The death of a close friend and Cornman Farms’ final season

Musician Jamie Doe writes,

There are moments in life for which we cannot prepare. … Reacting in all our messy humanity to the shock of a world made new, in each case we confront a profound dislocation that upends fragile certainties.

This past week, for me, was one of those moments. It has left me trying hard, but not always succeeding, to handle some pretty profound dislocation and newly fragile uncertainties with grace and dignity.

Not many leaders I know, other than those who work with loss professionally, took their jobs in order to help guide their organizations through the grieving process. And yet, if one is in a leadership role for any length of time, it will almost inevitably, at some point, become a significant part of one’s work. That work, for me at least, is far, far harder when I, too, am grieving the losses at hand as I am here, not just supporting others as they struggle with the loss of a loved one.

To add to the challenge, grief generally shows up at wholly unexpected times. This week, it happened twice on what had begun as a rather innocuous day. By evening, though, I found myself dealing with two very different losses at once—the closing of a business and the death of a close friend.

While they are very different kinds of loss, the reality is that:

• Both events evoke a sense of grief and loss.
• Each of us is impacted differently by different losses; there is no “right” way to grieve.
• Dealing with grief—individually or collectively—is pretty much always difficult.
• Grief is not something to be disposed of as quickly as possible, nor, as neuroscientist and grief expert Mary-Frances O’Connor has taught, is it something we are meant to “overcome.” Grief, O’Connor says, can be especially difficult after a death that was wholly unexpected.
• As historian Yuval Noah Harari has written, there is no hierarchy of emotion. What one person is overwhelmed by, another may be oblivious to.
• Similarly, some people in the organization may be deeply affected. Our role as leaders is to help navigate during this time as well.

These are certainly not the first losses I’ve experienced in my life, nor, I know, will they be the last. While it would be understandable to approach each of the two on its own, given how different they are, I’ve chosen to address them here together since the reality of life is that they occurred within days of one another.

To be clear, I don’t like going through grief in any form. I’ve learned, though, to find ways to work through it anyway. And although it’s often hard for me to remember while I’m going through it, I’ve also learned that letting myself grieve loss is part of living and caring deeply. Hiding it—as I was raised to do as a kid—definitely does not help. Over time, engaging with grief effectively helps us to become more complete people. As author Elisabeth Knübler-Ross explains,

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern.

Even knowing that, as is often true for me when I experience significant loss, I’ve still been a bit in denial in recent days. Denial, I know, doesn’t alter the realities of the losses I’m beginning to grieve, but it does offer me a gentler runway into what I know will be an emotionally challenging time. Writing this piece is one way I know to wade into it all. Typing, quietly, can bring the tears.

Still, I’ve learned to lean in, to feel the pain, experience the sense of loss, and slowly, over time, to figure out how to go forward in positive ways. As spiritual leader Ram Dass reminds us,

No one can bypass the process, and everyone will have different karma around it. Grieving has to run its course. Just allow that pain of being human, and let it transform you. … It forces us to grow, to adapt, to learn resilience and compassion.

This work with grief is, in a sense, a journey that we have navigated many times over the course of our 44 years at Zingerman’s. Still, each time through is different. I haven’t really experienced either of these specific situations before, so I have a lot to learn in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Writer Naomi Shihab Nye reminds me, “You are living in a poem.” In a sense, that gives me some solace, since poetry is one of the most positive ways people know to engage with the emotions of loss and grief. The poem being written right now, week by week, is about the decision to close Cornman Farms this coming fall, and, at the same time, the unexpected death of my good friend, Melvin Parson, founder of We the People Opportunity Farm and an amazing human being. The loss, in both cases, feels especially profound in the community—here in Washtenaw County and within the Zingerman’s Community—because both Cornman and Melvin were loved by so many.

Thinking about it all as a poem, I might title it then with the three-word suggestion I got from my Irish friend Aisling Rogerson, founder of the Fumbally Café in Dublin, who is herself navigating the deep loss of her partner, Manchán Magan, last fall. When I shared with her this past weekend that I felt neither emotionally prepared for the losses I was facing nor experienced in dealing with them, Aisling offered me a simple but wise message:

take your time

Xoxo

What follows, then, is only an entrée to what will surely be many years of learning to live with these new losses. As Mary-Frances O’Connor reminds us, “Grief never ends.” We do best when we own it, lean into it, and learn from it. The poem I have found myself living in—unexpectedly, this month of March 2026—could also draw on the essay I wrote last month (Magic and Loss) about Manchán’s painful passing at the far-too-early age of 55, and might be entitled. “More Magic and a Lot More Loss.”

As I wrote last month, one of the hardest parts of leadership life for me, at least, is that magic and loss nearly always coexist. While some in the organization will be mourning, many others will simply be going to work as usual. So while some of us are deep in grief, others may likely be, at the same time, really excited about our new work with Little Kim, and about nearly half a dozen potential new businesses that we’re in conversation about (no, of course, they won’t all work out). Others still will be jazzed about the wonderful weddings and other critical events for families at the Greyline, Roadhouse, Miss Kim, etc., and by crafting amazing wedding cakes from the Bakehouse’s Cake Studio. Grief, after all, does not make all the good things go away. Learning to work with both the ups and the downs at the same time is not an easy leadership task, but it is clearly a critical one.

These two stories of loss are very different, but since they arrived at almost the exact same unexpected time, my mind keeps moving back and forth from one to the other—reflecting on the amazing work that contributed to Cornman’s long run in Dexter and my friendship with Melvin and the way he contributed positively to so many people’s lives through his work with We the People Opportunity Farm. Both have been big parts of my life for many years. Experiencing the two losses in tandem has made this week particularly hard for me. Perhaps, though, the seeming coincidence of timing is less accidental than I imagined. The work that each of them contributed to our community both began, I realize now, in the same year. Cornman Farms opened its doors for the first time formally in May of 2014. And, later that summer, Melvin Parson began laying the early groundwork for what would become the deeply respected nonprofit, the We the People Opportunity Farm.

Forty years ago, in March of 1986, writer Judith Viorst released her now classic book, Necessary Losses. A few years later, as I was struggling with various forms of loss, the book was very helpful to me. This week, I find myself going back to it to help handle these two losses I’m working through. It’s filled with wise and insightful observations like this one:

… The people we are and the lives that we lead are determined, for better and worse, by our loss experiences

Which means that my own life, and the lives of the many thousands who loved both Cornman Farms and my good friend Melvin Parson, will be changed forever by the loss of each.

Over the years, Cornman Farms has been the site of many hundreds of beautiful farm weddings, private parties, fundraisers, and more. Its origin story goes back many years and includes our renovation of the 1834 farmhouse and 1837 barn (which won “Barn of the Year” from the Michigan Barn Preservation Network in 2015). I’ve heard stories from so many glowing brides, grooms, and parents about the love and care, attention to detail, and deep deliciousness of the amazing weddings they held at the Farm. I know, too, that our two managing partners, Kieron Hales and Tabitha Mason, have given a great deal of care to the decision to close—and that they take their responsibilities to clients and the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses very seriously. I could go on for many pages, but for the moment, I’ll just appreciate them for all they’ve done and are still going to do in the months ahead and beyond. Love letters and notes of appreciation have already begun to come in the last few days, and I’m sure that in the coming weeks and months, ever more folks will share stories as well. Closing Cornman will not cut off the memories. As the Irish writer and also good friend Gareth Higgins taught me many years ago, “You never know where a story will end, especially when you’re in it.”

It would be disingenuous for me to say that it wasn’t hard for me to hear about Cornman’s decision to close. Over our 44 years, we’ve had a pretty good track record. That said, Paul reminded me after we wrote the 2009 vision 32 years ago now, that if we were going to open a lot of businesses in the ZCoB, some would do well for a while, and then, years later, not so much so. We had a remarkable and very successful run for many years at Cornman Farms. Since COVID, though, the market for weddings seems to have shifted in ways that have made our work harder to make financially viable. And as Tabitha and Kieron have been reminding me and others here, not every business is meant to last forever, and even their deep, deep dedication and countless hours of hard work can’t make up for a large number of missing dollars in sales. During its 11 years of hosting amazing weddings and events, I am confident that Cornman has treated every guest’s event with dignity and grace and created a host of memorable events that will live in spirit for decades to come. I’m also confident that same heartfelt good work will continue until we wind down this coming fall as Cornman honors every single 2026 commitment with the same love, passion, and positive energy we’ve worked at since day one.

The first email I can find in my archive from Melvin Parson is a lovely one sent in the summer of 2013—one that, in hindsight, shaped a relationship, a friendship that grew ever stronger over the years. And really, reading that email again now, in the spirit of Naomi Shihab Nye, it very poetically shapes what things will look like going forward as I work through the grief and loss emerging from Melvin’s decision to take his own life. As another grief expert, the contemporary writer David Kessler, beautifully says,

Death can end a life
but it cannot end love or connection.
Our relationships don’t disappear when someone dies.
They change, but they still continue.

Even though Melvin and I were just getting to know each other at the time, the email really set the tone for the many years of friendship that were to follow:

Hello my friend
I just sent you an audio message and realized that I didn’t even say hello so please forgive me.

How are things? Hope all is well and that life continues to present to you challenges which offer up the opportunity to continue to grow as a person mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

Take care my friend

Melvin

Melvin’s words remain true to this day. Melvin’s passing is leaving many of us, me included, with just what he suggested all those years ago when we were just getting to know each other. Opportunity that, to be honest, I didn’t want and don’t welcome, to continue to grow mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

At the time he sent that email, Melvin was in the early stages of imagining the nonprofit for which he would soon become widely known, and that would benefit so many in the community. In March, 11 years ago now, many hundreds got this first formal email from Melvin. I can hear him saying all this with his big, welcoming, soft smile—beaming:

I believe that growing food grows communities. I want to use farming as a vehicle to create a different outlook for my community.

Last year was my first ever undertaking in growing vegetables. I inherited a 3’ x 20’ raised vegetable garden that had been tended to by a sweet woman named Verna. Sadly, Verna passed away last year and somehow I was chosen to grow vegetables in her stead; mind you I had no experience gardening. However, I was a gamer, so off I went preparing the soil; getting my hands dirty and loving every minute of it!

I dedicated my first experience with growing food to Verna. This vision has led me to form We The People Grower’s Association. This year will be our inaugural growing season, and we need not only seeds, but seed money to get started.

I don’t just want to grow food. I want to create a sense of empowerment in the community and educate the community about food sustainability, nutrition and other essential skills which promote a healthy outlook upon self and those about you.

…

Our motto is to Grow Food and Get Strong.

Your donation would be used to buy seed, seedlings, hand/ tools, compost and to cover miscellaneous costs. Throughout the season you will literally be able to watch your donation grow–grow into food, grow into wellness, and grow into a community.

Thanks for Your Help,

Melvin

And sure enough, he made every single thing he suggested in that email into a meaningful reality. Many talk a good game, but Melvin made things happen.

Melvin came into the world on New Year’s Day 1964 in Detroit. He was raised for much of his childhood by his grandparents, and he told me more than a few times over our years together how his grandmother had gotten him to be a big reader as a kid. Unfortunately, Melvin got in with the wrong crowd. Addiction and arrest followed. He was incarcerated for 13 years, and at some point down the road, became deeply engaged with the recovery community. When he and I met, he had been sober for quite a while and would regularly attend meetings. And he would always, always generously volunteer to talk to anyone I met who was trying to get sober—best I could tell, he was really never too busy to help someone who was struggling. In the years after incarceration, he moved to Washtenaw County, as he would tell me, to be in “cultural soil” that was better suited to what he wanted to do. He earned a bachelor’s degree in social work from Eastern Michigan University, and he would later win a wealth of awards and recognitions for his work with We the People. Shy and lover of solitude that he was, he never liked going to the ceremonies, but he would show up, share his story, wow folks there, and, in the process, win even more people over to his cause at We the People.

Being introverts, Melvin and I were quite adept at hanging out in the same space, each doing our own thing. He LOVED the Bakehouse’s Obama Buns—they were one of his regular treats, and we would meet up many a weekend out at Zingerman’s Southside, where he could pick one up. I remember when he first reconnected with his son, and then when he became a grandfather. We would chat on the phone and text regularly. It was rare, I think, that we went more than a couple of days without connecting. When we did, it seemed one or the other of us would reach out to make sure the other was okay. Since neither of us went anywhere on holidays, we would almost always speak by phone on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the like. Judith Viorst writes, “Close friends contribute to our personal growth. They also contribute to our personal pleasure, making the music sound sweeter …. the laughter ring louder because they are there.” Melvin, for me, was most definitely one of those people.

Doing things well and receiving widespread recognition for his work does not mean Melvin’s life was easy. Yesterday, March 10, was the anniversary of Harriet Tubman’s death at the age of 90. It’s often said of her that she was “an organizer, a strategist, and a liberator,” and I would say the same descriptors apply to Melvin. He did all three with remarkable aplomb. Founder of the Elect Black Women PAC, Ruby Dennis-Powell observes that Tubman repeatedly chose to take risks for what she believed. As Dennis-Powell says, “She could have stayed safe in the North. She could have built a quiet life far from the violence and terror she’d survived. But she came back … Again and again and again.” From the outside looking in, it seems that Melvin did much the same, making himself emotionally vulnerable over and over again by expanding the scope of his work, by helping so many vulnerable people, by trying to raise money to support the work, and by living his values openly in a world that wasn’t always open to them.

Yodit Mesfin Johnson, friend and former director of NEW Center, knew Melvin well for many years and shared an important perspective that most people around him might never have seen:

Men like Melvin, a sensitive, brilliant, unconventional Black man, do not move through this country untouched. They move through a gauntlet.

This world does not know what to do with men who feel deeply. Boys like mine—who adored Mel—are taught early that softness is dangerous. Grief is weakness. Need is shame. Wonder is childish. Tenderness makes you vulnerable to ridicule, abandonment, or harm. … A man like Melvin, who felt the world around him deeply, was also resisting the script every day just by being himself. I see so many brothers doing this. That resistance is costly. It means feeling too much while having too few places where his full emotional life could be received without judgment.

He told us he was tired. Soul tired. He just wanted to be with his grandmother again. To be free.

Visionaries like Mel suffer from seeing too clearly. He could see the hypocrisy too sharply. He noticed the performance. The emptiness. The cruelty dressed up as normal life. Dignity and kindness were his antidote for this cruel world.

Over and over again during the years I knew him, I saw Melvin make it possible for people who doubted they would ever reenter mainstream society to feel better about themselves and to learn to make their way through the world with confidence and support. I met many of the amazing interns who came through We the People over the years, watching and trying to help from the sidelines as he gave them the support and guidance to move forward in a world that was often not very welcoming. Shihab Jackson worked on the farm for nearly two years. After Melvin’s passing, he shared the enormous significance of seeing someone like Melvin, having come out of incarceration and overcome serious substance issues, making his own way so positively in the world:

It can’t be understated how important and impactful it was to see myself in somebody else and vice versa. We got to witness that and be a part of that journey with him.

The Iranian-born American writer Azar Nafisi says there are books to read “in times of mourning and resistance.” To my sense of things, Judith Viorst’s Necessary Losses is one of those rare books. It taught me to lean into a lifetime of loss—none of which, until I read Viorst, had I ever really talked about: the loss of my father through divorce when I was a kid; the death of my uncle, whom I loved deeply, from a heart attack at age 48, just a week after we opened the Deli; the ending of relationships; the failure of projects at work. Viorst wrote, “Losing is the price we pay for living. It is also the source of much of our growth and gain.” Right now, wrapped up in the losses of the moment, it’s hard to feel excited about the gains that will eventually come—but Viorst’s wisdom has proven true for me many times before, and I’m confident it will again.

Viorst, who just celebrated her 95th birthday on the 2nd of February, was born in Newark. She got a BA close to home at Rutgers and then also graduated from the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. Her first books were very popular and also very humorous. Necessary Losses was a serious turn in a different direction, but it turned out to be a classic. Viorst is unhesitatingly clear in how grief and loss like this work:

Throughout our life we grow by giving up. … no matter how clever we are, we must lose … It is only through our losses that we become fully developed human beings. … In fact, I would like to propose that central to understanding our lives is understanding how we deal with loss.

Looking back now, it’s my belief that Melvin, Tabitha, and Kieron have each, in their own way, shown real grace in difficult moments. I hope that going forward, I can learn from their good work.

Why am I sharing all this?

• First and foremost, to pay homage to the work that Kieron, Tabitha, and Melvin have contributed to the quality of life of many thousands of others. I, too, have benefited enormously from knowing them and from their deep dedication to doing what they believe in.
• To, once again, acknowledge grief when it comes in ways that impact not just me, but many thousands around me, and really, directly or indirectly, our entire organization.
• To help, imperfectly of course, create an organizational ecosystem where grief is something we can share productively, rather than hide it in some corporate closet.
• To remind myself—and maybe you—that great people doing great work still won’t always work out the way we want.
• To help myself to process these “necessary losses” that I know I find so painful. Writing is one way I’ve taught myself to slowly start to come to terms with the hard realities at hand, but each of us, of course, can and will come to our own conclusions. 

As we piece all this together, Viorst gives me an artistic framework within which I can put the feelings that come up around all this:

We each are artists of the self, creating a collage—a new and original work of art—out of scraps and fragments of identifications. The people with whom we identify are, positively or negatively, always important to us. Our feelings toward them are, in some way, always intense.

Tabitha Mason, Kieron Hales, Cornman Farms, and Melvin Parson will all have prominent places on whatever I, and many thousands of others in our community, create. Their work will continue to be celebrated, I’m confident, for many years to come.

Working through hard times

P.S. I’m increasingly excited about the two days we’ll get to spend with my good friend Gareth Higgins later this month when he and I co-teach about stories and beliefs at ZingTrain. In fact, I reference Melvin, his good work and our friendship, a number of times in the book, The Power of Beliefs in Business, which serves as one of the framing texts for this terrific two-day session.

A wonderful winter recipe

Soon enough, local spring produce will start showing up on our markets as spring is finally in sight for us. Before that happens, though, I want to share one of my favorite winter dishes—the delicious Sauerkraut SSoon enough, local spring produce will start showing up on our markets as spring is finally in sight for us. Before that happens, though, I want to share one of my favorite winter dishes—the delicious Sauerkraut Salad that’s in the back of the pamphlet “A Taste of Zingerman’s Food Philosophy.” I started making it two or three winters ago, and it remains one of my favorites for this time of year. After all, even when local vegetables are in short supply, we do have some world-class sauerkraut from David Klingenberger and the crew at the Brinery!

Sauerkraut Salad may sound a bit strange to most American ears, but seriously, it’s terrific. As the name implies, it starts with sauerkraut rather than salad greens. I use naturally fermented kraut from the Brinery. It’s what we use at the Deli on the Reuben and sell through Mail Order in the Reuben Kit. Seriously, the stuff is superb. And superbly good for us too. Dr. Zach Bush, whose work on holistic health strikes a deep chord with me, says:

Foods that undergo wild (air) fermentation are among the most ancient gut health tools. Wild and live fermented foods, such as sauerkraut, kavas, and kefirs gain much greater biodiversity than probiotics through the hundreds of species that are introduced to the fermenting crock from the ambient air environment.

All of which means that although I’ve really been making the salad for the flavor, it happens to be really good for our health as well! Over the years, I’ve used three different Brinery krauts, but any of their offerings would probably work well: Fair ’n’ By (green cabbage, filtered water, sea salt), Stimulus Package (green cabbage, filtered water, caraway seed, sea salt), and Galaxy Rose (green cabbage, watermelon radish, filtered water, sea salt). Both the company and the kraut are terrific and totally value-aligned for us here at Zingerman’s. As David says, they “aim to stimulate both your inner economy with living fermented foods, as well as the economy of our greater community and local food movement.”

To make the salad, start by putting a bunch of sauerkraut in a mixing bowl. A healthy handful per person would work. Add a good bit of fresh apple, cut into chunks, and then add an array of vegetables. You can use whatever you like—as I said above, winter vegetables work really well. I used fresh fennel, celery, and a carrot one night. The next night, I added bell pepper. Watermelon radishes are wonderful, and so is celeriac. Sprinkle on some sea salt and a grinding of black pepper. I added a bunch of caraway seeds. Sprinkle on some Gingras oak-barrel-aged organic apple cider vinegar, add a little extra virgin olive oil, and a bit more black pepper if you like. Mix well, then let the salad stand for a few minutes. Eat and enjoy. The sour crunch of the kraut, the sweet brightness of the apple, and the savory freshness of the vegetables all come together in a shockingly good way. Last but not least, I like it too, with chunks of a good mountain cheese mixed into the salad as well. We have an especially great selection of them in stock at the Deli right now—I’m partial to the Extra Aged Emmental (cut from the authentic, 180-pound wheel) and also the hard-to-get Schwagalp Alpkäse.

Shop for sauerkraut

A regenerative path toward healthy, enduring organizational futures

In her Sunday morning Substack, British-Turkish author Elif Shafak reflected—as so many of us are trying to do—on the uncertain state of the world. In her efforts to center herself, Shafak draws on the work of German-born American psychologist Erich Fromm. I’ve long found Fromm’s writing a helpful guide to what we’re living through. His insights into what was unfolding in his native Germany in the 1930s, as the Nazis rose to power—most notably in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom—have been especially clarifying for me as I try to make sense of what’s been happening here in the U.S. over the last decade. Shafak, who has lived through authoritarian rule in her native Turkey and fought hard for the right to make her literary art, concludes:

Art is how we tell the truth. … These days we need to remember this perhaps more profoundly than ever before as the world around us unravels with a bewildering speed and we seem to sink into some sort of collective madness. There is such a thing, after all.

… [Erich] Fromm observed that particularly in an anxiety-ridden age marked by uncertainty, insecurity and constant upheaval, individuals tend to surrender their independent judgement and their ability of critical reflection, succumbing to collective narcissism.

The world we live in is becoming increasingly more uncertain, worrying and difficult. We turn to art for light, to literature for wisdom, to nature for humility and to each other for strength.

The essay that follows is, indeed, about a form of art—in this case, an artistic approach to succession planning that has shaped how we think about the future of our organization here at Zingerman’s. If there is, as Shafak says, “collective madness,” this work could be said to be about “collective creativity.” It’s a long-term model for business ownership that calls up humility, images of nature, and the importance of collaboration and connection to community. Rather than retreating into the kind of “collective narcissism” that Erich Fromm wrote about, the Perpetual Purpose Trust (PPT) invites a collective coming together in a spirit of generosity—looking to the long-term health of the whole instead of the short-term enrichment of the few.

Seen through this lens, I believe PPTs fit well with the second of historian Timothy Snyder’s 20 tips for pushing back against autocracy in his book On Tyranny:

Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose an institution you care about and take its side.

In this case, the institution in question would be the one you might have started, or that, perhaps, you play an integral and influential role in. When it comes to succession planning, PPTs protect high-quality local companies rooted in the community and help to defend them from getting sold off to bigger businesses for financial considerations that can seem “too good to pass up.” Every healthy local business that’s maintained is, after all, one less company that’s getting rolled up into the books of giant corporations run by far-away oligarchs with little connection to the community. And as economist Michael Shuman has demonstrated in The Local Economy Solution, strong local economies are foundational to quality of life in every direction. PPTs are one practical way to help make that happen.

Perpetual Purpose Trusts are not a new topic for me. We have, happily, had one in place for three years now—I wrote about what we were doing with ours back when we formally rolled it out in January of 2023. Having just spent two inspiring days at the Purpose Trust Ownership Conference in Austin at the end of last week, I was reminded that while the idea feels familiar to us here in the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB), it remains largely unknown in much of the broader business world. What we almost take for granted is still new to many modern-day business owners. I’m not suggesting a PPT is right for everyone. I do believe, though, that it’s a deeply holistic and healthy option for organizations that want to stay locally owned and closely connected to the people who work in the business and to the community around them. Three years in, we remain very happy that we chose this path.

What is a Perpetual Purpose Trust? It’s an ownership model that allows an organization to create healthy succession beyond its founders while keeping the company local and grounded in its essence. In a PPT, the organization’s purpose plays a meaningful legal role. The trust becomes an owner (in our case, a partial owner) and has a serious fiduciary responsibility to safeguard that purpose over time. Unlike a person, a purpose trust does not retire, relocate, or pass away. It can serve as an owner in perpetuity, helping protect the business from being sold off to outside buyers whose interests may not align with the organization’s long-term reason for being. It’s one thoughtful option to consider for anyone approaching succession in a spirit of generosity and stewardship. And it’s worth remembering that living with purpose brings a whole host of benefits. University of Michigan professor of public health Vic Strecher details many of those upsides in his book Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything, and in this podcast from this past summer.

I first read about what we have come to call PPTs about 10 years ago in E.F. Schumacher’s amazing Small is Beautiful. While it’s not the main focus of the 1973 book, Schumacher does share the story of the Scott Bader Commonwealth in England, which started a program something like this about 75 years ago.

The idea of placing a business into a trust for the benefit of large numbers of people rests on a fundamentally different set of beliefs than the more common approach, where owners aim to extract as much value as possible and then exit at the peak by selling to a larger, cash-rich corporation. In fact, the PPT model is grounded in assumptions that are nearly the exact opposite. Schumacher framed his views on the issue:

Private enterprise claims that its profits are being earned by its own efforts, and that a substantial part of them is then taxed away by public authorities. This is not a correct reflection of the truth—generally speaking. The truth is that a large part of the costs of private enterprise has been borne by the public authorities—because they pay for the infrastructure—and that the profits of private enterprise therefore greatly overstate its achievement.

What Schumacher is saying is also aligned with what Paul’s grandfather told him (and then Paul told me) when we got going at the Deli in the early ’80s: “Half of what you earn rightly belongs to the community and the people who helped you get to where you’ve gotten.”

In his closing keynote at the end of the conference, Mark Clayton Hand—one of the country’s leading scholars on Perpetual Purpose Trusts and democratic practice in the workplace—beautifully wove together the significance of PPTs with the work of Native American writer and wisdom-keeper Steven Charleston. I knew a fair bit about PPTs, but nothing about Charleston. I’ve been studying his insightful work ever since.

Charleston, who just turned 77 on the 15th of February, was born into the Choctaw tribe in Duncan, Oklahoma, in the winter of 1949. He studied religion at college and received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the subject before taking a position in the Anglican ministry. He has worked as both a professor and a minister ever since, and he currently serves as the Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Alaska. Charleston has written many books over the course of his career, the most recent of which is We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope. In it, Charleston reminds readers of the horror of the apocalyptic experience that Native American people underwent when Europeans arrived in the Americas. The resilience that helped his ancestors survive that painful apocalypse, Charleston believes, offers good, grounded lessons that can help anyone interested navigate our current national challenges.

The idea of a Perpetual Purpose Trust—to hold something important in a community collectively, so it stays rooted and works for the benefit of the whole rather than just a few—is very much in line with Native American philosophies. In that sense, Steven Charleston helped me see PPTs in a new light. Yes, PPTs are still fairly new in the U.S.—there are only about 50 in the country. But the principle behind them—the idea of giving back to the community, of keeping a company that really matters to the town, sharing profits and decision-making more widely rather than concentrating them in just a couple of hands—is far from new.

In today’s business climate, where extraction and consolidation often seem like the “norm,” a PPT feels radical. Yet in older, Indigenous traditions, something like a PPT simply makes sense, and while few have done it, anyone could. Seen through the lens Charleston provides, it’s actually the more common modern practice—extract and exit—that seems out of step. Which makes me realize it is far less extraordinary than I originally imagined. Instead, it seems more aligned with what I wrote last week about the “unordinary”—it’s actually a very natural way to pursue succession, but in our current socio-economic construct, few do. It is my hope and belief that in the coming years, PPTs will become quite common. Natalie Reitman-White, who’s been instrumental in getting the national work on PPTs to where it is, envisions 1000 of them in the U.S. by the year 2040.

Perpetual Purpose Trusts are a positive step in a sustainable, community-oriented direction—a direction that feels well-aligned with Indigenous insight Steven Charleston shared in a recent interview:

So many people are worried and anxious and fearful these days. I mean, we really are at a global turning point. And I don’t know if my books will help people … but if they can help at all, it’s incumbent upon me to speak up and try and offer something to help people through this difficult time and to reassure them, we’ll make it. We can do this. And … the spirit is with us. We don’t have to be afraid. We don’t ever have to be afraid. We need to stand up and be counted. Now’s our moment. We’re here for a reason. There’s a purpose for this. It’s not by accident. We didn’t ask to be born into interesting times like this. We didn’t ask to be at a hinge point of history, but we’re there and we’re there because the spirit wants us to do something collectively.

One way, I believe, that we can take the collective action Charleston is suggesting is to lean into the idea of Perpetual Purpose Trusts. For anyone focused on healthy, positive, regenerative ways to design ownership succession in your organization— as we have been here in the ZCoB for a number of years now—give some thought to creating a Perpetual Purpose Trust. As Steven Charleston says, “Celebrating what we hope for together is better than fighting over what we believe separately.”

FJ Intelligence is a progressive design firm based in the Eixample neighborhood of València. In a 2023 piece entitled “Everyone looks to the future: emerging technologies and disruptive innovation,” they share,

When we talk about emerging technologies, we often focus on specific terms such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, or the Internet of Things. But what truly matters is not the technology itself. What matters is the way these innovations can reshape how societies function, how value is created, and how resources are managed.

Disruptive innovation is structural. It affects business models, employment, regulation, infrastructure, and even how trust is built in digital environments.
And while some changes are already visible, others are only beginning to take shape.

…

The future is not predicted: it is built.
Emerging technologies and disruptive innovation will continue to reshape the world in ways we are only beginning to understand. The coming years will not only be defined by new breakthroughs, but by how societies and organizations respond to them.
Those who will lead this transformation will not necessarily be the ones who adopt technologies first, but the ones who understand them best. Those who can anticipate their impact, govern them responsibly, and integrate innovation into a long-term strategic vision. Because in a world driven by disruption, the future does not simply happen. It is built.

I wouldn’t have typically thought of a PPT as a “technology,” but upon further reflection, I realized it absolutely is. Merriam-Webster says technology is simply “the practical application of scientific knowledge especially in a particular area.” So, sure enough, the Perpetual Purpose Trust is a technology that can help reshape our world in positive ways. Six or seven years ago, after exploring any number of other options, both Paul and I agreed that it met our desire to keep what we had started together 44 years ago in March of 1982, when we opened the Deli, grounded in the community. We did not, we knew, want to watch it follow the path so many other great local businesses have taken—oft-told stories in which a much-loved local institution ends up owned and run by people who do not carry the spirit of its founding forward, with decision-making power and profits moving further and further afield. The name and the logo remain, but the essence that made the organization so special evaporates.

Those sorts of stories are, I’m sorry to say, all too common. I heard one such experience while I was at the Perpetual Purpose Trust conference: Joe Rogoff spent most of his career working in natural foods stores out west in California, places whose work he believed in and where he felt like he had the freedom and dignity to make a meaningfully positive difference. All that changed when the small chain he was working at was sold to a much bigger company. Sometimes those sales can work out well, but more often than not, the experience is more akin to what Joe describes. At first, things went fairly well, but soon enough, finances overran philosophy, and the people now in charge dictated a different direction:

The financial results were not making the shareholders happy, despite maintaining excellent results for a grocery chain. Cuts to labor restricted training and service. … Where we had once been encouraged to “run it like you own it,” we were now reminded that we were owned by money managers and shareholders who were most certainly not stewards. So the culture changed, doing business in any way with the company changed, and the experience of working there was changed so that the pride in the company, how it was positively impacting the world, and in the job itself evaporated …

It’s why my after-career (I’m too busy to call it retirement) has been focused on steward ownership [another name for Perpetual Purpose Trusts]. I serve on boards for co-ops, employee-owned businesses and purpose trusts because they seem the most reliable models for workplace equity and preservation of shared stakeholder values. They tend to be non-extractive and non-exploitive, and while it’s not necessarily required, also tend to be intent on doing something good for the world.

For us, the PPT is a way to do the opposite of what Joe witnessed as the grocery store to which he had devoted himself for so many years was sold. In the current national climate of uncertainty, it is a positive statement about the future, an overt commitment to community, to the belief that we are all in this together, and that founding owners (like Paul and me) can exit with grace while also giving the organization an opportunity to stay rooted in place for decades to come. I won’t be there, but the implementation of the PPT in 2021 has had me thinking regularly about the 100th anniversary of the ZCoB in 2082!

Mark Clayton Hand shared his learnings from Steven Charleston, who offers four approaches to help get through any apocalypse, including what we are currently experiencing:

“Radical change demands a radical response—turning the culture upside down.”

“The crumbling of the world we know demands that we build prototypes, or ‘lighthouses,’ that can show people an alternative potential future. ”

“It is imperative that we take into consideration the stakeholders that have historically had no voice or power in our economies.”

“The future can only be built together–co-created. We can’t do that without you, but with you, we are confident that we can co-create that better, alternative future.”

As Mark pointed out, the Perpetual Purpose Trust model does all four of these. It represents a significant shift in business culture—moving from “me first, me forever” toward an approach in which everyone can benefit, and the organization stays rooted in its community for the long term. It is absolutely an alternative model—a lighthouse, as Mark put it—showing what’s possible. It brings front-line staff and the broader community more meaningfully into the conversation. And finally, as Mark emphasized in his fourth point, it’s all about collaborative co-creation. Rather than taking out ever-increasing profits, trusts are designed to enhance purpose. Steven Charleston expresses this in a beautifully positive, community-centered way. While he wasn’t writing specifically about Perpetual Purpose Trusts, it’s clear from his reflections that his thinking aligns closely with what this model seeks to support:

Here is one way to look at yourself through spiritual eyes: you are a message. When you wonder what existence is all about, when you ask about your purpose in life, or when you feel small in comparison to the troubles of the world: remember that you are a message sent by the Spirit into creation. What you say, what you do, how you think and feel: your whole life is a long and sustained message for others to encounter, experience and receive. You are a living message: sent to touch more lives than you can imagine.

This is, I believe, with ever greater strength, what a Perpetual Purpose Trust can make possible—it’s our message to the future, our legacy, what we leave behind, a gift that we hope can keep on giving to the people who are part of it and the community it is in for years to come. As Charleston says, touching more lives than we can imagine.

In the Introduction to his new book, Founder to Future, John Abrams offers a perspective that is more explicitly grounded in business practice while still reflecting the same spirit shown in Steven Charleston’s insightful and inspiring comments:

Small businesses can be living systems that work for all the right reasons: to make people’s lives more meaningful and satisfying, to spread wealth more equitably, to treat the planet and each other better, and to protect mission and purpose. Making work that matters. This book is about reshaping tomorrow’s workplace for both individual fulfillment and the common good. Business can be at the heart of the great civilizational shift that we need today.

At the conference in Austin last week, about 150 others were in attendance, all at different stages of implementing versions of Perpetual Purpose Trusts in their own organizations. The range of attendees was wide—auto repair shops, assisted living facilities, manufacturers, a few fellow food businesses, as well as financial and legal service firms that support this work. I am not here to say that Perpetual Purpose Trusts are the right path for everyone. But I believe they are, as FJ Intelligence writes, an example of how “innovations can reshape how societies function, how value is created, and how resources are managed. … And while some changes are already visible, others are only beginning to take shape.” The PPT is a bit of both. As the sold-out conference—with a waiting list—would suggest, the model is already visible. And at the same time, I would argue that its broader impact is only just beginning to be seen. PPTs can work for everything from large manufacturing firms to independent musicians looking for a way to protect their legacy.

From our perspective, here’s what we hope and believe that the Zingerman’s Perpetual Purpose Trust (ZPPT) will make happen:

1. Over the coming years, this program will make the Zingerman’s “intellectual property,” or “brand,” self-owned. ZPPT will ensure that Zingerman’s WILL NOT be sold to any outside company! No going public, no franchising, no selling the business to some big company that wants to buy us! It empowers and authorizes our “Purpose” (Mission, Guiding Principles, Beliefs) so that it takes precedence over profit. Profit is good too, of course, but NOT at the expense of values.
2. Through this program, we will be paying out more and more of the profit from the intellectual property to Community Share owners—the Zingerman’s staff members who own a share in the business. Right now, there are over 300 of them! Over the next 20 years, that will gradually increase so that over half of the profit from our intellectual property will go to Community Share owners!
3. ZPPT will help to make a sustainable, thoughtful, planned transition possible for Paul and me.
4. This program will share ownership more and more widely. As Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer says, “the more something is shared, the greater its value becomes.”
5. Make the ZCoB a more and more attractive place to come and work!
6. Create a metaphorical “old-growth forest” that will continue to benefit the community of which we’re a part and the people in the ZCoB for decades to come. Forester, author, and professor Suzanne Simard says, An old growth forest “is a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness. The trees, understory plants, fungi and microbes in a forest are so thoroughly connected, communicative and codependent that some scientists have described them as superorganisms.

By doing this, we can keep Zingerman’s whole, healthy, and integrated into the community for decades to come, rather than sell it off—which can lead to transfer of wealth and power and influence outside the organization and outside the community. There’s much more to Ann Arbor, of course, than Zingerman’s. But over the last 40-plus years, we have grown to become a reasonably important part of this ecosystem. We are who we are, and have made it as far as we have, in great part because of that ecosystem. This is a way to keep that relationship going long after any one individual who may be part of the ZCoB is present.

I will say from experience that trying to plan organizational succession can be a lonely and sometimes scary path. Very few of us had a clear sense, early on, of what we’d want to do with our businesses many years down the road. Of those who did, in my anecdotal conversational experience, their vision was often to flip the business for a lot of money and “retire early.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with that vision, but it wasn’t the one many people—Paul and me included—had. We may not have been fully clear about what we did want to happen decades later, but we were clear that it wasn’t selling the business to some big company for a pile of cash.

As I wrote last week, the amazing Arab Israeli hip hop band System Ali sings about their belief that they can begin to create a new, more caring, more inclusive, more community-focused country. As they put in their song “Voyna,” they are “building the house anew.” The Perpetual Purpose Trust is, I believe, one of the ways I know to do that here—to seed a society which, per Steven Charleston, E.F. Schumacher, and Mark Clayton Hand’s teachings, would be grounded in community in ways that individuals can do well, and that also benefit the greater ecosystems of which they are a part at the same time. As Steven Charleston shares,

In the darkness, in the valley of shadow, we can feel isolated and afraid. But once we have the light of hope, we begin to see just how many people share in our struggle. The first step toward community is recognizing our common humanity. Instead of seeing strangers in the dark, we recognize fellow climbers in the light.

Hope booster

P.S. On March 25 and 26, I will be co-teaching with my good friend Gareth Higgins! Gareth authored the amazing How Not to Be Afraid and also co-wrote The Seventh Story with Brian McLaren. This will be the third straight year we’re doing this special two-day ZingTrain seminar, “Reframing Your Leadership Stories and Beliefs.” It is a rare opportunity to learn from Gareth’s great work on the power of storytelling in our lives and blend it with deep work on beliefs—the kind I detailed extensively in The Power of Beliefs in Business. Both Gareth and I speak and teach regularly around the world, but this is the only time we do it together. Telling better stories is a powerful way to support the start of what you want to create in your organization.

A judge’s call to action, a hip hop band’s act for justice, and other unordinary actions

Four years ago, Rabbi Lauren Holtzblatt, the same thoughtful and widely respected rabbi who officiated at Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s funeral in the fall of 2020, wrote in The New York Times,

Words matter. Every letter in the Torah is believed to have significance, and every word is essential. … There is a deep spiritual practice in combing through phrases, repetitions and words. We find meaning to justify each phrase; each phrase justifies its meaning.

Coming from a different place and different perspective, and in their own dub-centric way, the message on the second cut of the powerful new album from my friends at Indigenous Resistance says something similar:

Sometimes we can’t trust our own language.
That’s why it’s necessary to be hyper-vigilant when it comes to our own terminology.

Sometimes words, combined in just the right construct, can make a concept come clear in a completely new way. Other times, we look deep within a single word itself, understood differently, to gain clarity, meaning, and improved understanding.

This is one of the latter: a better understanding that’s beginning to come to me as I ponder the uncommon, if not super-intriguing, word unordinary.

In an era when ever more “urgent” breaking news dominates the headlines, when social media makes the world seem to rush past us faster by the day, it would be easy to miss writer David Whyte’s ideas about the importance of the “unordinary.” I almost did. It would have been my loss. As Whyte writes, “Unordinary is worthy of a lifetime’s dedication and a lifetime’s journey; and yet, in such an extraordinary way, unordinary is always, always, always, just a single step away from my ordinary, everyday life.”

The gentleness of this whole concept feels like an invitation to those of us who are intrigued—to slow down, lean in, listen to our hearts, and let it settle. The last piece of my own understanding of the impact of the unordinary clicked only as I was finishing the final bits of this enews. It happened when I was literally looking through a different lens, starting to shoot photos of the cover of Whyte’s book for this essay. I’d had the title—Consolations II—ensconced in my head for weeks. But through the camera lens, it was the subtitle that suddenly caught my attention. Under Consolations II, in much smaller white-on-black letters, I really read the subtitle for the first time and let it sink in: “The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.” Sure enough, it struck me—solace, emotional nourishment, and slowing down to attend to everyday things is what “unordinary” is all about.

Early last summer, I wrote a piece about how much difference ordinary people like us can make in the world. I stand by that belief—resistance is most powerful when it’s done by everyday people. If I were to change anything in that original essay, though, it would be my use of the word extra-ordinary, as in “ordinary people doing extra-ordinary things.” Writing now, I find I have a deeper respect for—and understanding of—another way of saying what I was trying to say back then. Speaking up peacefully for dignity and democracy is awesome, but it’s not, I would now say, an extraordinary action. Anyone who’s willing to be a tiny bit bold can do it. It remains special, but I would say now, instead, that it is inspiringly unordinary.

Before you (or even my own cynical self) decide I’m splitting linguistic hairs when there’s real work to be done in the world, let me say this—the shift in how I understand that one word is already changing the way I work. New understandings, I have learned over the years, bring new ways to stand in the world. This is no exception.

In 1921, Polish-born semanticist Alfred Korzybski offered one of his most memorable lines: “Definitions create conditions.” Which means that new definitions—of the sort I’ve been immersing myself in here—create new conditions. Change the definition of a word and, not surprisingly, you do things differently, too.

All of which brings me back to unordinary. It’s a word I’ve long known, but rarely used. What follows is an exploration of a new understanding of unordinary—and the wonderful new conditions that this different definition could well create.

In David Whyte’s Consolations II, “Unordinary” is the 48th of the 52 short pieces—each with a single-word title, one for every week of the year. It begins,

UNORDINARY is a word that belongs to our future, a word that could open up a different understanding of what it means to be singular, what it means to be communally human, and above all, what it means to be here, in this difficult world; all of us, every one of us, trying to live an extraordinary, ordinary life.

If, as Whyte writes, unordinary belongs to our future, then I’d say that future is already here, present in the midst of the everyday, ready to make a difference right now. We all have the ability to do meaningfully unordinary things right now. As Whyte writes, our unordinary is “something to be uncovered and perhaps at times, even unleashed.”

Last week, on February 17, conservative Judge J. Michael Luttig delivered a talk to the New York City Bar Association titled “America’s Time of Testing Has Come.” It was a very clear call to action—not only to the lawyers in the room, but to all of us who are paying attention around the country. Luttig spoke that evening directly, in a way that David Whyte might call “unleashed.” It was down-to-earth, direct, powerful, and compelling. And at the same time, it was deeply impactful and also wholly unordinary—there was nothing about the way Luttig addressed the audience that evening that many hundreds of other retired judges couldn’t already have done too.

Judge Luttig’s talk in New York laid out the challenge we all face right now in February 2026:

We must, finally, summon the courage that has eluded us in our all-consuming fear. Americans must summon from deep within the courage that was once our Founders’ courage. …

The time has come again, as it has come before, when the “appalling silence of the good people” is now “betrayal.”

We must stand, raise our voices, and speak out against what we are witnessing in America today. We must “break the silence of the night.”

For, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned, “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

If we but find the courage to speak truth to power now, today, as did the Founders and our ancestors when their time of testing came, the United States of America will endure forever as the beacon of freedom and liberty to the world. America will once again be the envy of the world.

It would be hard for me not to take Judge Luttig’s call to action to heart. In an interview with Ali Velshi on MS Now a few days later, Luttig took a historian’s view of current events. To his mind, it’s clear that we are all being tested, but the tide is turning in the right direction. He cited the recent Super Bowl halftime show, the demonstrations in Minneapolis, along with the Supreme Court decision about tariffs, as evidence that the momentum for democratic direction is growing, sharing that:

For the first time in 10 years … I have confidence that America is going to prevail and long endure … I have not just hope, but I have the belief that we have come to the turning point and that America and Americans are going to answer the call from our founders and ancestors.

If history is calling, then I, for one, am ready to pick up the phone—to find the kind of courage Judge Luttig calls on us all to show. Once we do, the real question becomes how we will continue to both live our daily lives and, at the same time, find small but significant ways to make a meaningful difference. That question is part of what I’ve attempted to explore in the new pamphlet, “Why Democracy Matters: A Deep Understanding of Democracy in Our Everyday Lives.”

I realized in writing this piece, the inverse of Alfred Korzybski’s now classic statement is also true: Conditions can create definitions.

Sure enough, the social conditions in which we are living in the U.S. these days have me thinking about new definitions. As author Ursula K. Le Guin said in the fall of 2014, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” Resistance. Art. The art of words. Unordinary actions taken by dozens of people—like Judge Luttig—by people like you and me answering the call to stand up for democracy. There’s no need to wait to be “extraordinary.” Unordinary is in each of us.

Unordinary is ordinary people doing something that matters—simple, available to all, but powerful in its intent. Becoming a federal judge, as Judge Luttig did, is extraordinary. Speaking out about what is ethically authentic? Unordinary. Any of us can do it.

In trying to play a small positive unordinary part in this work, I find myself returning again to Timothy Snyder’s slim and powerful book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Each lesson is a modest but meaningful call to action. Lesson #9 reads:

Be Kind to Our Language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.

This essay is, in its own way, an effort to take that advice. My new engagement with “unordinariness” is an attempt to understand a familiar word in an unfamiliar way, a way that regrounds me in the face of what could otherwise start to seem a paralyzing power grab by those who aspire to authoritarianism.

The idea of unordinary came clear to me in the context of a creative musical collective I stumbled upon last week called System Ali. A hip hop band from Israel, made up of both Arabs and Jews, speaking up and speaking out together about the injustice of the government’s actions. I was only half paying attention when their rendition of “Let My People Go” started playing.

Usually, I choose music on purpose. But sometimes, if I’m focused on something else, I tune out and just go with whatever starts playing on my phone. Something about System Ali caught my attention, though—I’ve replayed that unordinary moment a couple hundred times over the course of the last of couple days, so much so that I can hear it in my head even with no music actually playing.

It all starts with a gentle Arabic drone in the background. Soon it was joined by a wailing, Eastern European shtetl-style accordion in the foreground—two musical lineages that rarely share the same stage. A violin. More accordion. Then a sudden, unexpected shift into a bolder, more aggressive rhythm when band members began to rap, each in the language of their choosing—Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, English, Amharic, Yiddish. I kept listening, going from one song to the next: hip hop grooves layered with Arabic scales, Gypsy inflections, jazz phrasing, the polyphonic singing of Ethiopia, and a little rock and roll energy to boot. Wow. Arabs and Jews, immigrants and natives, all making music dignity-centered together in one ensemble.

System Ali’s songs deal with life under the definition of minorities in Israel, without hesitating to tackle the painful and sensitive issues in an honest, critical, quintessentially authentic way. As I said, System Ali is a mixed race, mixed religion, mixed gender group—which means the racism, separation, and fear that are so abundant in the region are nowhere to be seen, nor heard, in their work. Their album is an action towards building an alternative, wholly unordinary, reality.

To Judge Luttig’s point, they are not being silent: The band members sing about George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, the Nakba (the expulsion of so many Palestinian people from their land in 1948), the pain and loss and endless heartbreak that all peoples have experienced in the course of the history of their region. Without question, they challenge all of us who will listen to learn, and to be better at accessing our own unordinariness in the interest of making the kind of positive difference that both they and Judge Luttig have called on us to. On “Let My People Go,” the opening vocal sallies start—first in Arabic, then in Russian, and then move on to Hebrew and a little English—passing from one band member to the next with force, power, and feeling:

My heart is on fire
This situation is infuriating
Right to left so much pain
We want to live
But How?
Without an ability
Without an essence
I’m surrounded East to West South to North

I’m not about politics I’m all about myself
Because there’s a never-ending war in our home

I found myself thinking, Wow! System Ali is amazing. Diverse voices, diverse languages, diverse backgrounds, all playing together in a powerful, grounded, and meaningful way. It was really something so unusual to see—diverse bands singing protest songs are not easy to find in the region right now. The members of System Ali have taken a deep breath, answered their own call to action, and are speaking out—with unity in diversity—when so many others are staying silent.

It’s all so unordinary, in an absolutely wonderful way, that it’s gotten my attention. I’m not the only one. Journalist Ben Shalev, writing for the independent paper Haaretz, says,

An emotional declaration is in order. … let me put it this way:

“I think I saw what I would like to see as part of the future of Israeli music and its name is System Ali.”

I’ll add to Shalev’s statement: I would like to see a future in which the values of System Ali are very widespread. Not just of music in the Middle East—but the future, period. In our companies and communities, as well as our countries. Diverse, dignity-centered, and direct. Not afraid to speak up against war, indignity, and injustice. Eager to honor difference and put pain in the context of art, rather than inflict it aggressively onto others. Able to come together collaboratively to create one-of-a-kind art that makes a positive difference in the world!

In their song “I Can’t Breathe,” the band urges,

Don’t accept the lie,
don’t drink the poison.

Forgetting is a habit

The big learning of unordinary for me is about embracing that the diverse, ethically-based, inclusive, and encouraging reality that System Ali is creating with its music could actually be the norm. In a sense, what’s odd isn’t them—it’s the sad reality that a group of Arabs and Jews playing socially conscious, peace-focused, dignity-driven, and difference-making music together in one band that easily could and should be so ordinary we barely even notice anything beyond their tunes is, instead, so rare.

As I pondered the music of System Ali, it seemed an ideal example of what unordinary might be. It’s a way to live Timothy Snyder’s call to be kind to our language as an act of resistance against the numbing drama of authoritarianism.

Here’s a bit more about how I’m thinking about it. Extraordinary is when someone makes something rare, difficult, or almost impossible take place. It’s stuff that takes both a very special skillset and hard work. Olympic athletes—extraordinary. Michael Jordan—extraordinary. Climbing the Himalayas—extraordinary. Being a brain surgeon—definitely extraordinary. Timothy Snyder’s and Ursula K. Le Guin’s writing. I appreciate them as such. They are special. Definitely not ordinary.

The more I played with the idea of unordinary, the more it resonated. I began to see that, while the quality of our food may indeed be particularly special—extraordinary when we do it really well—most of what we do in our business practices, seen through my new lens of understanding, is definitely unordinary. They aren’t, I’m realizing, especially extraordinary at all. Anyone who wants to could do them. It takes neither a particularly special skill nor years of intensive formal training to learn to be kind. Kindness. Compassion. Dignity. Diversity. Humility. Empathy. Inclusion. Any eight-year-old could have their hand at them. Vision-writing. Extra-miling. Open-book management. Open meetings. Consensus. Also wonderful, but still, not really “extraordinary.” We have no special ingredient that makes us more able to do what we do than any other American organization.

All of those processes are really important to us, and I recommend them wholeheartedly to you too, but the truth is that anyone who decides to could do them. In that sense, I would now describe them as “unordinary.” Yes, uncommon, but not because of a rare ability that’s uniquely abundant in and around Ann Arbor. They’re hard to find because they’re not the norm—most people color within the same behavioral lines their colleagues do. They’re not the norm because, in current conditions, it may take a bit more attentiveness to take positive, dignity-based action. And, at the same time, they are absolutely unordinary.

As is so often the case, now that I’ve been thinking more and more about what it means to be unordinary, I’ve started to see evidence of it all around me. Just to give some context to the rest of the conversation, I’ll share a couple of examples here.

Unordinariness is what caught me a couple of days ago in this article about the late Reverend Jesse Jackson, who passed away last week. The headline of an article by reporter Madeline King in the Chicago Tribune conveyed the concept: “Neighbors remember Rev. Jesse Jackson as a ‘quiet reminder that greatness can live right next to you.’” All the stories illustrated the point further:

Although he worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., … to his neighbors, he was a friendly face who made others feel seen. …“Jackson was the type of neighbor to compliment your baby as you push her in a stroller and then stop by your house to celebrate her law school graduation decades later,” West said. … “He was absolutely wonderful,” Speller said. “Very personable, genuine, generous with his time.”

All of what’s being said about Jackson is wonderful and uplifting. Yet, in a way, it describes what any human is capable of. What made it remarkable was the authenticity he brought—it altered the energy of the moment—but at its core, it reminds us that this is something anyone could do. Once again, it’s wholly unordinary.

Unordinariness is, I realize, nearly all of what draws me to the writing of Wendell Berry. Berry’s actual writing, many say, is exceptional. The content, though, when it comes down to it, in this context, is more upliftingly unordinary than anything else. Rereading with this lens, there’s little Berry advocates that exceeds the normal bandwidth of any caring, thoughtful human being who might be living on the land.

Something similar, I realize, is also true of Peter Block’s writing. It is beautifully unordinary. In Community: The Structure of Belonging, he shares, “Being powerful means that my experience, my discovery, even my pleasure, are mine to create.” Extraordinary? Not really. Inspiringly, insightfully, unordinary? Absolutely. He goes on, “The shift toward citizenship is to take the stand that we are the creators of our world as well as the products of it.” It’s moving. It’s accurate. It’s definitely unordinary! It’s the choice that, in comparably unordinary ways, Judge Luttig and System Ali have both made. And that any of us who decide to step up as Judge Luttig has called on us to do, can make too.

I’m writing this and sharing my musings as one way to offer clearer language to use in the abundant, unordinary instances of life where that might really matter to folks. Why? Because with clearer language, we communicate more effectively, we think more clearly, and we make better decisions. We can embrace unordinariness and all that goes with it, and deal with it differently from the extraordinary work that goes into the work of Olympic athletes and trained virtuoso musicians.

To my eye, System Ali sets the pace. It’s wild how much they have done with their work. And will do. As Yonatan Kunda, one of the band’s vocalists and lyricists, explains, “This band is not about molding or combining everyone into one thing … It’s about keeping those [cultural] differences and embracing them for their individuality and uniqueness.” Muhammad Aguani, another lead member from Jaffa, shares, “When I’m with the band, I feel like I’m with my family,” he says. “I respect them and I’m proud of them. I love them very much.”

Looking from the outside, the members of System Ali seem able to turn normal, healthy disagreement into the kind of creative growth we all want. They run their band practices standing or sitting, but always facing each other in a circle, the better to facilitate mutual respect. They talk a lot about each band member’s need to protect, nurture, and grow within their own bayit, which means “house” in both Arabic and Hebrew. As Aguani adds, “We fight a lot. What he’s saying may make me angry, but then I write another verse.” What I’m learning from them now is to continue to lean into the unordinariness of the moment, and the magic that can be made from it. They are a reminder that no matter how bleak headlines may look—in a business or a bigger entity like a country—there is always positive, wonderfully unordinary resistance beneath the surface.

Ben Shalev, a journalist for Haaretz, describes the way the band works together while allowing each member to remain fully themselves. Writing about the “conglomerate” that is System Ali, he notes that each rapper has “a separate, distinct identity.” One “looks and sounds like a Russian revolutionary,” while another, dressed in a jogging suit, “resembles an assistant trainer in a Golden Gloves boxing club in Jaffa’s Gimel neighborhood.” The band members themselves put it more simply. As one member explained:

We wear whatever we want because we want to and it is who we are. And since we are all different people, we wear different things. And that’s it. Liba, she wants to wear a dress and me, I like to wear jeans and a t-shirt and Enchik has his sporty look. So what? It’s all good, man!

What catches my attention most, though, are these poignant lyrics from the song “Voyna” (“War”). This version is the one I’ve had on repeat. At about the two-and-a-half-minute mark, bass player Yonatan Kunda sings these lines:

All that is left is the shock
Spinning around the block of our souls like a hawk
As our ministers mop up blood with theoretical talk
They can’t hear anything or feel anybody
On the left, and to the right, all the kings are conned
In this political ping pong
We are nobody’s pawns

We are singing the 23rd Psalm
In the persistence of resistance
In the rock of the song.
We’re the screech of the chalk of the white and blue
There’s smoke rising from a fire no one ever knew
In our hearts,
We’re building this house anew.

Tears fill my eyes as I type up those song lyrics. Kunda sings with a fervor, and the music is so compelling that it reminds me that all the people you and I work with are also capable of calling up this same kind of passion—of choosing to be unordinary, of speaking out from the heart for what we believe, but doing it always with dignity and respect for everyone around us. While System Ali is terrific, they are not, in this new context, extraordinary. I actually wish we were in a situation in which so many other bands were bringing together diverse musicians to sing about peace, dignity, and gentle justice for all. Their work makes a difference. It’s Judge Luttig’s call to action come alive. Wholly, wonderfully, lovingly unordinary. Creative, caring, difference-making work we can all, in our own ways, do in our organizations every day.

The American-born Kunda, it turns out, spends a lot of time at the Yaffa Youth Center teaching young kids poetry, in both Hebrew and Arabic, as well as playing music, offering the positive impact of unordinariness:

It’s the beginning of the end of the problem when we create music together.

Take unordinary action

P.S. In Arabic, the word for apricot is mish mush. In Hebrew, it’s mish mish. In my world right now, an apricot is an invitation into the dignity and democracy that System Ali, Judge Luttig, and all the other good people I mentioned above are advocating. I was wearing my apricot-embroidered Carhartt jacket when I ran into long-time customer Jonathan Sugar wearing his! We both smiled. Check out all the apricot shirts, hoodies, hats, and jackets—Underground Printing ships your order straight from its Ann Arbor store to your home, and all the proceeds are donated to Democracy Now!—a non-partisan, non-profit!

Inuit insight, magic words, and bringing democracy to life every day

Greenland has certainly been in the news a lot recently. While power politics can make for catchy headlines, the component of Greenland’s culture and history that draws my attention on a deeper level is its Native population, which makes up about 90 percent of the people who live there. Rather than talking about invading, we might instead find ourselves inspired by the cultural teachings of the Indigenous people who call Greenland home. I find myself thinking back to that Josef Albers poem “More or Less”:

To distribute material possessions
is to divide them

to distribute spiritual possessions
is to multiply them

The Inuit are an ancient culture, whose ancestors likely came from eastern Siberia, moved across what’s now Canada, and, over generations, made their way east to Greenland—where today roughly 95 percent of the population of 60,000 or so is Inuit.

One of the figures from Greenland Inuit history who fascinates me most is the explorer and cultural anthropologist Knud Rasmussen. Born in Jakobshavn (now Ilulissat) to a Danish missionary father and an Inuit–Danish mother, Rasmussen grew up speaking Greenlandic and immersed in Inuit culture—an upbringing that would profoundly shape his life’s work.

In 1902, at the age of 23, Rasmussen set out on his first expedition to study Inuit culture in Greenland (the same year, it happens, that Rocco and Katherine Disderide built what, eight decades later, would become the Deli’s building). Rasmussen has been hailed by 20th-century anthropologists as “The Father of Eskimology.” Over the course of his life, he donated over 15,000 artifacts to the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen to support a better understanding of Inuit culture.

In 1908, Rasmussen wrote what’s considered the classic anthropological work on the Inuit, entitled The People of the Polar North. It’s a combination of learnings from his extensive time spent living with various Inuit communities, detailed accounts of his travels, and serious scholarly study. When Rasmussen died of pneumonia at the age of 54 in December 1933, The New York Times published an obituary the following day, calling his book “a treasury of folklore.” Author and photographer Dave Hamilton writes of Rasmussen,

He remains a much-loved character within the Inuit communities of Greenland and Canada. In Denmark he is also a national hero—but outside of these far northern countries he is virtually unknown.

…

Rasmussen was acutely aware of how easily Inuit culture could be polluted and diluted by Western influence. He had the foresight to understand that if it wasn’t documented, it could be lost forever. … He collected folk tales in a way that other explorers might butterflies or beetles.

Much to my happy surprise, Rasmussen mentions dignity often in his writing—not as a subject in itself, but woven throughout his vivid descriptions of Inuit life. From him, I learned that the daily practice of dignity in Inuit culture reaches farther than what I’ve seen or read about in most other cultures—and certainly much deeper than what we experience here in our own country.

Lisa Koperqualuk is a Canadian Inuit anthropologist who hails from the far northern province of Nunavut. She specializes in the study of Inuit spirituality and traditional life, since, as she says, “For Inuit, our past is our pathway to the future.” In 2018, Koperqualuk delivered a talk titled “Some Reflections on What Human Dignity Means to Us Inuit,” in which she shared how deeply Inuit culture values dignity. Dignity wasn’t a subject she studied in her formal schooling. Rather, it was part of her childhood. She reflected,

I think when I think of dignity it relates first to the way I was brought up. My grandfather … always showed respect for me. So the word I would use is “sususiak”—to have respect for one another. … So I was raised by my grandparents. I learned of the respect they showed to others. I learned not only through their words but by their actions. And so most Inuit are raised to have respect for others and in doing so they have respect for themselves—and therefore all that is around them. This was taught as being part of Inuit law. The way one should conduct themselves as Inuit.

By the time Koperqualuk was an adult, her grandfather’s influence and the impact of growing up in and studying Inuit culture had made dignity second nature for her. She explains in the talk that dignity is the underlying principle behind the Inuit people’s respect for themselves, for all human beings, and for “the need to protect our environment and how it relates to dignity.” It also underlies, she says, the founding of what Koperqualuk calls “a cooperative jewel,” La Fédération des Coopératives du Nouveau-Québec, back in 1959.

Coming back to Knud Rasmussen and his extensive studies of Inuit people in Greenland, he later traveled westward with a team of fellow explorers to Canada. Rasmussen’s purpose was to learn about the history and culture of every Inuit group he encountered there. He spent significant time with each community, most especially the Netsilik Inuit in what is now the Canadian province of Nunavut. Rasmussen lived with the Netsilik for over half a year, during which time he gained the community’s trust. Gradually, many began to share their personal stories, dreams, and sacred traditions.

In his 1931 book, The Netsilik Eskimos: Social Life and Spiritual Culture, Rasmussen recounts the many tales he was told during his travels among Inuit communities:

All that is described in them did really happen once, when everything in the world was different to what it is now. Thus these tales are both their real history and the source of all their religious ideas.

As Rasmussen later shares in Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, The Danish Expedition to Arctic North America in Charge, Volume 2: The Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, one of the stories he heard in his time in Canada came from an elderly Netslik Inuit woman named Nalungiaq. She taught him that,

Of all sources of power, magic words are the most difficult to get hold of. But they are also the strongest of all, for it was a word—a magic word—which in the olden days, when mankind lived in the dark, gave them light; and it was by means of a magic word that death was brought into life at the time when human beings were beginning to overcrowd the earth.

While magic—in a word or otherwise—is well accepted in traditional Inuit and other Native cultures, it has over time been made anathema in most of the Western world. In a story that very few Americans (me included) are aware of, Indigenous American historian and author John Mohawk explains how that came to happen over the centuries:

As the church grew in political importance, it began a “campaign against magic” during the three hundred years starting about 1450. Individuals who had a spiritual relationship with plants or animals were considered to be practicing magic. In the 1600s it was believed that these people had renounced Christ and were in league with the devil, who promised them the powers over nature in return, and they then used these powers against their enemies. The war on witches and magic was a psychological war on nature.

By contrast, Inuit culture treats nature with the same dignity as people are taught to treat each other, and magic is simply part of the traditional beliefs and practices. I’m beginning to believe ever more strongly that we might be wise to adopt a similar approach here, and to reverse the centuries-old work to eliminate the idea of magic from our lives. In the context of what I wrote on the subject a few weeks ago about making magic happen, I’ve begun to realize that magic matters far more than I ever imagined—not just to professional magicians like my friend Acar Altinsel of Penguin Magic, for whom magic is a way to make a living, but to all of us who want to tune in more closely to the world around us. In fact, as I wrote last month, I believe that magical things tend to happen in the lives of those who are deeply mindful of them.

With all that in mind, thinking about what Inuit Elder Nalungiaq told Rasmussen a hundred years ago, what I want to share here is my growing belief:

Dignity is a magic word.

It’s so magical, in fact, that I’ve come to believe that it’s the practice of dignity in cultures, companies, and countries that makes a democratic construct come alive. Its impact is, in essence, magical. When dignity is the expected cultural norm—as it seems to be among the Inuit—all kinds of wonderful outcomes, things that would almost never happen in settings where dignity is not the norm, begin to unfold.

Around the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses (ZCoB), both dignity and democratic constructs are expected and acted on every day. Dignity and democracy are only rarely discussed in tandem by leaders in Washington, D.C. Same goes for even the most progressive news outlets. Nevertheless, the connection between the two is becoming increasingly clear to me. Living and working in companies and communities where dignity is deeply embedded in the culture provides the framework we need to make democracy a daily reality.

In an essay published about a decade ago in Boston Review, Nick Bromell—Professor of English at Amherst College and author of The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of U.S. Democracy—writes about the troubled state of democracy in the United States. In the essay, titled “Beyond Freedom and Equality: The Democratic Value of Dignity,” Bromell reflects on the increasingly fragile condition of democracy here and in a number of other countries around the world in recent years, writing,

Dozens of books and hundreds of articles have proposed solutions. … The one I propose here is that we accord more importance to human dignity.

I only came across Bromell’s insightful piece a few months ago as we were working to finish the new pamphlet “Why Democracy Matters: A Deep Understanding of Democracy in Our Everyday Lives.” I wish I’d seen it sooner, and that more people had paid attention to it when it came out. Bromell’s insight is similar to what I arrived at in my work on the new pamphlet.

The connection between dignity and democracy has not, as best I can tell, been widely expressed in recent years. As Bromell writes,

Political theorists have written at length about the meanings of equality and freedom, but work on the relation between dignity and democracy is scant.

Putting together what I learned in my previous pamphlet, “A Revolution of Dignity in the Twenty-First Century Workplace,” with my writing, learning, and deep reflection on democracy over the past 18 months, I came to a conclusion that, in a sense, builds on Bromell’s great work. The epilogue of my soon-to-be-released pamphlet is titled “What Is to Be Done? A Framework for Dignity and Democracy in Action.” In it, I share what I have come to believe more strongly every day. As I wrote above, dignity is not only, as Bromell argues, profoundly important. Dignity, effectively practiced, IS democracy.

To be clear, I’m not talking about dignity as some sort of inspiring but loose philosophical concept. My conclusion here is based on the application of the six elements of dignity that I arrived at a few years ago. What I came to believe, in writing the new pamphlet, is that the daily practice of dignity is basically what one needs to do to create a democratic organization. Yes, of course, voting can matter, but it does not a democracy make. As I remind people regularly, they vote in Russia too. It’s dignity that makes democracy work.

With all that in mind, it’s also now my strongly held belief that where people lead lives with effective democratic engagement, the odds are very high that their countries and companies will work in democratic ways as well. It’s about you and me—and everyone we know—actively implementing the six elements of dignity. The way we implement it, I know, will never be perfect. But when done well, all day, every day, by essentially everyone in the organization, democracy is effectively created at the same time.

The early 20th-century business thinker Mary Parker Follet—believed by many to be way ahead of her time—understood this a hundred years ago. She concluded in her 1918 book The New State: Group Organization, the Solution of Popular Government,

Democracy transcends time and space, it can never be understood except as a spiritual force. Majority rule rests on numbers; democracy rests on the well-grounded assumption that society is neither a collection of units nor an organism but a network of human relations.

The core of those relations will be at its democratic best then when those relations are based, all day, on dignity.

For clarity, then, here are the six elements of dignity I developed a couple years back:

1. Honor the essential humanity of everyone we work with.
2. Be authentic in all our interactions (without acting out).
3. Make sure everyone has a meaningful say.
4. Begin every interaction with positive beliefs.
5. Commit to helping everyone get to greatness.
6. Create an effective application of equity.

In that sense, dignity is what I’ve described both in a piece I penned about dignity at the tail end of this past summer, and also now in the new pamphlet, a framework.

As Ann Arbor poet, author, and arts leader Aaron Dworkin says, “A well-constructed framework encourages freedom; it doesn’t constrain it.” To make a democracy a reality, I am now adamant, dignity is what we need to do, not just peripherally, but in daily practice. We need to use the six elements of dignity extensively and effectively as a framework so that

1. Every system in the organization is designed to actualize dignity.
2. AND
3. Every person in the organization acts with dignity in every direction.

Given the importance of dignity in traditional Inuit culture, it’s no surprise now that historical Inuit governance was designed in ways that effectively call up the practice of dignity I’ve detailed here and in the new pamphlet. As the website Digital Indigenous Literacies explains in the article “Inuit Governance Practices”:

It values evidence, experimentation, curiosity, objectivity, repeatability, knowledge mobilization, and peer-review. It is built on respect and care for others and the environment, fostering good spirit by being inclusive and welcoming, being innovative and resourceful, and working together. It is respected by Inuit as Western science is by scientists.

You already know from what I’ve written here that I’ve been working with the six elements I developed to help make dignity a daily reality. The Inuit have a framework of their own. According to Digital Indigenous Literacies, its culture is based on eight Guiding Principles:

• Pijitsirniq: the concept of serving
• Aajiiqatigiingniq/Aajiiqatigiinniq: the concept of consensus decision-making
• Pilimmaksarniq/Pijariuqsarniq: the concept of skills and knowledge acquisition
• Ikajuqtigiinniq/Piliriqatigiinniq: the concept of collaborative relationships or working together for a common purpose
• Avatittinnik Kamatsiarniq: the concept of environmental stewardship
• Qanuqtuurnniq: the concept of being resourceful to solve problems
• Inuuqatigitsiarniq: the concept of respecting others, relationships, and caring for people
• Tunnganarniq: the concept of fostering good spirit by being open, welcoming and inclusive

Whether it’s in Inuit communities or elsewhere, dignity makes all the difference. And unfortunately, as Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning write in their 2015 article, “Honor, Dignity, and Victimhood: A Tour Through Three Centuries of American Political Culture,” cultures in which dignity is not a key ingredient slowly decompensate. By contrast, cultures like the Inuit’s, ours, and perhaps yours as well—where dignity is expected of one another and widely practiced—are far, far healthier. As they write,

Dignity exists independently of what others think. … We believe that truly sustainable and respectful change begins with an internal commitment. Dignity cannot only be something we promise to participants; it must shape the very culture of our organizations.

In other words, dignity isn’t just another nice image to post on social media; it’s something we have to live into every day. It’s certainly what we’re trying to do here in the ZCoB. It’s also, as I wrote, what the Inuit have done for centuries. I believe that all truly sustainable organizations have woven dignity into their culture and values. In an article published last November, entitled “Building Cultures of Dignity,” S. Dilshad and Tom Wein reinforce its importance, writing,

Dignity must be woven into the fabric of your organization’s processes and pathways. This means embedding it in project or program design, ethical review, HR policies, and team communication. It requires moving from a mindset of a separate lens for projects to one of foundational integration. … we analysed the flows of how our work and culture is approved and shaped, and sought out the “choke points” when important and lasting decisions are made, such as at our approval process for new projects, ethics review, and project kickoff materials, to ensure dignity is upheld.

Hannah Paniyavluk Loon, an Instructor of Inupiaq language at the University of Alaska, offers a lovely example of how dignity culture plays out in Inuit communities, and what the impact of this “magic word” would be in everyday life. Loon doesn’t directly say the word “dignity,” but dignity is implicit in the lovely things she says about her native culture:

Our knowledge tells us to always be mindful of our environment and the resources around us. It is up to each family member to always take care of the harvest cleanly and to give away the first season’s catch, such as beluga or bearded seal. It is always common to give Elders and those with lots of children fish, meat and plants. It is our belief that giving is a practice we share throughout. Not only do we give resources, but also western food when people run out of food or funeral expenses. It doesn’t matter who we are, we should always partake to donate finances and food to the bereaved family.

I imagine a company—and a country—where the view Dr. Loon describes isn’t just that of a few caring individuals, but the everyday, lived practice of most of the people within it.

How can we get there today? In an essay published in the summer of 1968, entitled “The Black Flag of Anarchy,” anarchist, educator, author, poet, and professor Paul Goodman writes,

We learn by doing, and the only way to educate cooperative citizens is to give power to people as they are. Except in unusual circumstances, there is not much need for dictators, deans, police, prearranged curricula, imposed schedules, conscription, coercive laws. Free people easily agree among themselves on plausible working rules.

When dignity is already deeply embedded in culture, Goodman writes, we actively “educate cooperative citizens.” The dearth of this approach in the U.S. here in the 21st century is making it difficult, I believe, for people to understand the concept and how to abstract their way forward. All of which reinforces for me why democracy only happens when people practice dignity. Dignity done well across all elements of a culture, actually IS democracy in action. The work, as I write repeatedly in the new pamphlet, is about how you and I live our lives. In one of my favorite philosophical framings of recent years, Wendell Berry said of our country’s situation, “The leaders will have to be led.”

It’s time, then, here at the start of 2026, to dig into dignity, to make its existential magic come alive in the way we treat everyone else we interact with, in the way we run our organizations, and last on the list, the way we run our countries.

To close here, I’m going to go back to one of the people who has inspired my own work, someone who fought for human dignity over a hundred years ago: Emma Goldman, who, at around the same time Knud Rasmussen was studying Inuit tribes in the early 20th century, wisely observed that,

The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and well-being.

Magic words, it turns out, make for magical worlds. I’m ready to get going. Want to join me?

Dignity IS Democracy

P.S. Live in the area? I’ll be doing a book talk on the new pamphlet at Darius Smith’s newly opened Ohana Lounge in Ypsilanti. The conversation will start a bit after 6pm on Thursday, March 5! We’ll have copies of the new pamphlet and other Zingerman’s Press books for sale and signing.

The insight of Italo Calvino and a path to more positive living

Ever committed yourself to something big, something you care deeply about, but that you’ve never done before? Something you believe in your heart you can become adept at, but that you have little idea how to do right now? Ever experienced that anxiety that arises when you start to tell other folks what you’ve decided to do? Does that foreboding fear of failure come flooding in when you declare your intentions to the people you care most about? That’s definitely what it feels like for me.

If the details of this situation sound familiar to you, then I say, “Awesome!” You’ve likely made what radical business writer Carol Sanford calls a “promise beyond ableness.” For the purposes of this piece, I’ll call these promises PBAs.

In the third week of November 1974, around the same time I’d started learning how to be a line cook, the novelist Joseph McElroy published a piece in The New York Times Review of Books about the newly released work of one of Italy’s best-known writers. Looking back at the article late last week, the first few lines caught my attention:

“Invisible Cities” is a new book by Italy’s most original storyteller, Italo Calvino. But this time not a book of stories. Something more.

“Something more” is indeed worthy of our attention. It’s also the particular subject of the essay that follows.

In the introduction to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Invisible Cities, author Anthony Doerr writes about his own imaginative and exploratory childhood, sharing how, as a young boy, he would regularly make up stories while playing with his older brothers:

We search for secret doors. … You find one.

I agree with the young Anthony Doerr who’s embedded so deeply in the adult author’s memory. A meaningful part of our life’s journey starts with just that sort of search. Given time, focus, good self-management, and hard work, all of us can—and, I believe, will—find a “secret door” that’s right for us. We just have to learn how to look for it.

In essence, the decision to go through that secret door is just the sort of PBA that Carol Sanford was so passionate about incorporating into people’s lives. When you take a deep breath and decide to go determinedly through that door, you commit to a PBA. When you share your decision with the world so others know about it and then dive in and start working at it, the odds are high that you will arrive at “something more” in time. When you put in the work, and things work out well, that “more” can be life-changing.

Invisible Cities, as I’ve come to view it, is Italo Calvino’s invitation to see what sort of secret doors might be out there and which ones are well-suited to the way we would like to live our lives. Not necessarily living in the narrow ways that mainstream society deems “successful,” but, rather, by imagining inspiring and enchanting possibilities. Calvino encourages us to explore, much as one of the book’s two main characters, Marco Polo, once explored the world.

Neither Calvino nor Polo, of course, used the term “promises beyond ableness,” but the possibilities PBAs present are essentially what I believe the book is all about. Alex Sager, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, writes that Calvino’s “tales of Marco Polo are exercises of imagination and of perception to alert us to reality and to help us imagine how things might be otherwise.”

In the fall of 2012, 40 years after Invisible Cities came out and a little over 800 years after the real life Marco Polo passed away in his hometown of Venice, Carol Sanford published an intriguing piece of her own. In a 21st-century business kind of way, she offered a path we can take to get to an uplifting future, a path that, with a lot of hard work and a bit of good fortune, can help us get to “Invisible Cities of our own creation.” Sanford explains:

The most fundamental managing principle for innovation is to believe in and practice the principle that everyone is growing and learning and is part of the innovation team.

That is why I created a work system for managing people that sees development as core and is based on “promises beyond ableness”—promises by people to do something that they know they can’t do now, so that they have to grow in order to succeed. Those who make promises beyond ableness have seen something that really needs to change. It is worth the climb, and they commit to the personal and professional growth to accomplish it.

A PBA, as Sanford has frames it, is an answer—a positive, inspiring, and very practical one—for any of us who feel stuck and those of us who are inspired to do more, to grow, to make more meaning in our lives and in the lives of those around us. PBAs can be huge in scale, like envisioning an amazing workplace we will create and how it might look 10 years into the future. Or they can be far smaller by the world’s standards but still significant to the person doing them and the people touched by them. In fact, I now realize that when I sit down to write this essay every week, I’m engaged in making a small-scale PBA come alive. I’m not just restating old information; I’m figuring things out while I write. It’s scary, for sure, but I’ve freely agreed to the deadlines that we have in place, and I’m dedicated to doing the work in a way that will benefit readers around the world, the people who make up the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), and me in the process.

In a June 2013 piece in The Atlantic, Ilana Masad encouraged readers of Invisible Cities to savor its complexity: “Don’t let this volume’s slimness fool you into thinking it’s insubstantial. Calvino’s masterpiece has multiple layers of riddles.” Which is also, in a sense, the unnerving reality of Carol Sanford’s PBA construct. The future is unclear because, in great part, we are all currently working to create it. Our lives are layers of riddles, riddles that, like writing this essay every week, creating a business from scratch, or learning a new skill, we have the ability to answer. PBAs help make that sort of positive future a reality for anyone open to pursuing it.

When many people first learn about Sanford’s idea of promising beyond one’s ability, they get stuck worrying and wondering just what it is, exactly, that they should promise. Best I can tell, the answer is “I don’t know, and neither does anyone else.” We have to sort it out for ourselves. Self-reflection and internally driven decision-making are important parts of the journey. As Ilana Masad writes, “Whether the places [in Invisible Cities] exist literally or only metaphorically … well, that’s up to you to decide.” While we can, of course, confer with others whose perspectives we care about, in the end, we each must choose the PBAs we are going to pursue for ourselves.

Writing in Medium in the spring of 2019, Carol Sanford noted that our growth as individuals is a natural outcome of the work that emerges from making a PBA:

It is often said, “people are resistant to change.” This is not the case when approaching change through a new and shared understanding of the true nature of change and the elements of change that typically trigger resistance. Developing this understanding and designing from that new mindset is the essence of this phase.

A key difference in this form of work design is to require everyone to make a “promise beyond ableness” which is to contribute something significant to a stakeholder outside the business. It is beyond the current ability of the person making the commitment, would clearly benefit the stakeholder as measured by their terms, and will grow the person making the promise to deliver. They become self-directed, as part of a team, delivering on this promise. It has the effect of awakening motivation, creating new capability for the organization for the future, and building a business that is owned by everyone.

When I give presentations about Zingerman’s life and leadership philosophies, frameworks, and approaches to business at public events, one of the most common questions people ask goes something like this:

This is all great stuff. I love it. It’s just that I work for a boss whose style is almost the exact opposite. What should I do?

The question comes, most typically, from middle managers and folks who are far down the org chart. They’ve often been led to believe they have no say in how things are run, so they feel like this is the truth. I remind them that they likely have more power and influence than they are imagining. Usually, meaningful change can—and does—come in far smaller increments than most have been taught to look for.

When I answer the question, I make clear that because I started Zingerman’s and have been in a leadership position ever since, it’s been ages since I was in the sort of spot they’re in. But with that caveat, I usually suggest pushing ahead anyway. We don’t need to wait for our bosses’ approval to get going in ways that make a difference. Most of us have the power to make small, positive changes in the way we lead and live, changes that will make a meaningful difference but won’t create problems for anyone. Starting to practice servant leadership or the six elements of dignity probably isn’t going to alienate anyone, but will, when we stick with it, make a meaningful difference. Every act of kindness, every new learning, every day we make dignity the heart of what we do … they all have a positive impact!

In a sense, I’m suggesting a small version of Richard Rohr’s notion that “the best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.” When we operate within our own sphere of influence, it’s pretty rare that anyone will try to stop us from pushing into new, positive territory. It may not work, but the current reality isn’t working either. Natural Law #9, the idea that success means you get better problems, encourages us to decide which problem we want. Should we stay stuck in the status quo or push toward positive possibilities and see what happens? As you can tell, I’ve tried to teach myself to choose the latter and push past my own ever-present fear. It’s almost impossible, I believe, to see the secret doors without sticking our necks out.

Society, of course, often teaches us the opposite: to stay in our boxes, avoid making waves, and wait for the boss to give direction. In the spirit of what I wrote last summer about the power of ordinary people to make a big difference in the world, I’ll share another bit of insight. It’s from the wise and inspiring Carol Sanford:

This drive to take on things we do not understand or cannot do is inherent in each of us, but it goes to sleep unless it is connected to something compelling, something we can see is needed in a situation that we care about. Once we recognize the need and make the promise to do something about it, the beyond ableness part provides the opportunity and reason to stretch and grow. Proactively seeking to work on things we do not already know how to do may seem daunting at first, but in the long run, it is profoundly affirming.

How, then, do we find the “right” promise to extend our ableness? That’s the quest that Marco Polo has taken up in Invisible Cities. As he says in the book, “At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there.”

The visioning process we use and teach so regularly here at Zingerman’s is a wonderful way to bring PBAs out into the open. An effective vision, we believe, must be both inspiring and strategically sound. In other words, it includes many PBAs. They are, by definition, both inspiring to the person pursuing them and strategically sound. A good vision is a big stretch, but we believe we can achieve it! A vision without any PBAs may be very strategically sound, but I doubt it’s going to be very inspiring. I can see now that our 2032 Vision actually has any number of PBAs, including commitments to do effective work around succession and to teach young people our approaches to leadership and life.

Looking back now to our organizational beginnings, Paul Saginaw and I were definitely making a PBA when we opened the Deli in 1982. Neither one of us had ever run one before. Same for the Bakehouse in 1992. We didn’t know much of anything about baking; we just were driven to have better bread! In fact, it just dawned on me that our vision for Zingerman’s to achieve by 2009 is another PBA, one that is based on making more in the future. After all, each new venture we get going on has a whole new specialty we’ve never yet made happen, and it involves working with a new managing partner to make it go. The whole visioning process, and the “hot pen” technique we use to do it, is very conducive to getting clear on the PBAs that, in our hearts, we hope to pursue. As Calvino shared in a lecture at NYU’s Institute for the Humanities in 1983, “In a certain sense, I believe that we always write about something we don’t know; we write to make it possible for the unwritten world to express itself through us.”

Italo Calvino’s life story shaped his fascinating and inspiring approach to writing. He was born in Cuba in 1923, in the years following the Spanish flu pandemic. His Italian parents had emigrated to the island, but when young Italo was four, they moved the family back to their hometown of San Remo, in the region of Liguria on the Italian Riviera. Calvino’s father, Mario, was an agronomist, an anarchist, and a scientist whose work was widely held in high regard. His mother was a very values-driven pacifist who, when the Nazis came to Italy in 1944, encouraged her sons, as Calvino later explained in the essay “Political Autobiography of a Young Man, Hermit in Paris,” to join the Resistance in the name of “natural justice and family virtues.”

When the war ended, Calvino completed his graduate thesis on the writing of Joseph Conrad. Soon after, he started authoring articles for publication and quickly became one of the most remarkable writers of the modern era. In a 1992 piece in The Paris Review, the renowned Italian literary critic Pietro Citati argued that Calvino’s “mind became the most complicated, enveloping, sinuous mind any modern Italian writer ever possessed.” The well-known American writer John Updike said that ”no living author is more ingenious.” Merve Emre, writing in The New Yorker three years ago this month, described Calvino as “word for word, the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” And, in the years before Calvino’s passing, the novelist John Gardner called him ”possibly Italy’s most brilliant living writer.”

In the winter of 1960, Calvino, by then in his late 30s, came to the U.S. for the first time. After spending a few weeks in NYC, he traveled south, in part to meet Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a man he had admired greatly from afar. By coincidence, Calvino ended up in Montgomery, Alabama, just in time to join the march Dr. King led there that year. Calvino collected his essays from this time under the title An Optimist in America. He seems to have centered himself in his mother’s idea of “natural justice.” Calvino reflected on what he saw take place: “This is a day that I will never forget as long as I live. I have seen what racism is, mass racism, accepted as one of a society’s fundamental rules.”

Over the years, Calvino penned an array of exceptional books and essays, winning awards and acclaim in Italy and around the world. Sadly, he died unexpectedly in September of 1985, after suffering a stroke. He was only 61 years old.

Like anyone who makes great art of any sort, Calvino’s life was, in a way, a series of PBAs that he successfully actualized. PBAs, I’ve come to see, can spring from literal art, like what Calvino makes, or metaphorical art, the sort that every one of us has the ability to create by living our daily lives as artfully as possible. After all, life, as I see it, is art. A PBA that we put into practice can help us go to the next level. In fact, PBAs are always about a long-term learning process, about someone working to master an area of expertise in which they have a high interest but little or no previous experience. A decision to radically diminish the sort of racism Calvino saw in Montgomery would be a great example of what one might commit to doing.

Now that I have PBAs in mind, I can see their impact all over our organization. I remember talking to Lisa Schultz, who would go on to become a managing partner at the Roadhouse, five or six years ago. At the time, Lisa had already worked at the restaurant for almost 15 years, first as a server and then as a supervisor, assistant manager, and front-of-the-house manager. She knew our systems and culture from the ground up and wanted to go to the next level in the organization, but she had zero experience as a business owner. At the time we started talking about her becoming a managing partner, many folks said she wasn’t “ready” yet, technically or tactically. At one point, Lisa said, “I may not always be the fastest learner, but I’ll keep learning until I’m really good at the job!” It was a PBA, and it has played out beautifully. I believed that she could—and would—learn what she needed to know, and I committed myself to supporting her in her development and growth. Sure enough, she keeps getting better and better at her work! She has grown into the role in a wonderful way and continues to grow still every day. The most recent manifestation of all that, is leading the Roadhouse’s extensive renovation project. For those who are in the Ann Arbor area, reopening is still scheduled for some time next week. Stay tuned!

The ZCoB is filled with all kinds of other PBA-driven stories. Ji Hye Kim, managing partner and the chef at the marvelous Miss Kim, came to work at the Deli from the world of health care. She had no experience as either a professional cook or a business owner. Miss Kim was her dream. Fifteen years later, she’s a nationally recognized chef, and the restaurant is busier than ever. Frank Carollo, who taught me to be a line cook around the time Invisible Cities was first released in English, became the managing partner at the Bakehouse when we started it in 1992. At the time, he didn’t know much about baking. But over the years, he became one of the best artisan bakers in the country! The story of Food Gatherers—which was Paul’s idea to start back in 1986, when there were only a handful of comparable food rescue organizations in the country—is another, and anyone who lives near Ann Arbor knows how impactful that PBA has been. I could go on and on with other examples.

My guess is that every managing partner in the ZCoB could tell a story similar to the ones I just mentioned. A few weeks ago, our entire Partner Group took its annual offsite retreat. As I looked around the room, I reflected on how far all of us have come. I think it’s safe to say, in a very good way, that none of the 22 people at the table would have been able to do what they do now back when they started working here. I absolutely include myself in that. What I am writing now, what I am able to see and do and say today, was way beyond my ability back in 1982. There’s no way I would have been able to imagine all of this. Every member of the group has essentially promised, and then delivered, beyond where their ableness was when they joined the organization.

To state the somewhat obvious, all of these stories impact the culture of the ZCoB in a very positive way. When someone new to the organization sees what others have accomplished, the odds of them deciding to do something significant of their own design increase.

My good friend Melvin Parson’s work at We the People Opportunity Farm is great at actualizing PBAs in positive ways. Melvin committed to creating a healthy nonprofit and a successful organic farm without ever having done either. Both he and the community are radically better off for it! Watching him from the outside, I can see that with each PBA he accomplishes, his confidence grows. And shortly after accomplishing a PBA, he commits to a couple of new ones. Now he’s working to open a nonprofit café in Ypsilanti!

By dint of the fact that you’re reading this, you have probably made—and made happen—more than a few PBAs over the course of your life. Our challenge, though, is more about supporting others around us to do the same. A great leader helps craft an organization in which PBAs become the norm, not the exception. Which is, in and of itself, a PBA that any leader reading this might consider committing to. It may not be easy, but that’s the point! Leadership educator Janet Macaluso, who studied with Carol Sanford for seven years, puts it this way:

The PBA: Promise Beyond Ableness.
PBAs aim for what we do NOT know how to do (YET).
But if we were to achieve it, it would increase the ableness and performance of our beloved people, places, or causes.
(so they’re worth it).
PBAs encourage us to commit to something BEYOND current capabilities.
They’re NOT about reckless over-promising.
Promises Beyond Ableness are commitments that:
S-t-r-e-t-c-h us beyond comfort.
Engage innovation on behalf of growing our ECOSYSTEM.

Adopting PBAs as a key organizational ethic is the opposite of the commonly touted Peter Principle. The latter is the belief that people get promoted to the level of their incompetence. PBAs are based, instead, on its inverse: the strongly held belief that when people push themselves to take on something they are passionate about, the odds are high they will learn to do it well. People create their own competence by taking on work they don’t yet know how to do but are strongly committed to getting great at. It’s an internally driven shift rather than an externally directed one. As Italo Calvino said in a talk on March 30, 1983, “Every rite of passage corresponds to a change in mental attitude.”

PBAs are based on the beliefs that:

• Everyone has the ability to grow in multiple ways that exceed their current level of acumen.
• The PBA process will work only when the individual in question commits to the growth because it’s something they are excited about and dedicated to doing.
• The process does not work when others assign the growth. As my friends at Indigenous Resistance write in the beautiful book Mongolia Dub Journey, a PBA emerges when we refuse to be “limited by allowing ourselves to be defined by boxes not of our making.”
• People who aspire to grow beyond ableness work with far greater energy and enthusiasm.
• When people pursue PBAs, their work will benefit others around them. It’s never just an act of selfishness or an attempt to build one’s bank account at the expense of others.
• PBAs help people grow as humans and live more fulfilling lives.

In this context, the leader’s role shifts away from telling people what they should pursue and toward the expectation that each person decides for themselves what they are going to do. A PBA should be something that will help the person, their organization, and the organization’s stakeholders at the same time. The leader must build clarity and confidence rather than focus on command and control. As Sanford writes in No More Gold Stars:

The key to translating all this into change on the ground was a concept that I named promises beyond ableness. Every member of the workforce was encouraged to find an important subject that was relevant to the company’s universe and strategy and, at the same time, was something they cared deeply about. It needed to be a subject that they were willing to work on over the coming years. Put another way, each worker identified and pursued his own long-thought process.

…

When people are developing their ableness and potential, directing themselves using principles calling for personal agency and responsibility, and working creatively in the service of higher purposes that they care deeply about, they are living the ultimate life. They are doing work they value, making contributions that matter, and living in communities and nations [and organizations] that give them the freedom to make a real difference with their lives.

Done well, PBAs have the power to change lives.

In the closing paragraph of Invisible Cities, Calvino’s Marco Polo presents, in a very poetic way, the choice that I believe all of us face: to be frustrated but accept the status quo and go with the flow,  or to take on the risky but rewarding challenge of creating the kind of positive futures we hope to have:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.

The latter of Marco Polo’s two options is, of course, what I have opted to pursue. My new pamphlet, “Why Democracy Matters,” is an effort to find people who are “not inferno,” in the midst of the inferno and give them enduring space in the ongoing huddle in my head. As Calvino writes, it’s risky and demands constant vigilance, but it seems the more positive path by far.

The new pamphlet, I realize now, is also the result of a PBA: my commitment to writing about a subject that I began to see that I cared deeply about but had never written on before. Risky for sure, but the right thing to do. Carol Sanford has this to say on democracy and how it relates to PBAs:

Ableness is the exercise of a skill or capacity at will whenever it is needed. … To grow ableness, a Responsible Business … builds people’s ability to manage their own state of being—their attitudes, behaviors, and ability to remain purposeful. … A Responsible Business next seeks to develop deliberative dialogue and critical thinking skills. … Democratic systems only work effectively when they move beyond the idea that there are only two sides to an issue.

It struck me this week that a dedication to democracy right now requires us all to make a very serious PBA. No American, after all, has rebuilt a healthy democracy at this scale, at least not in this country. This rebuilding requires us to make a collaborative promise beyond our collective ableness. And then deliver on it. We have the opportunity, as Marco Polo says, to make a whole new world from which everyone can benefit.

Near the end of Invisible Cities, the great ruler of the Mongol Empire, Kublai Khan, seeks the sort of straightforward answer from an expert that so many of us have been taught to listen to. He says to the world traveler Marco Polo:

You who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us.

Marco Polo shifts the conversation in a very different direction. The answer we all seek doesn’t come from experts. It emerges from regular reflection, from an intuitive, internally driven sense of the seeker. Polo explains his process:

At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest of instants, separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said.

I believe that together, we can do much more than most people believe possible. As I explain in the new pamphlet, I am ready to get going! I have had a brief glimpse of what is possible, an opening in the midst of apparent incongruity. You and I, we can hunt for the “cities” we seek. If we keep looking, we will find the secret door. It’s out there, waiting for us to do our work.

Craft a vision of greatness

P.S. I’ll be doing a book talk on Thursday, March 5, at Darius Smith’s new Ohana Lounge in Ypsilanti. It’s about the soon-to-be-released “Why Democracy Matters” pamphlet. The conversation kicks off a bit after 6 pm! We’ll have copies of the new pamphlet and other Zingerman’s Press books for sale and signing. Hope to see you there!