Why better questions matter more than most of us might believe

While researching vulnerability for last week’s essay, I stumbled across a directive from Ocean Vuong—the celebrated poet, novelist, and teacher—that urges us to “learn to question the questions.”

I’ve been thinking about his statement ever since.

Along similar lines, my friend Peter Block, the remarkable writer and philosopher, posits, “A good question works on you.” Here are a handful that have been working on me all week:

• Why does the quality of our questions have such an impact on the quality of our work?
• How can I learn, as Ocean Vuong advised, to better question the questions?
• What can I do over time to get better at asking better questions?
• What happens when an organization can collectively improve the quality of the questions it asks?

In his exceptional book Community (which I’ve read something like six times), Block writes that a great question is “ambiguous, personal, and stressful.” This has certainly been my experience with each of the four questions above. That said, I’m striving every day to accept that there will be no easy or quick answers to any of them. In fact, I have the feeling I’ll be at this work for the rest of my life.

What follows is an exploration of my own curiosity about questions, and about the impact of having an organization that learns to ask them ever more effectively.

To be clear, this is not the kind of essay that will arrive at a finite set of conclusions. My emphasis, instead, is my imperfect effort to better understand the import of asking better questions. The essay is only an entrée—a beginning—for a curious human (namely, me) who, in the spirit of vulnerability, has spent a lifetime both asking and being asked questions, yet has given relatively little thought over all those years to the craft of asking them well. If some clarity arises in the form of answers, that’s awesome. If not, then I’m working to align myself more closely with Peter Block’s wise words: “Questions bring us together. Answers divide us.”

Avoiding my own impulse to offer immediate answers is anything but easy for me. As the oldest kid in my family, I grew up feeling as if I was “supposed” to have an answer to nearly anything anyone asked. It’s not hard to see why, then, as an adult, my instinct still leans toward coming up with those answers. Undoing decades of conditioning will not, I know, be a quick process—but I’m committed to doing the work!

Why is it so important to take on this challenge? Nationally known speaker, leadership coach, and author Tony Robbins puts it pretty succinctly: “The quality of your questions determines the quality of your life.” Which means, then, the more effectively I can learn to bring better-quality questions to the fore—and come up with them when I’m feeling pressured and on the spot—the better my life and leadership are likely to be.

In the context of what I wrote about beliefs a few weeks back, what we believe has a huge influence on the kinds of questions we will ask. The insightful writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry demonstrates this well in his classic work The Unsettling of America, drawing the distinction between a person who comes to exploit the land and another who arrives instead as a nurturer:

I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter’s goal is money, profit; the nurturer’s goal is health—his land’s health, his own, his family’s, his community’s, his country’s. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity? (That is: How much can be taken from it without diminishing it? What can it produce dependably for an indefinite time?) 

Berry’s framing helped me see clearly how changing the question can completely alter the way things unfold. Two different approaches, with very different questions, driving diametrically different outcomes. Not surprisingly, I see our organization as a nurturer. As Berry explains, 

The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible.

In another of his wonderful books, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters, Peter Block writes that a question that begins with the word “how” “looks for the answer outside of us. It is an indirect expression of our doubts.” With that in mind, Block offers a very helpful set of half a dozen questions to stop asking (I have certainly asked them all many times over the years), and also, for each, a more effective way to ask a comparable question.

How do you do it? becomes What refusal have I been postponing?

How long will it take? becomes What commitment am I willing to make?

How much does it cost? becomes What is the price I am willing to pay?

How do you get those people to change? becomes What is my contribution to the problem I am concerned with?

How do we measure it? becomes What is the crossroad at which I find myself at this point in my life/work?

How are other people doing it successfully? becomes What do we want to create together?

While each of the six original questions has some merit on its own, they are not, per Peter Block, anywhere close to optimal. The “how” questions, I can see now, all seem to lead in impersonal directions. The answers may be interesting, but soon enough, they almost always invite disagreement—even argument. They’re not the kinds of questions that can bring together disparate views to cast things in a whole new light. 

All of which now leaves me wondering: How many times over the years have I and others here fallen into exactly this kind of rut, asking the narrow, controversy-causing “hows” that Block is trying to teach us to avoid? 

By contrast, the questions he suggests in place of the “hows” drive us to dig deeper—to explore our hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities. In this spirit, he challenges us:

If we could agree that for six months we would not ask How?, something in our lives, our institutions, and our culture might shift for the better. It would force us to engage in conversations about why we do what we do, as individuals and as institutions. It would create the space for longer discussions about purpose, about what is worth doing. It would refocus our attention on deciding what is the right question, rather than what is the right answer.

I can’t help but smile imagining the response I would get if I were to propose that everyone at Zingerman’s avoid the word “how” for half a year! So rather than propose this, I’ll start by practicing it. At the very least, I can explore how well I do with this challenge personally before I try to take it to the next, collective level. The work is about reframing and rethinking—building new intellectual habits and better question-asking discipline.

Writing about his longtime friend Peter Koestenbaum, the business philosopher and writer who died in 2024 at the age of 96, Peter Block says,

It is [his] willingness to reframe, turn, and even invert a question that creates the depth and opening for authentic change. Questions take on an almost sacred dimension when they are valued for their own sake. This is in stark contrast to the common need for answers and quick formulaic action.

Reflecting on all this, I realize that from the get-go back in 1982, we were already asking questions that were quite different from those of the mainstream business community. Looking back, here’s a list of what it seems we were asking of ourselves—and the world—when we were preparing to open the Deli 44 years ago:

• What if we didn’t try to grow our business as large as possible, as fast as possible?
• Why do so many other food businesses assume that customers can’t tell the difference between truly great food and only so-so fare?
• … And what makes them believe that people aren’t willing to pay for higher quality?
• What if, instead of settling for what’s working well enough to get by, we continuously pushed ourselves to make everything better?
• What if we treated everyone with dignity and care, rather than acting as if they’re just another interaction/transaction on the way to making more money?
• What if we committed to creating uniqueness—instead of the replication that has become so common in the Industrial Era? (Or, as Wendell Berry pithily puts it, “plopping a cookie cutter down on dough.”)

As organizations evolve over time, and the greater ecosystem around us does the same, the questions we pose need to evolve as well. Moving into the present moment, I find myself thinking about the questions I and others here have been asking in recent years:

• When it comes time to consider succession planning, what do you do with your business if you want to keep it local and within the community that made it possible for you to stay in operation for so many years? Our answer was to create the Perpetual Purpose Trust.
• Do you have to consolidate ownership the way we read about over and over again in the business pages? Our answer: you don’t. We now have 18 Managing Partners and over 300 staff members who own what we call a “Community Share.”
• Do you need to think and make decisions hierarchically? Our answer, again, is you don’t—hence, we have been running the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses by consensus of our Partners Group for 31 years.
• What if you decided to engage with everyone—regardless of position—as if they were a partner? (This is the idea embedded in Peter Block’s superb Stewardship.)
• What do we do when autocracy is on the rise all around us and we continue to try to be more and more democratic in the way we work? My answer is in the “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet.

In the coming weeks, I’ll keep reflecting on other questions that have been unconsciously driving our work over the years, while also exploring tools to help us ask better ones. I believe this could become a meaningful part of what we do.

In this context, the work of a leader becomes to help reshape, reframe, and rewrite the suboptimal questions that so many are stuck with. Peter Koestenbaum shares more:

People come to me because they want to make more money. I ask questions like, “Who are you?” “What are you?” Ultimately, the toughest question is, “What kind of a person are you going to be?”

The latter strikes me as a better question to ask in an interview or a performance review—or, really, any difficult conversation—than the more typical, “How do you handle stressful situations?” 

Questions, I’m seeing now, can be a critical means of accessing new insight. When we’re faced with a challenging situation, it’s important to turn away from the anxiety of arriving at quick answers and, instead, to get more curious about the questions themselves. As Ocean Vuong writes,

You’re working on a poem or a story, when you’re hitting a dead end, when it’s not going, take it with you. Get away from the desk. Now you have to work with your body. Maybe there’s questions you’re not asking. 

Jacqueline Rose’s most recent book, On Violence and On Violence Against Women, explores this subject in intriguing ways. In The New York Review of Books, Christine Smallwood writes,

What has the most force in Rose’s thinking are not her conclusions but her questions. “What, in moments of historical crisis, is being passed down from one generation to the next?” she asks in a chapter on Rhodes Must Fall. “What do we not want to know about the past? What do we not want to know about ourselves?” … The question “What do we not want to know about the past?” has no single or definitive answer, and no book can resolve it. But we must keep asking the question.

Rose’s question regarding what we don’t want to know about the past seems apt on many levels—certainly in the context of the vulnerability I wrote about last week, and my own understanding of the way my personal past influences how I show up in the world every day. It’s also vitally relevant for all of us in this country. Until we can come to agreement on what happened in the past, it’s hard to imagine being able to effectively move forward together into a positive future.

It comes as no coincidence that the most creative people—the people I’ve learned the most from over the years—are those who are themselves asking better questions. One of them is On Being’s Krista Tippett, who has been doing this for decades now on her award-winning podcast, and who offers some great insights into the power and significance of asking better questions:

I also find a question to be a mighty form of words, and I have learned a few things about questions. I have learned that questions elicit answers in their likeness—that answers rise or fall to the questions they meet. We’ve all seen this. We’ve all experienced it. It’s very hard to respond to a combative question with anything but a combative answer. It’s almost impossible to transcend a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. But the opposite is also true: it’s hard to resist a generous question. This is a skill that needs relearning, but I believe that we all have it in us to ask questions that invite, that draw forth searching in dignity and revelation. There is something redemptive and lifegiving about asking a better question.

Better questions, I’m realizing, create more authentic engagement and more thoughtful answers. They call for the kind of purposeful reflection Peter Block believes is possible, rather than the rushed action of simply pushing for an answer. Exploring the ethics of a situation becomes more important than mere effectiveness. Block reiterates his core point here:

The right questions are about values, purpose, aesthetics, human connection, and deeper philosophical inquiry. To experience the fullness of working and living, we need to be willing to address questions that we know have no answer. When we ask How? we limit ourselves to questions for which there is likely to be an answer, and this has major implications for all that we care about. The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts. The challenge is to acknowledge that just because something works, it doesn’t mean that it matters.

If “how” has such a narrowing effect, then what word opens us up to new possibilities? Block says,

Yes is the answer—if not the antithesis—to How? Yes expresses our willingness to claim our freedom and use it to discover the real meaning of commitment, which is to say Yes to causes that make no clear offer of a return, to say Yes when we do not have the mastery, or the methodology, to know how to get where we want to go. Yes affirms the value of participation, of being a player instead of a spectator to our own experience. Yes affirms the existence of a destination beyond material gain, for organizations as well as individuals.

A poem I love by singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer offers an artistic perspective on all this. These are the opening lines (and you can read the whole piece here):

“A Box with No Sides”

I have never written a song because
I had an answer.
I write songs because I have questions.
I write questions because
An answer presumes an ending,
This is this and that is that.
An answer alone has very few open spaces
With no room for returning to the well
For checking the map
Maybe retracing my steps
To walk the same path
But to see with new eyes …

Newcomer’s framing is, indeed, aligned with this exploration—and also, I recognize now, with my two most recent pamphlets. Both are based on, and built out of, questions that were very close to my heart—questions that pushed me to research and reflect for months and years before arriving at enough clarity to put something in print. “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace” emerged from a question that was essentially, “How do I deal with despair over the violent, heartless act of an authoritarian leader over whom I have no influence?” Similarly, “Why Democracy Matters” arose from my struggle to deal with the coming apart of the rule of law and the democratic constructs that I, for one, have taken for granted for far too long in our civic life. I can say now that although there was no clear answer to either question up front, over many months of study and reflection, I truly learned a lot. Those learnings have already influenced my own thinking enormously, and they’ve begun to sink roots into our organizational culture as well as the keynotes and training work I do through ZingTrain. 

I’ll close with the beautiful, inspiring words of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Letters to a Young Poet, written in the early 20th century. I’ve read this passage countless times before, but in the context of all I’ve gleaned working on this week’s essay, I see it now in a much deeper and more meaningful light. 

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

It’s clear I have many new questions to consider throughout my days, and I will need to remind myself regularly to stop stressing out when I don’t have an immediate answer. (To the eight-year-old, answer-focused child in me, I offer Peter Block’s sage words: “There is always something that cannot be explained.”) Instead, I will lean lovingly and gently into the questions, and I look forward to all the compelling, curiosity-driven learning to come. 

Lean in. Live the questions. See what comes of it. Let me know what you learn!

Find some answers

P.S. All this reminds me now of a framework I developed for helping new leaders to succeed. It’s called “Twenty Questions for Managers.” I haven’t used it in ages, but now I’m wondering if I ought to bring it back! Email me at [email protected] if you’d like a copy.

Baguette, hand-cut prosciutto, cultured butter, and Emmentaler

If you’re looking for a remarkable sandwich you can whip up at home in minutes, something so tasty you might well be thinking about it many days after you eat, try this. I’ve eaten it four times in the last few weeks. Terrifically tasty!

As with pretty much all the food we make and eat around here, the key is the quality of the ingredients. Each of these four is world-class on its own—together they really make for a magical symphony of flavors.

The French Baguette from the Bakehouse is the base of the whole thing. When I teach the “Welcome to ZCoB” new staff orientation class, we do a quick product tasting to demonstrate to folks how much difference there is between what’s typically sold in supermarkets and what we do at the Bakehouse. It really is night and day, and the tasting quickly makes an impression on everyone! Sweeter (even though no sugar is added), butterier (even though we use no dairy in it).

Hand-cut, three-year-old Prosciutto di Parma at the Deli right now is from the family-owned and run Pio Tosini. The hams are all made by hand at the Pio Tosini plant. Carefully hand-salted, turned regularly, slowly matured as they have been for 150 years, and checked closely before they’re shipped. Delicate, a bit nutty, lovely finish. Because the Deli staff still hand-slices, the texture and flavor are protected right up until you buy some.

Vermont Creamery Cultured Butter has been a hugely positive addition to our food in the last few years here in the ZCoB. The cream, all from local farms, is allowed to ripen as it would have done centuries ago. Be sure the butter is at room temperature so it’s easily spreadable and its full flavor comes to the fore.

Last but not least, the Emmentaler Réserve cheese. This is the real thing, and man, it is really good! The current wheel we have at the Deli is especially delicious. Over 19 months of maturing, it’s got a lovely nuttiness, a sprinkling of those tyrosine crystals that develop naturally after the sort of long aging this cheese has. It’s a particularly dense and delicious batch of the cheese, so even if you aren’t going to make this sandwich, it’s still worth checking out!

Putting all four together is pretty straightforward. Slice the fresh baguette horizontally. Spread both sides with a generous amount of butter. You can decide how much, but for context, this is a European-style sandwich, not a Deli Reuben, so the amount of butter you use might seem like a lot. Then add a few slices of ham and cheese. Great with a salad of spring greens!

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Sharing struggles can change lives and organizations for the better

In a piece published in the winter issue of The Boston Review, author Vivian Gornick (whose work on Emma Goldman and on the topic of rereading I’ve found wonderfully helpful) shares the story of an interaction she had many years ago with one Mr. Sperber, a Polish-Jewish émigré who was living in her building in Manhattan. The two, the older émigré and the young writer recently moved to the city, found themselves riding in the elevator together. The elevator stopped at a floor before the lobby, and the door opened. A teenaged Black resident was waiting to get on. For whatever reason, a young Gornick acted in one of those small, easily dismissed ways that actually push others away—she made a face that clearly conveyed a negative reaction. The unspoken racism so common in that era (and now) came through in a matter of seconds. The young man responded with dignity: “I’ll wait.” Her reaction wasn’t purposefully intended to cause harm, but nevertheless, it did.

Mr. Sperber could, as I might well have done when I was young, have said nothing at all and let the incident pass without comment or controversy. Instead, he decided to make himself vulnerable by sharing uninvited insight. In doing so, he gracefully and powerfully made Ms. Gornick aware of the painful impact that her unconscious beliefs had just had. He shared one line of pointed insight: “One must remain human until the last moment.” She saw things, suddenly, in a new light. In essence, Mr. Sperber effectively changed Vivian Gornick’s nascent beliefs. Half a century later, Sperber’s quiet, dignified response has continued to illuminate Gornick’s life and her writing.

Part of being human, I have learned over the years, is learning to be meaningfully vulnerable, both at work and out of work. We all have embarrassing, anxious, and uncertain moments in our lives. Whether we have the courage to share them constructively is another story altogether. By continuing to tell the story of Mr. Sperber all these years later, a story in which her own embarrassing ethical error is at the center, Gornick is demonstrating the import of vulnerability, which seems certain to have contributed to her own successful work as a writer over the years. As critic Clem Cecil says of Gornick, “her writing is all about getting to the vulnerable heart of things.” She certainly did here, and she regularly writes about her own shortfalls. I, with Mr. Sperber’s sentence in my head, keep thinking back on any number of situations where I acted, unthinkingly, unintentionally, in similarly uncaring ways. Like Gornick, my intentions weren’t bad, but my impact certainly was.

While most Americans have been trained to hide it, vulnerability could well be a key to a more positive future for all of us. In an article in the Harvard Gazette, poet Tracy K. Smith says,

In order to get to community, we have to go quiet, slow down, allow ourselves to be both vulnerable and brave.

Bringing bravery and vulnerability into one holistic and healthy existence is no small achievement. While it sounds straightforward, it is, in my experience, far harder to do than it is to suggest. And although bravery hits the headlines regularly, and the stories of seemingly heroic, brilliant entrepreneurial business leaders get a great deal of attention, the vulnerability part gets far less notice. We would be wise to work to bring the balance that Smith’s lovingly written sentence implies.

Back around the time we opened the Deli, in 1982, when I was roughly the same age as Vivian Gornick was when she got to know Mr. Sperber, I’m pretty sure I would have failed to succeed in Smith’s simple framework of courage and bravery. Well, at least on one level, we had had the guts to open our own business, all the more notable because we’d done it smack dab in the middle of such difficult economic times (interest rates were 18%; unemployment was very high). As for the other half of Smith’s call to action, vulnerability, I’m completely confident that it was in my vocabulary. It was not, though, on the list of leadership “tools” I could then call on.

Of course, to be clear, at some point early in my life, I did have it. Being vulnerable is an inherent element of being human. Like all infants, I was born vulnerable. Looking back now, I believe I lost my ability to express it effectively pretty early on in my life. Being the oldest kid with parents who got divorced when I was only three didn’t help. Neither did the fact that I grew up in a family that showed very little emotion. Nor did the reality of the stereotypical, unexpressive American male of that era. I can see now that, like it or not, I lost my natural vulnerability pretty quickly. It took me many years to get it back. By the time I realized that I had a really hard time being vulnerable, I was probably around 30. Therapy, a lot of reading, a men’s group, journaling, and learning how to have a different kind of conversation—one in which vulnerability was the norm—all helped me grow close to the sort of blend of bravery and courage that Tracy Smith speaks about.

What follows here is a first, and inevitably highly imperfect, attempt to both gain and then give some more clarity to the role that vulnerability plays in our organizations. To get at it, I drew, of course, on some of my own experience, along with insights from a pair of poets, an 84-year-old Dutch management consultant, a couple of really cool rock stars, and an array of wise and well-researched writers from whom I learn a lot. One of them, of course, is Brene Brown, whose 2012 book, Daring Greatly, was, in many ways, the insight that brought the idea that vulnerability is an essential element of healthy, everyday living out into the open. As Brown says, “Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.” Her TEDx talk “The Power of Vulnerability,” recorded in her hometown of Houston back in 2010, remains one of the five most-watched in history.

Last fall, I was a participant in a pretty high-level meeting. That alone, of course, is hardly remarkable. It’s a rare day I’m not part of one or two. With pretty much all our meetings here at Zingerman’s, we open up with some sort of icebreaker, a way to get “everyone’s voice in the room.” Sometimes it’s a simple, “What’s your energy, 0 to 10?” In other instances, it’s more engaged—an intro that may well still start with an energy score (it’s very helpful to hear where each other is at, the better to know how to be patient and kind to each other), but also a few minutes for each person to share how they’re really doing. The latter, in the interest of meaningful connection, is by far my personal preference—over the course of a couple of minutes, I can learn a lot about what’s going on with each person, and I can share my own ups and downs. In my experience, that kind of connection makes it infinitely easier for those in the group to be supportive, empathic, and compassionate with each other. How much each person shares is, of course, up to them, though I would forecast that in general, given the openness and emphasis on emotional intelligence that we have here in our culture, people tend to share much more than they would in most organizations.

Anyway, in this meeting, my attention was grabbed when, about halfway through everyone answering the icebreaker, one of the participants, someone who I would not have expected to share at this level, opened up with the group about the challenges she’s dealing with right now with one of her kids. “It’s a lot harder than I thought it was going to be,” she added. The response from the group couldn’t have been better. Support and empathy in the moment, and offers of additional help and support continued to come during the day. 

In stereotypical corporate cultures, someone who spoke publicly like that might well be quietly referred to HR to learn how to keep her problems out of the workplace and develop better boundaries. Here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), it’s essentially the opposite. Her story and struggle were welcomed. To my eye, her vulnerability elevated her standing with the group and generated even more support than she’d always had.

To me, it was all a really positive sign about the health of our culture and a testament to what so many people are working to create. I did not understand it all back when we opened in the ’80s, but it’s now very clear to me that effective expression of vulnerability is an essential element to living a healthy and rewarding life. Doing it reasonably well in a group is a critical component for any democratic construct, practiced either in companies or in countries. We cannot have an effective democracy without vulnerability.

That story is hardly the only example of ZCoBbers being vulnerable like that. In fact, around here, 44 years after we opened, vulnerability is probably more the norm than not. People will share during icebreakers about what they’re dealing with—their aging parents’ health, kids’ struggles in school, challenges and achievements at work, etc. There’s no drama really. It’s just on the level, shared and heard, far more often than not, with love.

This is not, though, I know, the norm in other places. One Zingerman’s alum is currently working in Minneapolis at a large bank. When tensions were at their peak with ICE incursions into the city, around here, it was not uncommon for folks to mention their anxiety about the situation. When I asked our former coworker what people were saying, his response shocked me: “Honestly, people in the office aren’t even talking about it. It’s like it’s not happening, even though it’s all around us.”

In a fall 2022 film from the remarkable Danish nonprofit Louisiana Channel, poet and author Ocean Vuong offers, “My vulnerability is my power.” Lo, that we were living in communities, companies, and countries where Vuong’s words would already be true for all involved. In a 2023 interview with Service 95, Vuong elaborated on the impact of vulnerability:

I think when we approach vulnerability as a common and perhaps even natural condition of our species (we are, after all, a relatively soft and physically defenceless species, hardy in groups and wilting when isolated), we’re able to connect with each other in a less superficial way. You realise that, especially in adults, when the masks of strength have been forced on us, or when we’ve calcified them through conditioning, we mostly operate in the community with performances of strength and success—when, in fact, we might very well be full of doubts, anger, fear, and grief. So giving each other permission to put down the shields in order to see each other’s faces more clearly is a gift. Vulnerability is as true and connected to us as our skin. Everything else is fabric.

As different as my life story is from Ocean Vuong’s, what he writes is very much applicable to my own childhood experience.

While we don’t necessarily call it out all that often, the truth, I’ve been realizing, is that a significant part of what has made our organization what it is is that we have made it possible for people to be vulnerable in their work. As Ocean Vuong alludes, vulnerability in this context is a strength, not a weakness. David Whyte, the insightful writer whose work on the idea of “Unordinary” I wrote a bunch about a few weeks ago, affirms Vuong’s views, saying:

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

Running from vulnerability is probably how I spent the first half of my life. When I was somewhere around 30 years old, I realized there was actually another way, a way that helped me start to make Tracy K. Smith’s call to blend bravery and courage into a reality. As Whyte writes,

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability—how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance. Our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant, and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

How would people learn to practice vulnerability, to walk wholeheartedly through David Whyte’s metaphorical door and make it happen? It’s a good question and one that, to be honest, I’d never thought much about until the last few weeks. In great part, much of the learning about vulnerability has to be cultural. People see other people being real and opening their hearts, while retaining their professionalism, and still getting a lot of work done. Over time, I imagine, they pick up on the reality that it’s okay to share more openly than they might have in other jobs. It’s also, I see now, developed in our systems and frameworks:

• In our Statement of Beliefs, we state specifically that we believe in humility and also in the value of asking for help.
• Open-book management means that new staff see numbers shared that are both good and bad. And at huddles, people will regularly talk about the stress of not being as profitable as they would prefer, sales falling short, etc.
• Visioning, by definition, is about putting one’s heart and soul out on paper. Done well, it’s always a bit scary (and always powerful)!
• The six elements of dignity call for honoring the humanity of everyone we work with (including our own) and being authentic without acting out.
• Our Courageous Conversations class calls on all of us to be vulnerable in the interest of having better conversations and deeper, more effective connections.

Part of what’s drawn me to this conversation of late is the realization that, in a sense, democracy and autocracy are key players in a struggle between organizational structures: one in which healthy vulnerability is encouraged and honored as important (democracy) and constructs in which vulnerability from leaders is anything but okay (autocratic settings). Which means that if we want to work and live in democratic constructs, we would be wise to talk about vulnerability a lot more often than most of us do!

Autocrats, of course, have a strong aversion to showing vulnerability. While they are happy to have everyone they dominate be vulnerable, they themselves generally project images of perfection, the heroic leader who saves—and dominates—the day. Dutch author and consultant Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, born in 1942 during WWII and now 84 years old, has authored just under 50 books. Depending on your life priorities, you might be even more impressed that he was apparently the first fly fisherman in Outer Mongolia. He has some of the most insightful work I’ve found on how and why autocrats are almost unable to express vulnerability. That doesn’t mean they aren’t vulnerable—clearly, Jung and Robert Bly’s shadow work taught me that what I/we/anyone hides is almost always the part of themselves they need to let out. Clearly, history tells us that in time, all authoritarians eventually fall. Sunday’s elections in Hungary evidenced that in real time!

Kets de Vries has decades of experience to draw on, and he sees the situation quite clearly: autocracy and vulnerability do not go well together. In an interview with INSEAD, he helps to illustrate clearly and directly why it becomes almost impossible to run a healthy, emotionally intelligent organization in which vulnerability is encouraged inside an autocratic ecosystem. To create a healthy organization, Kets de Vries says, “You need to be somewhat open and vulnerable in front of other people.” To do that, though, many of us, me included, have to overcome suboptimal experiences with vulnerability from back when we were kids. As Kets de Vries goes on to explain,

Many bullies had a disturbed childhood. They often grew up in homes with little warmth and positive adult attention, raised by emotionally and physically abusive caretakers. Such an environment would have quickly taught them that vulnerability leads to abuse and that the best defence is to lash out. By becoming bullies themselves, they gain more control over their lives and compensate for the lack of attention (or the abuse) they experienced at home.

…

Autocratic leaders … may also be projecting their own feelings of vulnerability onto their victims. In order to avoid feeling ashamed and humiliated for their own shortcomings, they go to great lengths to shame and humiliate others.

I’ve seen all this, I’m sorry to say, in up-close action over the years, even inside our own organization. They are nearly always well-meaning people who are drawn to our values, but have unresolved childhood challenges—often challenges they aren’t even open with themselves about—that lead them to take actions that are way out of alignment. Like Vivian Gornick and the elevator incident, intellectual intentions are positive, but unconscious beliefs and the actions that come out of them are anything but. It rarely goes well. They hide their vulnerability and then act out unproductively on those around them. The results are never good. In the end, they either arrive at a personal epiphany and shift their direction or they end up leaving the organization. What Kets de Vries describes here sounds a lot like what we’ve seen in the news in any number of countries, and it’s all too common in companies, too:

This fantasy of omnipotence often coexists with a profound fear of dependency. Dictators frequently experience reliance on others—institutions, advisors, expertise—as humiliating or even dangerous. Dependency implies vulnerability, and vulnerability threatens their grandiose self. The solution to these uncomfortable feelings is domination. Institutions are hollowed out. Independent courts, media, and bureaucracies are subordinated or destroyed. Advisors are chosen for loyalty rather than competence. Authority becomes personalized.

Here in the ZCoB, given our efforts to think and work in non-hierarchical ways, it’s probably a bit easier to explore vulnerability. We stress regularly that managers and partners are also just people, flawed and trying to figure things out. Still, I know, it can be awkward. Where does one draw the line? How much sharing is too much? How little is too little? Does not sharing make a manager seem aloof and egocentric? If they make themselves very vulnerable, will staff lose respect or take advantage?

Around here, though, I’d say, we benefit most of the time from erring on the side of being slightly too open. In his book Norwegian Wood, writer Haruki Murakami, who I quoted quite a bit in my “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet, asks, “What happens when people open their hearts?” His answer is simple and direct, and really, all the evidence I need to embrace the belief that regular and effectively expressed vulnerability leads to improvements at every level: “They get better.”

Musician David Bowie might not have been who I would have thought to look to for insight on this subject, but upon further reflection, it makes complete sense. Art, by definition, draws on vulnerability. As Brene Brown says, “There is no creativity without vulnerability,” and I will say from my extensive writing experience that that could not be more true. Artists like Bowie who work so well at the creative edge do it even more so. Bowie observes:

If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

My own experience with vulnerability seems very aligned with what Australian musician and writer Nick Cave posits. To be real, to share openly and effectively, to do it in ways that enhance connection, strengthen relationships, and open doors to new possibilities and creative connections. Cave, whose been very open in writing and talking about the pain of losing his son in 2022,

I like the idea of a robust vulnerability. That seems to make sense to me—the notion that there is a certain power or strength that can be obtained from opening oneself to the world, or by laying things bare. …

What is virtually impossible to see within a mirror is that the very essence of our humanness, our vulnerability and fragility, is the most beautiful thing we possess. … But those who have no awareness of their own fragility, who present themselves as overconfident, armoured-up and invulnerable, sacrifice the essence of what makes them both human and beautiful. … Vulnerability is the very thing that permits us to connect with each other, to recognise in others the same discomfort they have with themselves and with their place in the world. Vulnerability is the engine of compassion, and can be a superpower, a special vision that allows us to see the quivering, wounded inner world that most of us possess.

Even in non-autocratic settings, there remains the reality that it’s difficult for most leaders and managers to be effectively vulnerable with their staff. The more hierarchical the organization, the more difficult it is to do well. In a 2019 article entitled “The Cure for the Loneliness of Command,” Manfred Kets de Vries observes:

Hierarchy creates a power distance. The weight of responsibility for others makes it harder to speak to anyone with vulnerability and true honesty. This unease goes both ways: Even if CEOs try to minimise the distance, their subordinates will always be cognisant of their boss’ ability to make decisions that can dramatically affect their careers. CEOs must be close enough to relate to their subordinates, but also distanced enough to motivate them. It’s a delicate dance.

As you can tell, this is not easy work to do. It begins, I believe, with a better understanding of ourselves. The more effectively we get in touch with ourselves, access our essence, and feel grounded in our own dignity, the more effectively we can do it. As Tracy K. Smith says, effectively blending and balancing courage and vulnerability. In fact, it dawned on me that the way we define “full flavor” here at Zingerman’s—complexity, balance, and finish—is wholly applicable to effective expression! A well-shared message honors the complexity of nearly every situation, does so in a reasonably balanced way, and self-manages into a long and healthy “finish.”

Author Audre Lord advises, “That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” And when we do it with dignity, it all gets more powerful still. Her words resonate. All these years later, it is still hard for me to do. To talk about parts of my past that I’m not the proudest of. Getting divorced. Closing a business. Bad customer complaints. Partnerships that didn’t work out. Decisions I felt good about, but that turned out to be suboptimal. Bad grades on papers I can still remember from when I was in school. Recipes published that I later realized could have been written better. Getting caught cutting corners when I was a kid after I’d promised I wouldn’t. Typos in books. Fear of failure. Snippets of cynicism spoken aloud when I wish I’d kept my mouth shut.

I will, I know now, struggle with this sort of stuff for the rest of my life. I miss my friend Melvin. Every time I release new print pieces—books, pamphlets, this enews every week—it is, as David Bowie described so well, a time when my “feet are barely touching the bottom.” As you know, I live with uncertainty about the seeming state of our country, and also about the economic issues we all face every day.

Intellectually, I know that we’re all imperfect and that, however I’ve erred, it could have been far, far worse. I have trained myself to talk about all of them in the right settings (I think at least). It remains awkward, no matter how much I know in my head that there’s no shame now in any of them. Intellectual understanding, of course, does not immediately equate to emotional intelligence. And even though I know what author, sculptor, and painter Anne Truitt says, that “vulnerability is a guardian of integrity,” to be true, it all remains rather awkward and uncomfortable.

Vulnerability, even when it’s well-expressed, rarely emerges into the world in a linear form. And it certainly doesn’t fit mainstream stereotypes of what strong leaders are like. John Moriarty, the Irish writer and philosopher of whom I wrote so much last week, shares a lovely story that helped me settle into the idea of what vulnerability might mean in the context of an organization. While watching handyman Bill Joyce cutting stone at Ballinahinch Castle, Moriarty became convinced that Bill was cutting it crooked. He mentioned it to him as diplomatically and in as dignified a way as he could. Taking his time and very reflectively, Bill answered, “This is a grand old castle, John, a grand old place, and in a grand old place like this, the only way to cut anything straight is to cut it crooked.” We are all, in that sense, imperfectly crooked stones trying to fit into some great, grand old castles.

I’ll leave the last words here for Brene Brown, who remains something of a guru on the subject:

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.

And these days, to my eye, we can use all the light we can get!

Mindful management

P.S. I will be sharing thoughts on subjects like the value of vulnerability with Chip Conley on our late May retreat at Chip’s Modern Elder Academy in Santa Fe, Radical Wisdom: The Natural Laws of Business & A Meaningful Life. It runs from May 24–28. This is a one-time-only event, a coming together of two long-time friends who share values, a belief in writing, teaching, and sharing what we’ve learned in the hopes of helping others.

P.P.S. Speaking of Chip, sharing and vulnerability, here’s a short clip of a conversation with Seth Godin, where he shares how Chip, when he was his fellow student at Stanford, really helped Seth move forward with his life in business.

P.P.P.S. And here’s a podcast I did with Chip. The opening line: “Anarchism isn’t chaos. It might be the key to better leadership.”

Making a healthier organization in the process

When you know what to look for, the impact of beliefs on everything we do and experience is impossible to miss. Unfortunately, most of the world isn’t looking.

Fifteen years ago, I was still a member of the latter. I was going about my days with no idea of the power of beliefs in business or in my life in general. I realize now that I could easily have missed the opportunity altogether. It’s only because of my lifelong beliefs that a) there’s always more to learn and and b) we can learn from anyone and anywhere that I was even open to the opportunity. At the time, learning the self-fulfilling belief cycle seemed like a small thing. All these years later, I can see that small learning lifted up every aspect of my life.

To be clear, my life was already pretty good back when I began learning about beliefs; understanding the impact our beliefs have and realizing that we can change our beliefs if they aren’t contributing to the reality we seek, simply made my life, my leadership, and my work significantly better still. The benefits are already big, and they continue to get bigger all the time.

In the 1967 book, Conversations in Maine, activist and author Grace Lee Boggs writes that “we are creating the ideas for the next historical moment in history.”

The work with the beliefs is, without doubt, one of those ideas.

Scientist Bruce Lipton, in his book, The Biology of Belief, sums up some of the impact of beliefs work quite well:

I was exhilarated by the new realization that I could change the character of my life by changing my beliefs. I was instantly energized because I realized that there was a science-based path that would take me from my job as a perennial “victim” to my new position as “co-creator” of my destiny.

To be clear, what I have learned about beliefs over the years, and what we have put to work here at Zingerman’s, is just as available to anyone else who’s interested as it has been for us here. What follows is my appeal to anyone who’s even the least bit intrigued to examine, explore, and experiment with what the understanding of beliefs can mean in your own life. Beliefs, to be blunt, are a big deal. And in the chaotic, challenging world in which we’re living, we could use and benefit from that work now more than ever.

This focus on beliefs is the understanding that as the “root system of our lives,” they are a critical part of any personal or organizational ecosystem. No one would suggest farming without attending to the roots of the plants we’re planning to grow. This work, though, is hardly mainstream. I don’t think I’ve seen or heard anyone on national news suggesting that more attention to the role of beliefs would help to bring countries and companies together far more effectively and ethically. And yet, I will suggest, working with beliefs can have a really big impact (at no really no financial cost whatsoever!).

The Irish poet, mystic, and writer John Moriarty was one of the few people I’ve come across who understood the import of beliefs many years ago. Of course, insightful and way out of the mainstream thinker that he was, the power of beliefs was only one of many things he understood with amazing insight.

In 2007, Lilliput Press published a posthumous collection of essays by Moriarty, entitled A Hut at the Edge of the Village. In a comment that seems well-suited to my anarchist orientation, Moriarty makes a statement in the book that can guide us all, both in our companies, our communities, and our country. It seems as true today as it was when he wrote it many years ago:

When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights rarely come from parliament, senate, or committee, they tend to come from a hut at the edge of the village. Let’s go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.

The import of beliefs, I believe, is one of those insights. Help and hope are both waiting.

If you don’t already know John Moriarty’s work, let me be clear: it is not your everyday writing. Moriarty wrote a lot, but he was not cranking out page-turning mystery novels. Martin Shaw, who wrote the foreword for A Hut at the Edge of the Village, says of Moriarty’s work, “His writing is a massive thing to approach. Out where the buses don’t park.” The great Irish writer of the 21st century, Manchán Magan, who passed away at the age of 50 this past fall, would say that Moriarty’s work was where he would turn any time he felt clueless about how to go forward. Moriarty, Manchán says, is “Ireland’s most underrated deep thinker, a philosopher of the ditches and bog in the hedgerow, a druid or a mad Gaelic shaman.” Moriarty’s writing is weighty, the kind of stuff that makes you take pause, consider, go back, reread, and reconsider. A bit at times like listening to someone describe a waking dream, Moriarty brings together ancient Irish culture, pre-modern Christianity, Native American traditions he learned while teaching in Western Canada, and his own insightful sense of the world. Moriarty (and Manchán for that matter) is the sort of thinker and writer who just might get you to change some of your long-held beliefs.

I never had the honor of meeting John Moriarty in person, but I’ve read enough and heard sufficient stories from those who did to know that he was a very special human being. When he was interviewed by Andy O’Mahony of RTÉ Radio 1 in Ireland in 1985, O’Mahony, who had been doing interviews professionally for 25 years at that point, introduced Moriarty, saying: “My guest tonight is the most remarkable person I have ever met.” In Moriarty’s obituary in 2007, The Guardian called him, “A mystic and prophet in the Old Testament meaning of the word, his was an inspiring vision of a world and a culture that is truly healing.” Martin Shaw says that when you read Moriarty, “there is a continual emphasis on how we move from seeing to beholding the world around us. This move is the key to spiritual progress and mythic deepening. It changes everything.”

All of which is, I believe, also true of the work about beliefs that follows. It has, absolutely, significantly altered both the way I see the world and the way I behave, and it has definitely been a key to spiritual progress and mythic deepening. And when it comes to my work, my leadership, my life, and my sense of the world, it has absolutely changed everything!

So, what’s the main message here?

Simply that starting to share the way beliefs work in our lives more widely, and then doing thoughtful and meaningful self-reflection, will make a big difference. Since so few people understand that they even have beliefs about things like asking for help or women in leadership, awareness alone is a positive step forward. Understanding that we can change our beliefs in order to get different outcomes might be even more surprising to many people. As far as I know, the work is not taught or talked about in business schools, but it could not be clearer to me that making beliefs work a regular part of our days can make all the difference. And in that sense, we don’t need to wait for others to make our world right. We can get to work today and make better organizational health and resistance to autocracy wherever they might appear in effective daily realities. Per Grace Lee Boggs’ comment above, this is one of those ideas that can prepare us to think more effectively in the uncertain historical time in which we are living.

Over the last month or so, the impact of beliefs—built up over the last 10 or 12 years—has been front and center for me. So much so that I wanted to bring it in from the edges toward the center, where, I believe, anyone who’s interested in engaging with the power of beliefs can benefit big time, whether the tourist buses park there or not! As you’ll see in the various stories below, beliefs seem to keep showing up for me almost everywhere I turn. A keynote to a large group of physicians, an aha moment for a good friend who has decades of experience in business, the history of Ukrainian Easter eggs, and a young Czech writer’s efforts to make the music world a much more positive place to be. In short, it sure seems like everywhere I turn, I see the impact of the beliefs we work on here. I take the length of the list as a sign that the work is gaining momentum.

This string of belief-centered stories started a couple weeks ago, when I flew down to Atlanta to give the opening keynote to 1000-plus people at the Association of Academic Radiologists annual conference. The topic for the one-hour talk was, of course, “The Power of Beliefs.” After I spoke, I had a lot of one-on-one interactions where folks shared how impactful the work was for them. One attendee was in tears. Curious, I gently asked if he’d be willing to share more about what had been so meaningful about the learning. He shook his head to show me he didn’t want to get into it, and just said, “It really helped me a lot with something I’ve been struggling with.”

Later that evening, I did a book event at my friend Michael Shemtov’s Atlanta coffee shop, The Daily. Michael interviewed me for an hour or so, and then the group of attendees turned the gathering into a lively and engaging conversation. We talked primarily about the new pamphlet, “Why Democracy Matters,” but I touched on all the various books and pamphlets I’ve written, including The Power of Beliefs in Business. A week or so later, Michael messaged me to say how much he enjoyed the conversation. “The biggest takeaway I had was that you can’t get positive outcomes from negative beliefs. I’ve been telling everyone I talk to!”

The following Sunday, I taught Welcome to the ZCoB, our new staff orientation class, as I do regularly throughout the year. At the end, we have everyone in the class share their biggest learning from the session. The most common answer that morning? You guessed it. The work around what I’d taught them about our Self-Fulfilling Belief Cycle (more on this in a minute).

Two weeks later, I spent a couple of days co-teaching here in Ann Arbor at ZingTrain with my friend, the Irish writer and story activist, Gareth Higgins. Our topic? The impact of stories and beliefs on our leadership, our lives, and our work. As it has been the other two times we taught it (the seminar debuted at ZingTrain at the end of 2024), the work, for many, is literally life-changing. During the seminar, Gareth referenced John Moriarty a number of times, including sharing a story about a guy walking past John Moriarty on a back road in Connemara who, out of habit, asked, “How are you?” As Gareth tells it, “Moriarty stopped and kept the chap for 10 minutes talking about the metaphysical/cosmic/quantum physical/poetic aspects of that reality!” Which in turn reminded me to go back and restudy some of Moriarty’s work. Fascinated by the philosopher’s free thinking, I pulled out my old books and started to sift my way through the many videos that are up online.

While I was mulling over Moriarty’s writing, one of the attendees from the seminar that Gareth and I had co-taught texted me a week later to share:

Wanted to let you know that I used the “This I Believe” exercise in a tough meeting that was very heated with emotion. I started everybody off with a three-minute hot pen on everything they believed about the situation, positive and negative. Then I had them start—their positive responses and add three more. We each shared one of our positive beliefs and found a lot of common ground. I told them that was the mindset we needed to enter this meeting and share our thoughts with each other. It really helped to diffuse the emotions and get everybody in the right mindset.

I was happily surprised to hear how quickly what we’d taught only the week before was having a positive impact on an already healthy organization, trying, as it always has, to get better still.

Following Gareth’s lead, I took a deep dive back into John Moriarty’s work. In a tape titled with what Moriarty said many times was his goal in life (“Seeking to walk beautifully on the earth”), and recorded long before I’d given an iota of thought to the power of beliefs, Moriarty was talking through a version of the belief cycle in action:

Beliefs aren’t just movements in my mind that don’t leave my mind. Beliefs are actions. Beliefs about the Irish, they became actions in Drogheda. ….Nazi German beliefs about Jewish persons, they became actions, so beliefs are actions.

(Drogheda is a reference to the events in September 1649, when Oliver Cromwell’s English forces killed between 2,000 and 4,000 innocent Irish in the town in an act of angry revenge. If you’ve heard American leaders use the phrase “no quarter” in recent weeks during the war in Iran, situations like Drogheda are what they’re talking about—the idea of taking revenge and acting out their anger by killing everyone they could get their hands on.)

As you can tell, the presence and impact of beliefs kept growing bigger and bigger. Which is why, to be honest, I’m writing about it here. All of these stories about how much difference the work around beliefs has made makes me want to share it again here in the hopes that it might help a handful or two of others.

How does all this belief cycle stuff work? In a nutshell, for those who aren’t yet familiar with it, it goes like this:

Starting at the top (thinking about the illustration as a clock, we’re at 12:00), we all have thousands of beliefs. Beliefs about everything from books to bread, ways to work to days of the week. Based on our beliefs, we take action (at 3:00). And it turns out every action we take, other than an instinct like ducking if a ball is thrown at us, is based on our beliefs. Based on our actions, the people around us form beliefs of their own (6:00), and based on their beliefs, they too will take action. AND … here’s the big insight for me: 95% or so of the time, their action will reinforce the original belief. As late 19th-/early 20th-century psychologist William James once wrote, “Belief creates the actual fact.” Adding to that short synopsis, between 12:00 and 3:00, there’s what I call a filter—scientists would call it confirmation bias. We all filter out what does not support our beliefs. And we take in what does support them. Which is why, I learned, the saying, “I’ll believe it when I see it,” is backwards. It ought to say the inverse: “I’ll see it when I believe it.”

The beautiful thing about the beliefs work for me is that the learnings keep coming. Here’s one I stumbled on last week, something that helped explain why so many people are impacted so quickly by the belief cycle. 

In a 2010 article entitled “Learning By Doing: A Theory Of Learning Which Advocates Reading How-To Manuals, Only After Extensive Hands-On Direct Experience, And Then Only When There Is Need For Help & Guidance,” Professor Henry Gurr explains how humans generally learn best by doing, and only really by doing when there is a relevant situation in which try out the learning at hand. Gurr was a huge fan of and advocate for the writing about quality done by Robert Pirsig’s 1974 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. (I wrote a bunch about it a few years ago.)

Gurr’s “real job” (his quotes, not mine) was in experimental nuclear and neutrino physics, as well as a university professor and physics teacher. Gurr’s beliefs were so impacted by Pirsig’s book when he read it in 1995 that he essentially built the rest of his life around it, devoting years to retracing every bit of the Minneapolis to San Francisco motorcycle journey that’s the focus of the book. Later, Gurr applied Pirsig’s beliefs about quality to learning processes. Gurr writes,

Learning by doing at its best. You learn faster this way!! And you remember more this way!!! … And as you are doing this, of course => Watch How Your Mind Works!

I realized that one of the reasons the beliefs work connects with people is that it’s almost always “learning by doing.” It’s not just an academic exercise. Everyone has beliefs that are helping them already.

One of Gurr’s main areas of study was what he called “Flashes of Insight.” The realization that a very high percentage of really important learning comes up quickly, essentially out of the blue, not from the long-term linear approach to learning that’s encouraged in our educational system. By contrast, epiphanies of the sort Gurr is focused on often emerge quickly in moments we weren’t expecting them. This is, I’m sure, what happened that morning in Atlanta when the physician who thanked me with tears in his eyes—I doubt he came to the conference expecting that to happen.

A “Flash of Insight” is absolutely what happened to me when I learned this work 15 or so years ago. I was reading Bob and Judith Wright’s book Transformed. There were plenty of good learnings to be found. I like the Wrights’ work and have benefited from other insights of theirs in the past. Still, I was not expecting to have my world changed while I was reading. But sure enough, out of the blue, on page 109, I came across the visual model—the self-fulfilling belief cycle that we have now been teaching here for over a decade.

It was one of those situations akin to what John Moriarty once described about coming upon a door where we didn’t expect to find anything.

And now … a door, and we lift the latch. And how strange is it to stumble on the path that takes us to that door. And how strange it is to lift that latch. And how strange it is to hear that voice. And how strange it is to discover we were always so near home.

It sounds silly to me to say it now, but the truth is that I had never thought about the impact our beliefs have on our lives. This is, I realize too, what happens to a whole host of people when they hear me teach it too. Once one has the “Flash of Insight,” everything suddenly shifts. Things that were confusing for ages now appear in a way that makes total sense. In a talk given four years ago next week at the University of South Carolina Aiken, “An Explanation of Best Available Theory of ‘How Our Mind Works,” Gurr said, “Spontaneous insight comes out of unconscious broad brain processes, and you only know it when you have the flash of insight or mental arrival.”

For me, the flash of insight was just how HUGE this new learning was. Once I grasped what the self-fulfilling belief cycle was all about, it almost immediately became clear how hugely impactful the idea was. I started studying and realized it was even more impactful than I’d initially imagined. Which in turn brought more flashes of insight, more studying, more flashes, more insight. The belief cycle, I could suddenly see, was everywhere. I studied and had more flashes of insight, more reflection, studied more, and over the ensuing few years, it turned into a 600-page book, The Power of Beliefs in Business.

What I realized that week is that so many of the people who learn the belief cycle model for the first time experience the same sort of “Flash of Insight.” Why? Because, to Henry Gurr’s good point, nearly everyone who learns it can immediately apply it to a real-life practical situation they’re struggling with. Unlike many learnings that begin with an academic explanation that only later might be applied to real life, the belief cycle is at work all day, every day in all of our lives.

John Moriarty used to say, “The quest for the greater world is a request for a greater vision of the world we already live in.” The beliefs work, I believe, allows us to do just that. It opens the door for anyone interested to make a positive difference in every part of their lives—to self-manage more effectively, reduce stress, increase influence, and enhance enjoyment.

What can you do to make the work on beliefs come alive in your organization?

It’s more straightforward than many might think:

1. Start teaching the belief cycle to everyone in your organization The reality is that so few people even know that they have beliefs, that just sharing the model alone can be a big eye-opener!
2. Bring up beliefs in conversations. Rather than getting stuck in arguments and thoughts, as I learned how to do so well growing up, you’ll see that conversations start to shift in good ways when beliefs are woven in. What long-standing belief of yours is causing problems? What beliefs are really benefiting? Which beliefs might need to change?
3. Gently highlight areas of different beliefs. This is a way to show folks what you’re talking about. No judgement. It can be done with grace by simply asking questions: What do you believe about this situation? What do you believe about yourself? Where did those beliefs come from?
4. Remind everyone that beliefs can be changed. Secret #43 is “A Recipe for Changing a Belief.” The new “Why Democracy Matters” is a written reflection of my much-changed beliefs on the subject.
5. Consider writing a Statement of Beliefs. I believe ever more strongly that the work on a Statement of Beliefs can be as positively impactful as doing a long-term vision. The good news is that we can do both!

With beliefs in mind, I was happily surprised to get this seasonally timely learning on the history of Ukrainian Easter eggs, or pysanky, from the wonderful writer Darya Zorka. You can read her whole essay here. I thought it was a fascinating example of how beliefs play out in quiet ways in our lives, more often than not, without people even realizing it. As you’ll see, the social beliefs about the eggs changed significantly over time, but the belief that the eggs themselves were incredibly meaningful was so deeply held that it outlasted a whole host of very significant social changes.

Pysanky are no ordinary Easter eggs. As Zorka writes, “Ukrainian pysanky are among the most extraordinary Easter eggs in the world.” In ancient Ukrainian societies, the sun was seen as the most important of all the gods. And because birds were the only animals that could fly closer to the sun, they—and their eggs—were believed to have magical powers. When Christianity came to Kievan Rus in 988, the importance of eggs shifted from the sun to Jesus’ resurrection. In other words, the belief supporting the import of pysanky changed, but the import of the beautifully decorated Easter eggs was unchanged. When the Bolsheviks took power and the Soviet regime tried to eradicate Ukrainian culture, pysanky were banned. It was Ukrainians who lived, metaphorically, at the “edge of the village” in remote communities in the mountains. Their devotion and their belief in the import of pysanky kept the tradition going even when they risked going to jail for making them. In 1991, the Soviet Union fell and Ukraine regained its independence. And as Zorka writes, “When the Soviet Union collapsed, pysanky began their revival. Right now, it is one of the most cherished Ukrainian traditions and is deservedly recognized as the cultural heritage of humanity.” Bottom line? Over the course of history, beliefs changed plenty of times, but the pysanky stayed a critical component of Ukrainian culture.

The fact that we can build momentum around the power of positive beliefs and that those beliefs can make a difference was reaffirmed for me this past weekend when I read the enews from Filip at Start Trak. The founder of Z Tapes in Prague, which puts out music from an array of little-known Eastern European artists (he’s Slovak), Filip writes quite insightfully about the music world. And this week’s column is all about choosing positive beliefs. Writing about record reviews and music journalism, Filip encourages us all to begin our work with positive beliefs:

When I look around, I see a lot of negativity surrounding me in music-related topics. The critique or negativity is appropriate, as many things suck. Streaming, AI in music, major labels, shipping costs, social media platforms, living costs, and more. The reasons to be sad or discouraged are so many that you might think there is not an inch of positivity in the music world. I must admit that often, I contribute my negative thoughts to the pool of negativity. … However, I would love for us to take a step back and start thinking more positively.

Instead of writing a post about the streaming situation, you could write one promoting your friend’s music. Instead of feeling hopeless and seeing everything around you crumbling, think about how you can contribute to making the lives of other musicians better. Buy a tape or music on Bandcamp and write them a nice note. You could send them an email expressing how much their music means to you. You could start a blog or write for a blog like ours to share your passion for music.

In Night Journey to Buddh Gaia, John Moriarty writes, “A graffito on a gable in Spain reads, ‘How sad to be young and not want to change the world.’” He adapted it to: “How sad to be any age, nine or ninety, and not want to change the world.”

The work around beliefs, I am confident, is one way to make those changes happen. The fact that the changes are coming from the metaphorical huts at the edges of our villages rather than national headlines only reaffirms my belief that this is the route to positive change. Who knows how many great doors might open. The work around beliefs, as I said up top, has already improved my own life and our organization enormously. It has the power to do the same for countless others. There’s so much to learn, so many flashes of insight to have, so many epiphanies to experience, so many beliefs to be changed for the better. The immensity of the opportunity leads me to something John Moriarty used to say,

When people ask me are you happy, I’d say that isn’t quite the question. The real question is, am I still growing? Have I become a finished creation? Am I dead or am I still growing? Is my life still an adventure, an adventure full of trouble, full of joy, full of pain, full of cataclysm? Am I still living dangerously? So, “Am I still growing?” is the real question.

I realize that I can say with confidence that, thanks in great part to the impact of beliefs work, my answer to that last question is an adamant, “Absolutely!” Take a little time, explore the work around beliefs, either some of what I’ve written, or elsewhere, and examine what it might mean in your own life. Let me know what you learn.

A bundle of beliefs

P.S. The Power of Beliefs in Business book, as well as the various single essay pamphlets from the book, and our Statement of Beliefs are all on ZingermansPress.com and ZingTrain.com.

Trying out a different way to stay centered

Last week, while struggling to sort through how to stay centered and lead effectively through the ongoing rise of autocracy on a national level—as well as work through some of the feelings of loss I’ve shared in recent weeks—I went back to Adam Gopnik’s October 2025 essay in The New Yorker, “How to Endure Authoritarianism.” In it, Gopnik takes a good, long look at the various beliefs and practices of an array of Eastern Europeans who effectively resisted Soviet and Russian rule:

The essential insight of the dissidents … was that resistance against authoritarianism begins as much in the pre-political or nonpolitical arenas as it does in politics. That was Václav Havel’s constant point in the former Czechoslovakia, about the necessity of building “parallel structures” to the centralized authoritarian one, writing that all attempts by society to resist the pressure of the system have their beginnings in the pre-political arena.

What follows is an exploration of one small technique that could help make some of what the Eastern European dissidents recommended possible. It aligns closely with the guidance from Gopnik’s interviewees: seek out small, practical, and positive ways to stay true to ourselves and our values.

On the surface, this process I’ve been exploring is not political in the least, though certainly many artists have used it to express their political views. It’s all about the creation of calm, centered spaces in our own minds—nurturing self-reflection and clarity—so that we can live better lives and lead more effectively while we’re at it.

In the spring of 1966, leadership guru Peter Drucker published The Effective Executive, the 9th of 40 books he would write over the course of his 94 years on the planet. I read it not long after we opened the Deli. It’s loaded with insightful ideas, including Drucker’s belief that effective leaders are not born knowing how to be great leaders. We all, he makes clear, need to learn leadership effectiveness:

I have not come across a single “natural”: an executive who was born to be effective. All the effective ones had to learn to be effective. And all of them had to practice effectiveness until it became a habit. But all the ones who worked to make themselves effective executives succeeded in doing so. Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned.

Drucker also adds a reminder of what here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) we would think of as Natural Law of Business #8: “To get to greatness you’ve got to keep getting better, all the time!” No matter how much good stuff I may have going, there’s always more out there to benefit from. “Knowledge,” Drucker reminds all who will listen, “has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes.”

I can’t honestly remember which experts I was listening to the other day, but as their conversation about the news grew ever grimmer, one speaker tried to frame things in a more hopeful light: “Look, things are starting to swing back. In five years, maybe 10, I’m really confident we’ll find ourselves in an age of national generosity and dignity.” I agree. Regardless of how things look today, we are headed in the right direction!

At the same time, I’m not sure I have the patience to sit back and wait. Five years may be short in the grand sweep of history, but it’s a really long time on a personal level—I need help a whole lot sooner than that! As you might know from reading Managing Ourselves, I already do many things to stay centered, but exceptional times call for extra self-management tools. Starting to work more with poetry and a poetic approach to leadership have absolutely been a plus. But still, I’ve found myself wanting for something else, another approach that wouldn’t take a ton of time, or cost a lot, and could be done regularly.

As I was reflecting on the idea of new skills I might want to explore, one suddenly jumped out at me that I had never given much thought to in my life: collage. It could well be, I began to realize, just what I’ve been looking for. Collage offers a path to put things together in new and often eye-opening ways, to reconsider well-accepted constructs, and to start to see new connections. The practice helps us improve our knowledge by adding another creative tool to our leadership toolkit.

It might be easy to dismiss collage as some silly thing we learned in school as sixth graders, but, I see now, there’s so much more to it. As I explored collage further and progressed in my studies, I came across a whole host of descriptions and histories about the high-art process of collage, introduced in its modern form in the early 20th century by artist friends Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It was actually the great American artist Robert Motherwell who most quickly caught my attention. In an interview I read from the early 1950s, he said,

Collage is the 20th century’s greatest innovation.

Coming from someone of Motherwell’s stature—a celebrated American artist of the modern era—that’s not a small statement. In 1943, arts patron and longtime supporter of radical artists Peggy Guggenheim announced plans for a major collage survey in New York City. The exhibition would bring together European pioneers like Braque and Picasso alongside a new generation of American artists. Guggenheim, who admired Motherwell’s work, encouraged him to try collage. Although Motherwell had spent many years focused on painting, he accepted her suggestion and began exploring the medium. The shift proved transformative, and he went on to become one of the most renowned collage artists in history:

I felt a magical release. I took to it, as they say, as a duck to water … Collage is the only way one can refer to everything one knows in a single picture. As [choreographer, George] Balanchine said, “None of us create. What we do is assemble what is out there.”

To be upfront, collage is not something I’d previously have considered doing in the slightest. Like journaling 35 years ago, I had low-grade negative beliefs about it. It seemed like something we were taught in school or at summer camp. In fact, I remembered while writing this, I still have the collage I made in my senior year of high school!

Starting to understand that an artist like Motherwell held collage in such high regard, with nothing to lose, no cost to speak of, and a lot to gain, I’ve decided to give collage a try in the coming weeks. I’ve certainly benefited enormously from a whole host of other “unorthodox” business practices like visioning, belief cycles, energy management, journaling, hot pen, and more. Thinking aloud in the moment of a collage I might create, I can imagine images of my good friend Melvin Parson’s smiling face, or Cornman Farms, of intense national headlines, an array of drawings of apricots, cut outs of articles I’ve been inspired by, and photos of Archie, the blind and deaf little senior Shih Tzu that Tammie rescued 18 months ago (he’s doing great!).

In a sense, I would suggest, collage is a wonderful way to put poetry on the page with images and words. In fact, Czech collagist Jiri Kolar imagined his collages as “non-verbal poems.” Robert Motherwell once shared his belief that “Everything can be collaged,” which helped me realize that, in a way, I write by collaging various ideas and insights from others as a way to come out and share my own. Even here, so far, it’s a diverse list of Adam Gopnik, Peter Drucker, Robert Motherwell, and more.

The more I’ve studied collage, the more it seems surprisingly well suited to our times—a way to bring together seemingly disparate ideas, beliefs, or people into one frame. Max Ernst, one of the great artists and collagists of the 20th century, says, “Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.” With the way divisiveness is playing out in the country, collage sounds like a creative tool that could help more people come together. After all, the origin of its name quite literally means “to stick together.” And it sure seems we could use a lot of that these days!

Pavel Zoubok, owner of the Zoubok Gallery in New York, which specializes in collage, says,

People are naturally drawn to the tradition [of collage] because it encompasses the things we know, the things we live with, and it embraces them out of a preservationist impulse—to save something that otherwise would be thrown away … It’s a more democratic medium—in theory we can all make a collage. … On the whole, culture has become increasingly collagelike, thanks largely to the Internet. The idea of thinking in layers and seeing in layers has become common currency.

To add to the mix, Motherwell also made clear his strong belief that painting, or in this case, collage, “is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself.” And self-understanding is certainly something I would always want to improve on. Intriguingly, the method Motherwell and many others of the era used to collage was developed by surrealist Andre Breton, which he called “automatism.” It’s essentially the idea that you select your “ingredients” for the collage quickly and make any initial marks on the page, all without using conscious thought to consider them. Then later, you return to the page to work and rework the creative pieces you put in place.

Those who’ve done visioning here at Zingerman’s may recognize that the idea is essentially the same as the “hot pen” we use to do visioning—the idea is to move your hands faster than your conscious mind can keep up in order to better access what’s in your heart. American author Flannery O’Connor said it well: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” In this case, it would be something like “I collage to gain clarity on what I think!”

In her memoir Crazy Brave, poet, author, and musician Joy Harjo—about whom I wrote last week—writes, “Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.” Collage, I’m convinced, can offer a bit of that map that’s buried in our hearts. The benefits of collage, like those of daily journaling, seem to go far beyond the seemingly simplistic views you might likely get from many engaged in modern business. Quebecois artist Benoit Depelteau, cofounder of the marvelous Kolaj Magazine—all about collage—is a huge believer in the value of collage. In an essay entitled “Why Collage?” he says,

When printed images are torn, when textures confront, when artefacts are assembled together, when ideas collide, there’s always something grandiose happening, the edification of a new world. It goes way beyond paper and ink, and I like it.

MARCH is an online magazine that “embraces publishing as an act of protest to address the critical social and political issues of our times.” In their January 2021 issue, writer Regan Golden writes about what she calls “Collage as a Way of Living.” Her title alone was an inspiration when I came across it. The essay provided good insight into its benefits as well. Writing about her own life, Golden says,

As an artist, I have been working in collage for more than twenty years, but only now has my daily life come to mirror my multi-layered compositions. …

… When materials are sparse, artists make do with whatever newspaper clippings or scraps of fabric are available. Meanwhile, We are flooded with information by the twenty-four hour news cycle. Faced with this heap of information, only an artist armed with a scissors can cut and paste it down to size, winnowing out what is most important in this time of crisis. Now is the time we need collage to make art from minimal means and make meaning from the excess of facts and opinions.

My longtime friend Patrick-Earl Barnes, who has two beautiful pieces hanging at the Roadhouse, and whom I wrote about in “The Art of Business” pamphlet, has long woven collage into much of his work. His artist statement shines a light on what collage can do:

In 1989, my heart and spirit were touched with an inspiration to create art. It provided a channel, as well as an obligation, for me to vividly communicate to the world and open new ways for a better understanding. A self-taught artist who spent 25 years of my life preparing for the American dream and the next 27 years redefining it. I pay homage with my ideas and labor to all of my spirits. To all of the people who have passed through me and made me the person I am and will be. I respect where I come from, where I have been and where I am to go. The art is a conjunction of found objects, free association, various styles and approaches. I work mostly with collage and decoupage. The artwork moves into the large arena of combining various isms and disciplines weaving history, social, cultural studies and literature into a blend of instinctive spontaneous creations of art.

In response to a particular question that I asked him last week about collage, he offered,

I love collage because I love reading—collage is a cousin to painting. Since I started clipping newspaper articles, I’ve been fascinated with the medium. I like to challenge my viewers to research the things I’ve glued to the surface. A collage can be whatever you want it to be or convey. I started collecting “ism” words—every time I saw one in a magazine, I’d cut it out and glue it with the others I’d already collected. You could take pieces from all the covers and arrange them on a surface like a puzzle.

In an essay entitled “Why do collage? Mental health benefits of collage,” Marianne, founder of Jonna Studios in Finland, offers four ways that collage has supported her mental health over the years. Inspired by Laurie Kanyer’s book, Collage Care: Transforming Emotions & Building Resilience, she identifies these benefits: a safe space for emotional expression, mindfulness through making, building resilience through creativity, and self-discovery and reflection. Building on Marianne’s insights, I’ve been playing with this list of my own—a list I may put into a collage:

1. Effective emotional and creative expression.
   Like poetry, photography, or other art forms, it can encourage us as leaders to lean into new and different ways to communicate.
2. An invitation to practice mindfulness.
   Even writing this essay has me thinking anew about a whole range of images and ideas I might now repurpose into collage.
3. A prompt to take pause and think in new ways.
   Once he got going on a collage quickly, Robert Motherwell would “revise, revise, revise.” Taking the rough beginnings of a collage and bringing them to fruition isn’t just hand work—it pushes us to think anew.
4. Building creativity with increased connections.
   One of the main points of collage is to connect the otherwise unconnected, which is also a good way to define creativity. Even now just imagining this essay as a collage would bring together Peter Drucker and Robert Motherwell—which might not have happened before in the same piece.
5. Better understanding of ourselves.
   After we cut out an ad or image, we can consider what it means to us. Why does a particular label evoke the emotion it does? Why put these two things together? Why do they matter to us so much?
6. Learning to develop leadership strategy.
   In the fall of 2013, Catherine Craft, Adjunct Assistant Curator at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, summed up the process of collage as, “One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes and sometimes tears off and begins again.” Which sure sounded a lot like the hard work of leadership to me.
7. Connecting the seemingly unconnectable.
   A big part of what captures my attention about collage is that it allows—even invites—us to put together otherwise opposing forces onto the same page; to unite the disparate and imagine a coming together of what otherwise might not be present on the same positive page.

Of all of the various collagists I’ve connected with over the last couple of weeks, it’s a guy I had not heard of—Keith Waldrop—whose perspectives resonated most with me. Perhaps it started with his Ann Arbor connection, as well as the clarity of his message. Waldrop got his PhD here at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, and went on to become well known around the country for his creative work with collage, poetry, painting, and prose.

Collage, Waldrop makes clear, is as much about gaining clarity of the future as it is about understanding the past: “Collage is for me a way to explore, not necessarily the thing I am tearing up, but the thing I am contriving to build out of torn pieces.” His comments on collage struck me as especially well-suited to the awkwardness of our current national situation. When Waldrop writes, “On the not infrequent days of late when words don’t seem suffice … I turn to collage to get away from words.” Something in the visual piecing together of ordinarily disparate pieces helped him get his head into a better place. As he would say: “Collage, my great delight.”

Keith Waldrop grew up in rural Kansas, but left it behind for communities that felt more conducive to his less-than-orthodox way of thinking. He served in the military from 1953 to 1955, during which time he met Rosemarie Waldrop, a German-born poet, editor, translator, and writer in her own right. In 1962, the two started Burning Deck Press here in Ann Arbor. Which had a remarkable half-century of publishing nearly 250 influential and innovative works—primarily in the form of letterpress pamphlets. Waldrop received his PhD in comparative literature in 1964; Rosmarie followed in 1966. After a few years teaching in Detroit at Wayne State University, the couple moved to Rhode Island, and both taught at Brown for the rest of their lives. Over the years, he published two dozen books and pamphlets.

Writing about Keith, Ken Miklowski—a writer, poet, and co-founder of the Alternative Press here in town with his late wife, the amazing artist Ann Miklowski—shares his thoughts:

Keith was my poetry prof at Wayne State in the mid-sixties. I later helped him move his Burning Deck Press to Connecticut from Ann Arbor. That was the first time I ever saw a letterpress. Two years later we got our own and were completely self-taught on running it. Then later still we published him and his wife Rosemarie in The Alternative Press. We stayed in touch through the years.

To say that Keith Waldrop was one of a kind seems like an understatement. When he won the National Book Award, the judges said of his poetry: “If transcendental immanence were possible, it would be because Keith Waldrop had invented it.” In the press release for Waldrop’s book Several Gravities, the staff at Siglio Press gives us a good sense of what the collage-making process for Waldrop was like and why it (like poetry) can offer us new ways to approach what’s going on in the world around us:

In his poetry, Waldrop often purloins or salvages language from eclectic sources (religious books, novels, ticket stubs, scraps of paper, etc.), then “collages” phrases into poems at once philosophical and personal. Similarly, he captures images from old newspaper ads, early Renaissance paintings, comic strips, ancient maps, architectural illustrations, candy wrappers, etc. to create startlingly beautiful visual juxtapositions that delight in contradiction and ambiguity. In both poem and collage, the fragments themselves, the residue that clings to them, and the formal structures that bind them point to the condition of indeterminacy.

Robert Seydel, writing in Siglio in the summer of 2023—a few days after Waldrop passed away at the age of 90—describes Waldrop’s collages:

Registration marks on stamps are concrete evidence of flight; bodies in space and animal forms, the quick gestures of a calligraphic marking, free-floating alphabetic stutters, like small Dada sound phrasings, are all evidence against gravity and designate that in-between space, a liminality, that is so central to both his visual and poetic lexicon. Marvelous, romantic, and contradictory in their shapings, his pictures gesture toward, accommodate, and open up free territories of drift and dream. In their fullness they spell both an architecture of contemplation and a vision at odds with the solid structures of time.

Of Waldrop’s work, Seydel called his collage “a kind of aerial feat that attempts to delineate the unbridgeable spaces between things through the construction of artifacts into form, both visual and verbal.” The image of “unbridgeable” caught my attention. Maybe collage can do what so many other techniques seem unable to do, to bring the country together for that age of kindness and dignity that’s been forecasted for us five years down the road.

For Waldrop, collage was a lot about the spaces in-between, what he called “the unbeheld.” For me, this was an inspiring invitation within my exploration of collage to look for new angles, hear new approaches, find new commonalities, and new ways to connect. His way of thinking and connecting is intriguing to me. He’s certainly someone I wish I’d met—perhaps I can include his image in a coming collage.

In his article “How to Endure Authoritarianism,” Adam Gopnik writes about the great Polish dissident poet Wislawa Szymborska, explaining how “having seen all manner of extreme suffering from the Holocaust to Soviet rule, she turned to the heroism of daily life for succor and meaning.” Szymborska’s collage-like approach to poetry, in particular, caught my attention while writing this piece:

Granted, in daily speech, where we don’t stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like “the ordinary world,” “ordinary life,” “the ordinary course of events.” But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And, above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in this world.

Szymborska’s approach helped her hold onto her heart through nearly 70 years of Soviet rule. All of what she describes about the making of a poem could also be said for collage. While we can look at newspapers, menus, kids’ artwork, theater programs, used concert ticket stubs, panels, paycheck stubs and the like, putting them into a collage makes space for a level of mindful attention that I look forward to practicing.

Doing collage with intention can become one of our key tools to help us keep things in context, to hold space so that our lives are lived—as Czech dissident, poet, playwright, and later president Václav Havel once said was so important—“in truth.” In the spirit of which, I was shocked to see how much of that collage I made in high school—entitled “The Seventies,” pictured above—reflects so many of the social issues I still think about today. It was, then and now, true to my truth, the map still buried in my heart.

If we embrace collage collectively, perhaps we can make real what art critic Clement Greenberg, writing in 1948, called “the pasted paper revolution.” A revolution in which we could call on scissors, glue, paper, hard work, creative connection, truth-telling, and a whole lot of heart.

Approaching our lives as artists

Honoring 44 years of Zingerman’s (and a bit of anarchism in action)

In her introduction to this week’s thought-provoking and highly recommended episode of On Being, Krista Tippett comments on the current state of our world:

Terrible ruptures and escalating violence are part of the truth of what we see ourselves capable. But they are not the whole truth, not the inevitable future. Courageous experiments in healing and transformation are also a reality of our time.

I hope that we in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB) are effectively, if ever imperfectly, one of those courageous experiments.

Back when we opened the Deli in 1982, I could never have imagined that we would one day be working within the kind of national ecosystem we’re experiencing now. As I’ve shared at length in the new pamphlet, that reality has shifted my understanding of what democracy means—both to us as an organization and to those around us.

Today, my beliefs are very different from what they were even five or six years ago—about why democracy matters, what it looks like to practice it every day (not just every few years in a voting booth), and even about what we have already been doing for decades here in the ZCoB.

The focus of democracy, as I settled into my newly formed Deep Understanding, is not on politics, but rather on people: imperfect human beings like you and me working, however haltingly, to figure out how to live and work together with dignity and at least some modicum of effectiveness and meaningful collaboration. The work of bringing democracy to life doesn’t really begin in Washington. It begins much closer to home—in our workplaces and in our daily interactions with one another. Which means it’s up to ordinary folks like you and me to carry out the kind of caring experiments Krista Tippett is talking about.

A few weeks back, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a specialist in both Italian history and autocracy, wrote,

Resistance rises when the toll of organized lying and negligent and malevolent governance becomes difficult to ignore. All of this is now unfolding … It is our turn to mobilize peacefully in the face of abuses of power.

In a way, her words are hard for me to hear, but I believe Ben-Ghiat’s got it right. Like it or not, it’s time to lean in and get going.

The encouraging part of that challenging framing is that “resistance,” in many ways, simply means doing our existing collective work especially well—staying true to our values and vision, and honoring our humanity in ways that are holistic and, ultimately, uplifting. As theologian Richard Rohr writes, “The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.”

In the fall of 1968, Erich Fromm—the German-Jewish psychologist who escaped his homeland for the U.S. shortly before the Nazis consolidated power in the 1930s—published his 22nd book, The Revolution of Hope. In it, he explores how the 20th century’s drift toward dehumanization—and the loss of hope that accompanies it—might be reversed, envisioning instead a future in which people are valued for who they are and can work together in collaborative, creative ways that benefit everyone involved. Fromm’s is a very hope-evoking image. In his conclusion, he writes about the sort of inspiring futures that free-thinking organizations can make real:

The need of the individual to work actively together with others, to talk, plan, and act together, to do something which is meaningful beyond money-making activities of everyday life. To relate in a less alienated fashion than is customary in most relations to others, to make sacrifices, to put into practice norms and values in everyday life, to be open and “vulnerable,” to be imaginative, to rely on one’s own judgment and decision, the formation of a new type of social group is necessary.

People in these imagined organizations of the future, Fromm adds,

… would attempt to achieve personal change. Becoming vulnerable, active, they would practice contemplation, meditation, the art of being quiet, undriven and ungreedy.

What Fromm is describing is essentially what we attempt to do here in the ZCoB every day. Given that you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’re working toward this as well. That correlation is not a coincidence. In the topsy-turvy world in which we’re all working right now, it is my belief that small businesses and similarly sized not-for-profits are the sorts of places best suited to making Fromm’s forecast a positive reality.

In difficult times like these, values-driven, democratically inclined organizations of any size can serve as modern versions of what early 20th-century German pacifist anarchist Gustav Landauer—one of Erich Fromm’s philosophical predecessors—urged people to create. Rather than getting swept up in the mainstream, Landauer called on communities to build “the institutions necessary for a true community and a true society of human beings.” As Landauer explained, calling up images of commerce as a catalyst for what was possible,

The following has always been true, is true now and will always be true: people live together in communities; people exchange goods and services over long distances; people are differentiated by language, custom, desire, and need; people believe that everyone looks out for his individual interest; however, some people stand up, make a change, and point the direction for the spirit and the courage of others. This is the reality that will always remain.

We have been working, always awkwardly and imperfectly, over the course of many years toward this spirit and courage. The shortfalls and struggles, I need to remind myself regularly, are part of the work. As the poet Robert Bly writes in one of my favorite books, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, “The imperfect is our paradise. … in this bitterness, delight.”

This past Sunday was our 44th anniversary here at Zingerman’s! Enormous thanks to everyone reading this and to the many thousands of others who have supported us, encouraged us, and stayed patient with us over the years. Reaching this milestone is statistically unlikely—and deeply meaningful. Like most things that matter, it’s the result of a collective effort. A thousand thanks, in every language we can imagine.

In the language of poet, writer, and musician Joy Harjo’s people, the Muscogee Nation, the word for “thank you” is mvto. That idea of gratitude as something both spoken and carried forward connects to something else Harjo has reflected on often: the power of story. In an interview from last fall titled “The Power of Poetry,” conducted by THE THREAD Documentary Series, she shared a range of insights about how humans make meaning. Reflecting on people across the world, Harjo said simply, “We are storytellers.” Storytelling, she suggests, is how we remember who we are and how we stay connected to one another. She recalled visiting cousins and listening to stories that stretched back into history—stories that helped people remember where they came from, invited them to think, and nurtured curiosity and a deep sense of belonging. When asked what kind of story she would most want to leave her students with, Harjo said,

I would want to give them a story in which they would see themselves as included. That would plant something in them that says, you are a human being… You are made of contradictions, you are made of beauty, you were made by a Creator who loved you. And I would want to plant opportunity in them. I would want them to see that no matter what is going on in the world or if things are being bombed … if they were refugees or having a hard time or even coming from the best families, I would want them to see that they were given gifts that are valuable and that when you have these gifts it’s important to take care of them even as it’s important to share them—that that’s essentially what we all came in to do. And there’s a lot of stories to get there.

This is also a good part of what I would want people to take away from the now 44-year-long Zingerman’s story. What Harjo has described fits well with our approach over all these years. We understand far better how to do it in 2026 than we did in 1982, but the spirit and intent remain the same: sharing stories—of food, people, and place—woven meaningfully with history so customers, coworkers, and communities feel far more connected to what they’re eating. That history, as Harjo says, provides context that can carry the experience to another level. In one form or another, we’ve been telling those stories since the middle of March 1982.

On March 25 and 26, I will be co-teaching with Gareth Higgins: “Reframing Our Leadership Stories and Beliefs.” The stories we tell shape our lives. Over our two days together, we will explore the beliefs and stories—first informally, and then, over the years, more formally—that underlie what we have made happen. These beliefs and stories are integral to what we have done and to what we continue to do today. Two of the many things that I have learned from Gareth over the years:

• The story we tell about our lives—individually or collectively—is the single most important factor in determining our happiness.
• A wonderfully effective framework for filtering any story we’re going to tell is to ask ourselves: a) Is it true—or at least the truest version we can tell in the given situation? And b) Is it helpful?

All of what follows—and really, all that I write—I try to run through those frames.

As I reflect on our story on the occasion of our 44th anniversary, it is increasingly clear to me that its importance goes far beyond food. In the context of all we’ve contributed and accomplished over the years, I see now that, in a way, it’s less about cakes (though we do make some amazing ones!) and more about collaboration and kindness. And it’s as much about dignity and democracy in imperfect action as it is about amazing deli sandwiches.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that just the act of sharing our “life story”—as truthfully and helpfully as we can—has a significant impact on people. In the context of Joy Harjo’s thoughts on storytelling, I’m struck by how even the story on its own can carry a message many people appear hungry to hear: that you really can do business differently. Because the story of Zingerman’s differs from nearly all of the high-drama, headline-grabbing tales most often told in the business world of the 21st century, it seems to open space for people to imagine other, more holistic, more personal, more hopeful possibilities.

I have both reflected and written in recent years about my realization that, back in the early ’80s, we were unknowingly and unwittingly a small part of a much larger revolution in the American food world. When I look at what people were eating then and what they’re eating now, it’s hard to deny the significance of that shift. Looking around today, at the start of the second quarter of the 21st century, I’m arriving at a comparable conclusion about the way we work: knowingly or not, we are part of a similarly positive revolution in the workplace. You may not notice it, I know, in the news, but it is happening. And it is significant.

In a sense, what’s happening is a manifestation of the revolution of hope that Erich Fromm was elucidating nearly 80 years ago. It’s also, I see, part of the revolution of dignity I wrote about in the pamphlet of that name. It calls up, too, humility, kindness, empathy, compassion, generosity, love, and much more. The reality is that in the workplace “of the future” Fromm envisioned, all of these elements of the organizational ecosystem can—and in truth, must—stand alongside profit as equally important parts of the organizational conversation. This, I hope, is the story of Zingerman’s that will still be told 44 years from now.

Part of what I think has helped us become who we are over the years—the kind of organization that tries to help people be themselves—is the diverse range of voices and sources that we study, and then work hard to adapt to what we do. This curiosity and search for new insights have been part of our approach since before we even opened. The list of people we’ve learned from is far too long to include here, though many of the names will be familiar. In the last few weeks, I’ve added the Ukrainian human rights activist and pacifist Maksym Butkevych to that list. Butkevych, reflecting on the two difficult years he spent in Russian prison camps, wrote that torture, as he came to understand it through painful experience, “was about the abolition of the capacity for choice. Torture was about the undoing of personhood itself, about turning a person into an object.” While the circumstances he endured are in no way comparable to ordinary working life, his insight about the importance of agency and personhood feels relevant in a different, far less extreme context.

In many large organizations, people can sometimes feel reduced to roles, metrics, or functions rather than recognized as whole human beings (check out Humanocracy by Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini). Writing 120 years ago, anarchist, activist, and author Emma Goldman was very blunt about it: “The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves.” Together, these perspectives illustrate how essential it is for organizations to support dignity, choice, and meaningful participation in work.

The antidote, I want to suggest, is us—workplaces, large and small, that are intentionally organized around human dignity, with democratic practices within, and meaningfully positive engagement with the world around us. Workplaces where work is purposeful, where people care, where quality is a point of pride, not a shallow slogan. In our original unwritten vision in 1982, we knew from the get-go that we wanted to create a great place for people to work. I could say far, far more today about what that means, but from the first days of the Deli we were determined to treat people far better than most workplaces did—and, in many cases, still do.

Our work, clear enough in 1982 and clearer still with each passing year, is to do the opposite of what many people I know have experienced in well-known companies. Rather than shutting people out, we want to hold them up. Or better still, support them as they learn to hold themselves up. The more we honor the humanity of everyone we interact with, the better our work becomes. Yes, the finances need to be sound, but the two are not mutually exclusive: our Mission talks about bringing “great Zingerman’s experiences,” and “showing love and care in every interaction.”

I was reminded of the importance and active role of honoring humanity last Thursday morning at the ZCoB huddle. It really is inspiring to see so much meaningful human connection in action. People spent about a third of the three hours at the huddle talking about Cornman Farms—why the decision to wind down business in the fall was made, what went into it, how we can work collaboratively and supportively together in the coming months, its history, and a long list of special achievements. We heard deeply personal reflections from the two managing partners, Kieron Hales and Tabitha Mason. And a LOT of appreciations shared.

I tell the story of the huddle here because it was an inspiring real-life example of how a large group (about 50 in the room and 30 more online that day) can work together—with dignity in every direction, human to human, caring peer to caring peer—to deal with a difficult issue. No blaming, no shaming, no name-calling or finger-pointing. It was, to my sense, wholly human in the best possible way. That we have an organization that can have this kind of conversation in the open—caringly, honestly, and meaningfully—is, in and of itself, an uncommon and wonderful accomplishment. Psychologist Karla McLaren, who has written a lot about emotion, comments that “when your sadness is flowing and welcome in your life, then everything seems to go more easily.”

As is the case fairly frequently, an outside guest happened to attend that particular ZCoB huddle—a wonderful, hardworking, caring human being who’s been running his family’s manufacturing business here in town for longer than we’ve been in business. Much to his credit, he was curious enough to come across town to learn from what we do. After the huddle, he bought a couple of books from the ZingTrain shop and came over to me to thank me. “You guys really have the secret sauce,” he said with a big smile. “I mean, I know you work really hard for it! But you really do have the secret sauce!”

I thanked him profusely, appreciating that he recognized the work was not accidental and was actually the result of a whole lot of effort by a whole bunch of people. I assured him, though, that the sauce wasn’t secret—we teach it, write about it, and share it pretty darn widely.

Reflecting on it all later, I realized his kind comments brought me back to the subject I wrote about a few weeks ago: the David-Whyte-inspired belief about the “unordinary.” There’s a big difference between extraordinary—where someone does something exceptional that only they or a few others are capable of—and unordinary—where someone does something that essentially anyone could do, but hardly anyone actually does. Zingerman’s, I want to suggest, is wonderfully and inspiringly unordinary. Anyone who puts their mind to it could make something like what we do here happen in their own ecosystem: to be true to their essence, to honor humanity, to make money—but not at the expense of ethics; to include, to share, to support, to welcome; to dig into diversity, dignity, and democracy and make something special out of it in the process.

What makes the special sauce happen? As you likely know by now, I will always say there is no single perfectly reproducible recipe. Rather, woven into the Natural Laws of Business, our Vision, our Mission, our Values, our Statement of Beliefs, human connection is at the heart of what we do. Real people on site answer the phone. Live humans are working the chat. We encourage the people who work here to be true to themselves within the framework of our values and vision; to practice the second element of dignity daily by being authentic (without acting out) and by making space for customers and coworkers to do the same. When it works, you get the “special sauce.” Or maybe, I’ll say with a smile, a simple application of anarchism in action—beautifully blooming flowers. Emma Goldman—who writer Lydia Gans called the “Ultimate Humanist, a woman with a profound love for people and a commitment to make life better on this earth”—described a similarly hard-to-pin-down energy in her 1910 book Anarchism and Other Essays: 

It is the harmony of organic growth which produces variety of color and form, the complete whole we admire in the flower. Analogously will the organized activity of free human beings, imbued with the spirit of solidarity, result in the perfection of social harmony, which we call Anarchism.

Or maybe it’s like a visit to a spiritual center in Ethiopia. In the book Ethiopia: The Journey, anarchist author Amastra (part of the inspiring work of Indigenous Resistance) says,

It’s hard for me to put into words the feeling that the land in Ethiopia evokes in me. It has such a distinct, unique feel. Something shimmering, a light feel and at the same time a feeling that one is in a place very profound and multi-layered that you could only just begin to scratch the layers to understand it.

Which sure seems to me like a lovely, poetic, and anarchistic description of “secret sauce.”

In a sense, all of these describe “whole human beings” working together—trying to be themselves, to learn, and to make a positive difference at the same time. It’s about working slowly, over time, to bring together the many diverse components of our personalities. This may sound simple to those who haven’t tried it, but in my experience, it is anything but easy. I’ve worked at it for years and still have much more to do. That same work, it strikes me, holds true for organizations as well. Robert Bly’s wonderfully insightful A Little Book About the Human Shadow helped me understand what was happening to us years ago:

Our culture teaches us from early infancy to split and polarize dark and light, which I call here “mother” and “father.” So some people admire the right-thinking, well-lit side of the personality, and that group one can associate with the father, if one wants to; and some admire the left-thinking, poorly-lit side, and that group one can associate with the mother, if one wants to, and mythologically with the Great Mother. Most artists, poets, and musicians belong to the second group and love intuition, music, the feminine, owls, and the ocean. The right-thinking group loves action, commerce, and Empire.

A healthy business, I’m positing here, brings both together effectively. How does one make it happen? Here are a few of the ways we can move in the right direction:

• Living the Natural Laws of Business significantly increases the odds we can make it happen. It sets the stage.
• The six elements of the revolution of dignity work too—each of the six is inclined towards honoring the humanity of everyone involved in the organization.
• Having a clear long-term vision that gets at all this, as well as mission, values, and beliefs.
• Honoring one’s essence in all aspects of work.

Doing this sort of work well is a slow, winding, and sometimes frustrating process—to come into ourselves, to effectively express our collective essence. These are not things that emerge from the drive for overnight fame and wealth. It’s what we here at Zingerman’s would call Natural Law #11: “It takes a lot longer to make something great happen than most people think.” Or what Palestinian peace activist, Arab Aramin, calls “T.T.T.” (Things Take Time).

We have done a lot in our first 44 years. I look forward to carrying forward Joy Harjo’s call in the years ahead. We can do this. Cruelty may be making the news, but meaningful efforts grounded in human dignity, kindness, and democracy continue to unfold right here in our imperfect organization that began with a small Deli 44 years ago this month. Together, we can slowly help to make collective organizational healing and transformation the reality of our time. And continue to create new stories—stories about the positive revolution in the workplace we are currently part of. Stories, with help, will still be told—human to human—another 44 years down the road. I feel confident we can make it happen. I’ll leave with you these lovely lines from Joy Harjo, whose Muscogee Nation has survived many a cataclysmic attack from the outside,

The theme of the age is how do we work together and move together with compassion and love or … with our differences. With our … different systems, how do we move collectively in a way that is nourishing?

Create lasting change