” may sound extreme, but I think the point is to add a bit of specialness to the occasion. The point is not to make meetings into religious experiences, but rather to make meaning. A regular meeting can build closeness and connection. A couple of meetings that I’m a part of always open with personal check-ins where participants share how they’re doing in their lives. Sometimes the sharing is simple; other times it’s an opportunity for folks to open up about deeply personal challenges. In the process, it becomes a valued ritual. Nosrat writes, “Whatever it is, it should sanctify the occasion and be something that exists outside the chaos of everyday life.”

Consistency is key. The more we do the meeting, the more we work at it, the better we get. As Nosrat says, “Sometimes, the dinner’s a dud.” Some meetings still suck. Which is a bummer, but hey, teams have bad games. We get up and do it again, hopefully better, the next time. Assata Shakur says, “No movement can survive unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times.” The same goes, I believe, for good meetings.

Make room for everyone. Here in the ZCoB, many years ago, we informally opened most meetings to anyone in the organization who would like to participate; that is still the case today, unless they need to be closed for a good reason (say, HR matters that require privacy). In other words, the default is that anyone can come, unless we specifically decide they can’t. It’s had a huge impact. Most people, of course, don’t attend, but it’s a very different dynamic to opt out than to be locked out. And in a well-run, inclusive environment, people you might not have thought were paying attention begin to participate in powerful new ways. As Civil Rights activist Bob Moses said,

Leadership is there in the people … If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge.

Say the quiet parts out loud. Learning to have difficult conversations is a skill—one that I will be working on for the rest of my life. (ZingTrain offers a two-hour online class about “Courageous Conversations,” a version of which we teach internally for interested ZCoBbers.) As Nosrat writes, “If the group doesn’t already have a framework in place for honest, judgment-free communication about fairly dividing costs and labor, you must create one.”

Here at Zingerman’s, we have been working at making our meetings more productive, more effective, and more inspiring for probably 30 years now. We rarely get it all right, but we do pretty well. Here are 14 tips that I have gleaned over many years of work in—and on—meetings:

1. Prepare! The more time I invest in properly preparing for a meeting, the more I get out of it. The late, great Stas’ Kazmierski—who taught us visioning 30 years ago and was co-managing partner at ZingTrain for 15 years—recommended that those running a meeting ought to be spending about two hours preparing for every hour of meeting time.
2. Write a vision for the meeting. Not just for the next session, but for the series as a whole. Set it for a year or two out so all involved will know where you’re headed and why. This gives every recurring meeting a clear purpose and direction, keeping it aligned with long-term goals rather than just the immediate agenda.
3. Get clear on norms. How decisions are made, how you decide who speaks, what’s expected of participants, etc. Poet Alina Stefanescu says, “I love thinking about how absences are announced.” Knowing how you will handle regular members’ absence ahead of time makes meeting management much easier—here we use proxies, and also agree that if we’re not present, we’re obligated to go with what the group decides in our absence.
4. Agree on roles. Our meetings work well, in great part, because someone is always serving as a facilitator. We also generally have a notetaker, and sometimes a timekeeper. Big meetings even have a backup facilitator. The facilitator keeps the group politely focused on the issues at hand and effectively separates content from process. Here we have a whole team of folks who are trained to do that work when we hold large meetings, and they are very good at it! There are concrete skills and techniques that go into the craft of effective facilitation.In the ZCoB, the facilitator is almost never the “boss,” or the formal leader of the group. This immediately distributes power more equitably, letting people speak when invited rather than because of their place on the org chart. Making the facilitator someone who is not in charge is one of the best things we’ve ever done. It boosts the confidence and contribution of someone who might otherwise be peripheral—or absent—and keeps leaders (like me) from unintentionally taking over the meeting. I cannot overstate the importance of the facilitator’s role. The facilitator is deeply committed to getting the group back on course when the conversation starts to drift or meander.
5. Manage the energy. We have been formally working hard at energy management here in the ZCoB for about 15 years now, ever since we developed our recipe for energy management, adapted from business leader Anese Cavanaugh. Poet Alina Stefanescu captures what it feels like when the energy starts to slip: “I’m haunted by the way sound unravels as a melody falls apart.” Her line is a lovely way to describe those subtle, unspoken shifts that occur when meeting energy begins to go off course. The disconnect can happen in our heads—if I start to disengage from the meeting’s content, what Stefanescu describes is exactly what happens.
6. Share responsibility for the meeting. In the same way that we do everything else here, we ask that everyone who is in the meeting take 100% responsibility for the meeting. That means even if you’re “just a participant,” you are still responsible for participating, speaking up if things are going well, asking the facilitator to make an adjustment, etc. Assata Shakur writes, “Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.” Each of us learning to be more effective contributors to the quality of any meeting we’re part of is key to this process.I love Peter Block’s four ownership questions as a helpful framework for what each of us might do to prepare for any meeting we take part in:
   • To what extent do you intend to get value from being at this conference?
   • To what extent are you prepared to engage personally to achieve this?
   • To what extent are you prepared to take risks to learn at this conference?
   • To what extent are you prepared to take responsibility for the learning and engagement of others at this conference?
7. Write a good agenda. Agendas are essential in getting clear on things like “What are the outcomes for each segment of the meeting? Who is running it? What is the prework? Good agenda writing forces you to come to terms with the questions, not the answers. Susan B. Wilson, author of the 2003 tome Gourmet Meetings on a Microwave Schedule and a dozen other books on leadership, writes, “Meetings without an agenda are like a restaurant without a menu.” As the author of The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker puts it, “Figuring out your desired outcome brings focus to a meeting, and it does one more useful thing: It allows people to make better choices about whether they need to be there.”
8. Be ready to move more slowly than you might want. This has been a hard lesson for an impatient person like me, but the reality I keep learning is that it takes time for clarity to come, for groups to align, and for diverse perspectives to get processed. Authoritarian leaders, it’s true, can announce decisions quickly, but the announcement almost always leads to confusion, chaos, and undesirable outcomes. Moving more slowly, in a mindful and inclusive way, can feel frustrating, but we’ll go much forward far more effectively in the long run. As the folks at the amazing Alabama Chanin say, “Slowness is not delay—it is design.”
9. Make sure you are clear about the decisions that are made. What exactly did we decide? Who’s responsible for doing it? By when will it be done? Recording these decisions is essential—otherwise, you risk repeating the same meeting next week just trying to remember what was agreed (trust me, I’ve been there. It’s neither fun nor productive). I like leadership coach Amiel Handelsman’s suggestion to have decisions “writ large” on big sheets of paper posted on the wall for everyone to see. It keeps things visible, accountable, and hard to forget.
10. Practice good listening skills. In my studies of translation last month, I caught this line from poet Eliot Weinberger in an interview in the current issue of The Paris Review: “Every act of reading is a translation, every text is a translation.” Which makes me wonder—is every meeting then a massive work of simultaneous translation? It kind of makes clear(er) why it’s so darned hard to hold a great, inclusive, dignity-centered meeting.At a show at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley last week, Big Thief was performing a new song, “It’s a Beautiful World,” when a heckler interrupted the performance. Lead singer Adrianne Lenker’s response is one I want to learn from. Rather than playing over the interruption or yelling back, Lenker stopped, stood quietly, and got herself centered. After a bit of awkward silence, she began to speak—slowly and gently,I’m just having a moment here. I love you all. I’m listening. And I’m feeling. I’m finding my own words here. I don’t want to speak reactively. I want to hear what you are feeling and make room for your expression, and also deeply speak from my heart. So, I’m taking a moment and I’m not panic-speaking … I’m just grateful that we can be standing in this space shoulder to shoulder in a peaceful way gathering … that’s something special, especially in these heavy times.
11. Work with positive intention. No meeting will work well if most of the participants do not see themselves as a positive part of a positive get-together. (If people come to a meeting trying to set traps or take everyone else down, it will be tough to stop them—even with the most skilled facilitation.) For me, it means, in part, each member of the group approaches the gathering with positive beliefs and a deep desire to make things work. When standard-issue meetings go awry, it’s often because people come in looking for a fight. In most cases (though not all—see the note about Adrianne Lenker above), they will find it.Here, we work to practice what Peter Block taught me 30 years ago to think of as “Stewardship”—in essence, it means treating everyone in the room, regardless of their formal role, as if they were an equal partner. Block writes,Partnership is so critical to stewardship. It balances responsibility … The questions “How would partners handle this?” and “What policy or structure would we create if this were a partnership?” are the two most useful questions I know in the search for the alternative to patriarchy.For things to work well, we need, I believe, to come in working for collaboration, understanding, uplifting others, and creative ideation—done with dignity in all directions. Sociologist Francesca Polletta points out that two commonly used forms of governance may sound ok, but are actually unhelpful options:What we want here, and what Polletta pushes for too, is “participatory” meetings, of which she writes,Participatory decision-making can build solidarity by pressing participants to recognize the legitimacy of other people’s reasoning.
    • “Adversary democracy,” which “assumes that people know their preferences before deliberation begins,” and also
    • “Nondemocratic systems,” hierarchically oriented organizations, “which assume that leaders know their followers’ interests better than the followers themselves do.”
12. Aspire to More Effective Question-Asking. As my business partner Paul Saginaw taught me so many years ago, “When furious, get curious.” Which means we need to flip frustration on its conversational head and effectively ask questions. Peter Block says, “A good question works on you.” In Freedom is an Endless Meeting, Francesca Polletta writes about Civil Rights activist and Highlander Folk School co-founder Myles Horton. She says that in a challenging meeting situation,Horton’s answer was to ask questions. “I use questions more than I do anything else. They don’t think of a question as intervening because they don’t realize that the reason you asked that question is because you know something. … Instead of you getting on a pinnacle you put them on a pinnacle.” Horton described a Highlander director in a workshop who “asks one question, and that one question turned that workshop around and completely moved it in a different direction.”I love what Peter Block says: “When we ask questions that are an invitation to hear each other, something is created. … Good questions can be considered as sacraments of silence.”
13. Be open to new possibilities. In a truly great meeting, the power of the group exceeds the sum total of people’s individual contributions. As Alina Stefanecu encourages us, we can learn to “imagine defiantly.”
14. End with appreciations. This is one of the best things we do in the ZCoB! In a nutshell, we end every meeting with at least a few minutes for folks to share heartfelt appreciation of anyone they want to appreciate. Some participants don’t say anything. Many do. It’s magical!

Remember that while the principles in the frameworks I’ve shared here will likely work anywhere, the details will be best worked out by those who will be part of the meeting. Stas’ Kazmierski helped bring the culture of effective meeting management into our ecosystem. During his many years as part of the ZCoB, Stas’ always taught us to “Adapt, not adopt.” Kurdish sociologist Dilar Dirik reminds us of much the same:

Every canton in Rojava has different structures. No commune is alike. The principles of democratic autonomy indeed have universal appeal, however, their implementation requires local proposals, adaptations, and actions.

If we do all this well, it’s remarkable how many good things can come from it. Our organizations get better, the lives of the people who participate are enhanced, and ultimately, the communities of which they are a part become more positive places to be as well. As Francesca Pollitti observes,

Participatory deliberation yields citizens who are more knowledgeable, public spirited, better able to see the connections between their own interests and those of others, and more willing to revalue their own interests.

I’ll leave you with the heartfelt words from our Kurdish huddle visitor, Akin Arslan. We fall short—I’m fully aware—in some parts of our work pretty much every day. Sometimes, though, it works:

Seeing what you and Zingerman’s have accomplished has been inspiring and healing. … You often mention the Kurdish saying “Resistance is life” (Berxwedan Jiyane). You see the hope there; you see the belief there. Thank you for bringing that belief back into my life and making me rethink about it. And thank you for your way of describing anarchism, it’s given me fresh excitement and energy at a time when I really needed it.

More on how we do what we do

Well-run, inclusive meetings offer a constructive act of resistance

This Thursday morning, from nine to noon, I’ll join about 80 coworkers for our monthly Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) huddle in the ZingTrain conference room. While a three-hour meeting might sound off-putting to many, I genuinely look forward to it. For me, the huddle is theologian Richard Rohr’s statement—“The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better”—put into real-life action. It is tangible evidence that people of different ages, backgrounds, job descriptions, levels of authority, and daily responsibilities can consistently gather to demonstrate what anarchist anthropologist David Graeber called “our capacity to come together as reasonable human beings and work out the resulting common problems.” In its own imperfect way, the huddle is a down-to-earth application of democratic practice, demonstrating, as Graeber writes, that each of us can quietly be “people who can make a difference in world events.”

To be clear, multi-hour-long meetings were not always events I was eager to attend. Like many folks who start small businesses, I spent years caught up in my distaste for the idea—and the reality—of spending much time in meetings. Start-ups, after all, are about action. New businesses—especially those fortunate enough to be busy from the get-go, as we were with the Deli—don’t offer much opportunity for sitting around the table talking. As I would have said at the time, not entirely inaccurately, we had much more “important” work to do.

That was then, but it is not, as you can already tell, now. As I explain in The Power of Beliefs in Business, negative beliefs of the sort I once held will always lead to negative outcomes. Great organizations, great lives—great anything—I now know, cannot be built on negative beliefs. I’m happy to say I have successfully changed my mind. Today, in 2025, I have a whole host of positive beliefs about what well-run meetings can make possible. Over the years, it has become eminently clear to me that effective, inclusive, collaborative meeting management—as we work hard to practice here in the ZCoB—is:

• An essential ingredient of running any organization and, more broadly, a cornerstone of healthy democratic constructs.
• A quiet but powerful form of positive resistance—when autocracy is on the rise, open, dignity-centered meetings counter the arbitrariness of behind-closed-doors autocratic rule and help to lay the foundation for healthier societies.

This last part, especially, is something I’ve only recently come to understand. Others, though, have seen it clearly for years. Journalist David Frum said it succinctly in 2017:

Democracy … is about meetings.

Years ago, I would have taken Frum’s statement in the context of what gets done in Congress. Today, I view it from a quite different perspective. Most of the meetings that make up the democracy David Frum is describing actually begin, not in Washington, but rather with what you and I do at work every day. In a country full of inclusive, dignity-based, effective meetings, Congressional hearings would look and sound far more constructive than they do currently. As my business partner of four-plus decades, Paul Saginaw, always says, one can learn to “disagree without being disagreeable.”

In this sense, our ZCoB-wide Thursday morning meeting is a small but meaningful contribution to making this an effectively operating, inclusively democratic country. Jason Stanley, professor at the University of Toronto and author of How Fascism Works, recently wrote me,

Workplace democracy is one of the central and most important topics in democratic political philosophy. It’s where the battle over authoritarianism is fought. … Democracy takes work.

In the free, “non-state,” democratic space of Kurdish Rojava (in Northern Syria), there is a widely repeated Kurdish expression: “Resistance is Life.” Which means that one way to resist, in troubled times when autocracy is on the rise, is to continue to live life in constructive, collaborative, inclusive, and effective ways—rather than slide into the sort of defensive reactivity and passive disengagement that dictators dream of. In Rojava, meetings akin to the one we will have on Thursday morning are also the norm. Writing about the Kurds’ work there, journalist Harry Waveney observed, “The most precious thing they have offered us is the truth that things can be different” from the way they are in most countries. That is very much my hope for our organization, too—that we show, despite the seemingly monolithic mainstream you see in most business news, that business really can be done differently.

A seemingly small but significant part of what makes our work work in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses is that we long ago learned to value what it takes to run a good meeting. When experts talk about why the ZCoB works as it does, they usually point to stuff like high-quality products, great customer service, memorable marketing, or maybe even Servant Leadership or Visioning. Good meeting management almost never makes the list!

The reality is that the hard work it takes to prepare and run a meeting is now so deeply embedded in our culture that casual observers barely notice it. Here, though, we don’t take it for granted. Leading and participating in well-run meetings are skills people learn through both formal systems and informal practice. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most folks who’ve been here five or six months—and have chosen to actively engage in our work (I know not everyone does)—can step into a range of meeting roles and, on the spot, start to do a solid job. They’re also well accustomed to being effective participants. And when we mess up, that shared skill set usually helps us quickly see where we went astray.

Much of the world, I know, skips right past this stuff. Photographer Tomasz Trzebiatowski, the founder of Frames, gave me a good way to understand the situation through the lens of photography. The work the public pays attention to—like reubens and rye bread, food tours and fried tofu—is centered in the light. But, as Trzebiatowski points out, light only makes sense in relation to what we usually miss: the shadows that give it shape and meaning:

We always say photography is about light, but maybe it’s really about shadows. … Light is obvious, right? It illuminates. It reveals. But without shadow, light is just brightness, flat, directionless, empty. Every photograph you have ever loved has shadows in it.

They shape the scene. They carve out the space. They give depth, drama, and tension. … Shadows are not the absence of light. They are the evidence that light has form, direction, and meaning.

So … don’t just chase the light. Listen for the shadows because they are the ones that make the photograph speak.

Well-run meetings, in this context, happen in the shadows of organizational life—they’re the behind-the-scenes infrastructure that’s essential but almost invisible to the average consumer. They aren’t actually hard to see; it’s just that hardly anyone looks. Most people are understandably drawn to the light—great products, profit-and-loss statements, inspiring speeches by bosses. But off to the side, in the organizational equivalent of the shadows, it’s the imperfect but consistent effectiveness of our meetings that makes everything else possible. The public takes no notice, but I know the reality: no good meetings, no pastrami, no profit, no people!

It is my strong belief that anyone who is a part of an organization that aspires to excellence would be wise to master good meeting skills. And, if people want to be part of a democratic construct—either at work or in the world around them—they, too, will need to learn them. Democracy, it turns out, doesn’t turn on what happens in Congress; to the contrary, it’s about how we run our Student Council when we’re in grade school. And as David Frum says, “The Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) … is the incubator of democracy.” What we do in our workplaces makes a difference in the world. All of which means that if we want an inclusive society, dedicated to due process and dignity, well-run business meetings are a really good place to begin.

Recent evidence for this fact of organizational life is coming in abundance right now from a fairly unlikely spot: Serbia. The student-led meetings and the pro-democracy demonstrations that emerge from them are remarkable. Of this grassroots work the Serbs are doing, historian Timothy Snyder wrote this past weekend, “Those who care about the future of democracy should know about them.”

The story in Serbia started last November, when the concrete canopy of the main railway station in Novi Sad, the country’s second largest city, collapsed onto the busy pavement below, killing 16 people and severely injuring another. In the aftermath, local students gathered to protest, demanding accountability and safer public infrastructure. Those first early acts of resistance have evolved into a mass movement actively advocating for the end of autocratic rule and the reinstatement of democratic norms and due process in the country. They have been doing this work, impressively and very effectively, for over 10 months now.

Unfortunately, the Serbian government has often responded to these peaceful demonstrations with violence and provocation. In a panel discussion held in Brno in the Czech Republic last spring, one Serb student caught my attention when she commented on the government’s actions,

Something really scary, really terrifying happened in our country.

While the situation here in the U.S. is not the same as in Serbia, I can still relate to what she says. Scary and strange things seem to be happening here in our country almost every day. In that sense, we are all faced with the same situation the students in Serbia were—we can stand aside, or we can find peaceful, positive ways to stand up and be seen.

How can we do that? Good meetings aren’t glamorous, but they are a good way to stick to our principles. Timothy Snyder recently urged, “Resistance requires an openness to learning from others.” While we seem to be unsure of what to do, the student-led movement in Serbia has organized itself by running hundreds of regular open meetings—what they call plenums—in which inclusion and consensus are very much the norm. Instead of becoming more militant in response to autocratic attacks, they have put their energies into holding remarkable meetings.

Who knew? Running good meetings can be seen as an act of meaningful resistance. In early June, the Serb Student u svakom selu (“A student in every village”) program posted a message on its Instagram that we could all take to heart: “Ask yourself a question—Who is ‘building’ your future? So exercise your right, be a part of the change!”

There’s a lot to be said for the impact of their approach. The journal Balkan Insight titled a long article about the movement: “Serbia’s Student Plenums: A Blueprint for Renewing Democracy.” In April, Serbian sociologist at the University of Belgrade, Suzana Ignjatović, wrote about the students’ good work: “Through plenums and public gatherings, people involved in Serbia’s protest movement are trying to reclaim public institutions.” The impact has far exceeded what most observers might have imagined. Plenums, she points out,

… are not just a technical tool, but the ideological pillar of the student movement. In the manual for plenums, students encourage people to organise zborovi, or public gatherings, as “plenums for citizens,” and even offer training. In this sense, direct democracy has been rediscovered as a long-forgotten political method. … All important decisions are made in plenums, including on strategy going forward. … A plenum-type gathering is a first-aid kit for patchwork democracy, rooted in the belief that political change from below is possible.

Learning to run effective, inclusive, equitable meetings helps you, and it helps the people you work with. It helps your organization to function far more effectively. And learning to be an effective participant in those meetings is, I have learned, a prerequisite for being a good long-term citizen. When we do it well, the world around us is made better in the process. Artist and head of Black Mountain College for many years, Josef Albers—who escaped from Germany in the years before the Nazis took power—wrote,

To distribute material possessions
Is to divide them

to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them

This multiplication is what is happening in well-run meetings in healthy organizations. Everyone involved comes out ahead. People do productive work and learn how to be active, constructive citizens at the same time.

What the Serbs are doing is parallel, in a positive way, to what is happening in the Kurdish communities of Northern Syria. In the above-mentioned article entitled “Resistance is Life” in the journal Planet, Welsh writer Harry Waveney describes the Kurdish concept of hevaltî. One Kurdish friend here called it “comradeship.” Waveney compares it to the idea of peer-to-peer friendship and support. Hevaltî, not competition and conflict, is what the Kurdish resistance movement is organized around. Like the plenums in Serbia, the Kurds have woven effective, equity-based meeting management into the way they work. It is how they run their lives. Author Janet Biehl, who has written a number of books about Rojava, says, “There are many meetings, of course. … it’s a very communal society, a very communitarian society, so it’s part and parcel of their life.” This is pretty much how I would describe life in the ZCoB as well.

Through these meetings, the Kurds in Rojava are changing lives and running their country. Waveney writes,

The Rojava revolution is hevaltî generalised, and it is not limited to the borders of Northeast Syria. It exists within those who fight for it, worldwide. It is friendship rendered at the level of politics.

These are not mere romantic affectations but how the Kurds and their allies will often describe their achievements, and the key to their success. Their goal is nothing less than the total transformation of life. … The Rojava revolution gives ordinary people the freedom and power to say, I am here.

Showing up to participate in the day-to-day governance of their communities—or in our case, our company—makes a huge difference. It is an entrée to dignity, an act of active inclusion in all directions, a way to learn to participate and to own one’s own power.

This work of effective meeting management is not as easy to do well as cynics on the outside might imagine. Running good meetings is hard work, but it’s good work. And it demonstrates in a down-to-earth, wonderfully humble way that no matter what happens around us, we are here doing good, inclusive work every day. It makes real what Kurds in Rojava say regularly: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Good meetings aren’t magic. As Kurdish sociologist Dilar Dirik writes, we do them, “Not because these things are perfect, but because things are possible—through faith and struggle.”

Anarchist Howard Ehrlich writes, “If we are not actively involved in building the new society today, it is unlikely that we will be involved tomorrow.” In the context of which, inclusive, well-run meetings show—on a small scale—what is possible. They invite and organize the kind of constructive conversation that is critical to this work. And they make happen what Ehrlich is advocating: “The goal of organizing ourselves collectively is to empower each and every member of the collective.” Thursday’s meeting is open to anyone who works in the ZCoB. And, even if they’ve only worked with us for a couple of weeks, we pay them to come and participate.

If you think what you do at work won’t make much difference, take note that what started as small student gatherings in Serbia is now a mass movement. In March, over half a million people marched together, peacefully, in the capital city of Belgrade. Essentially, the way the students in Serbia are bringing democratic practice to their day-to-day decision-making is changing the culture of the country. The practice of the plenum is spreading. As Timothy Snyder writes, “Serbs did not have to be students to understand the students. And the students gave them something to understand.”

In only 10 months, the impact has been significant in ways I don’t think anyone would have imagined a year ago at this time. The Serbian sociologist Suzana Ignjatović says,

Plenums have become popular across Serbian society—among schoolteachers, parents of schoolchildren, public libraries, university professors, and local communities. Everyone has been encouraged by students to exercise direct democracy. … Almost every public protest can turn into a plenum about some issue.

When all is said and done, if we want to have democratic constructs—in companies or countries—it is imperative that we learn how to run a good meeting. Susan Griffin, writing in Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, says, “It is perhaps what democracy is in the end: a meeting.” Running meetings is not what most people go into business to do, but it is what anyone who wants their business to run well—and to model what’s possible in the most positive way—needs to learn.

In 1965, the Students for a Democratic Society, which was founded here in Ann Arbor five years earlier, put out a photocopied pamphlet called A Movement of Many Voices, written “for those who wish to devote themselves to organizing activity for a summer or longer.” In it, they remind us that, “Movements begin when people get together to think out loud about the kind of city they might help create.” One person in the piece came up with a quip that has had me smiling for days:

Freedom is an endless meeting.

Democratic engagement of diverse voices—here in the ZCoB or anywhere—can only happen if there is a near-constant conversation. Done well, it’s remarkably effective: different perspectives are processed with dignity, clear decisions are made, meaningful notes taken, plans shaped, and business gets done. Done poorly … you don’t need me to tell you—it’s a mess.

Learning to do this work is not something that’s just for a handful of leaders. To the contrary, knowing what I know now, I wish we had learned it when we were little kids in school. After all, if we can’t get together and converse constructively, make meaningful decisions, and get moving in an agreed-upon direction, things—quite simply—won’t work. As Nigerian author and poet Chinua Achebe once wrote, “A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.” The same holds true in organizations: if we don’t actively teach people how to participate in governance, what they learn—or don’t learn—will make a huge difference.

In an era in which civics classes have been just another victim of budget cuts and focus on science and math, many people have nowhere in which they can learn these critical community-building skills. The good news, organizations like ours can do it, right now!

John Tropman, University of Michigan professor of Social Work, writes in Fixing Broken Meetings, “Decisions are the lifeblood of organizational jobs, tasks, and work. … [and] there is a deeper structure to decision making than most people appreciate.” That structure is what learning to run good meetings makes possible.

Next week, I will share a lot more about the basics of how we run meetings—as I’ve said, it’s not all that glamorous, but it’s something no organization, of any size, should work without. Their impact on our work, as you can tell from all of that I’ve written here, has been enormous. Sticking to our inclusive, dignity-centric practices of gathering consistently and constructively is an act of quiet but meaningful resistance. The news is all over the place, but we are still right here, getting together and doing our work as we have done for many years now. As the Kurds in Rojava say, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

In his terrific small book, On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder’s second lesson for those who want to resist the imposition of authoritarian rule is “Defend institutions.” He says,

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So choose an institution you care about—a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union—and take its side.

Continuing to run good meetings, as Thursday morning’s ZCoB-wide gathering at ZingTrain will surely be, is our effort to defend our own institution. Many companies have made clear that they did not really mean it when they posted their “principles” online. We, I believe, are quietly working hard to stick to ours. And lo and behold, I now see, well-run meetings are actually at the center of that work.

I would never have imagined 43 years ago that we would be known here at Zingerman’s for the quality and effectiveness of our meetings—imperfect but nevertheless important models of what some form of democratic engagement can look like in practice. When they write our history, it may certainly say that we had a great corned beef sandwich, we could bake some delicious bread, and that we were deeply dedicated to both customer service and community. It would make me smile if some history student half a century into the future added in at least a footnote: “They ran some darned good meetings.”

Build a great business

P.S. Next month, on Wednesday, October 15, and Thursday, October 16, I’ll be co-leading the Zingerman’s Experience Seminar with ZingTrain managing partner Katie Frank. It is, I believe, one of the best ways to understand what makes the culture here in the ZCoB unique—to see what, in the words of photographer Tomasz Trzebiatowski, is in the “light” of organizational life as well as what usually remains in the “shadows,” only for insiders to experience. Lots of great learning—and plenty of delicious food to boot!

Small is beautiful at our amazing space in Dexter

Been thinking about a wedding that feels magical and meaningful for you and the one you love? A lot of couples dream of a one-of-a-kind, exceptionally heartfelt, beautiful ceremony. What they don’t dream about, though, is the mountain of stress that often comes with a big wedding. Guest lists running into the hundreds, endless seating charts, skyrocketing budgets, and the pressure of orchestrating an all-day production can quickly turn much-anticipated joy into agonizing overwhelm. After hearing those struggles from guests for years, the caring crew at Corman Farms created a very special style of small wedding with big impact: “The Tiny Weddings are essentially an elopement for the couple who wants the simplicity of a courthouse wedding but envisions a beautifully curated experience.”

In his classic 1973 business book, Small is Beautiful, progressive business thinker E.F. Schumacher famously says, “Any fool can make things complicated; it requires a genius to make things simple.” In the last couple years, the crew at Cornman Farms has figured out how to do the latter when it comes to getting married. Make it much simpler, but without sacrificing any of the majesty, beauty, and grace that can get lost when one gets married quickly at City Hall.

A Tiny Wedding at Cornman means the two of you, the loving couple, along with a handful of friends and family, coming together to joyfully celebrate the big day. It is both small and beautiful! The whole of a Tiny Wedding takes place over the course of an hour and a half, and it’s all done with far less complexity than the more typical big ceremony. When it’s over, you will have celebrated your love and life commitments at the award-winning, beautifully restored 1830s farmhouse at Cornman Farms in Dexter. A 15-to-20-minute drive west from the Deli, and not far up the road from the Roadhouse, Cornman has that remarkable combination of being both easy access from town, but in a setting that is still really quite rural.

The Tiny Weddings are small in size (2-10 people), but could be the quickest-growing category at Cornman. Tabitha Mason, one of the two co-managing partners, says, “Over the years, we’ve marked off more and more days to host this series of all-inclusive micro weddings in partnership with the best local Michigan wedding vendors.”

What’s included in The Tiny Wedding package? A really wonderful little wedding ceremony with a totally official officiant and so much more. The key thing to get across is that if you want to get married in a small, intimate context, at a compellingly beautiful place, this is your shot. It is surely a less stressful way to tie the knot, and still make the event marvelously memorable. Smaller size, lower cost, fewer logistics, and less lead time mean you’ll have more time, money, and energy to invest in other ways. Click the button below to get on the list for notification when the Winter 2026 Tiny Weddings are available.

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P.S. Want to do something bigger in size? Cornman also does wonderful weddings for up to 75 people!