Zingerman’s 4th Annual Camp Bacon is coming soon and to help get everyone prepared, we’re sharing tasty excerpts and recipes from Ari’s book, Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon. 

Angels, Devils, Pigs . . . and a Nice Date with Bacon

These four little appetizers have been around a long time. They’re great ways to bring bacon into a party setting without a whole lot of work. You can adjust the portions easily to fit whatever appetite, group size, budget or BQ (Sarah Katherine Lewis’ “bacon quotient”) you’re working with.

Angels on Horseback
The angels, in this case, are oysters—their little frilly flaps get all fluffy and angelically wing-like under the heat of the broiler. Angels on Horseback is often presented as fancy food, but it’s in really basic books too, like V. M. Sherlock’s Apalachicola Seafood Recipes—a small, softcover, brown pamphlety thing that I like a lot. Ms. Sherlock calls them by the unfancy name “broiled oysters,” which just reinforces my belief that they’re really a pretty darned down-to-earth way to eat. I like to use Arkansas long pepper bacon—it’s got a nice bit of spice, but the moderate smoke level keeps the wood from completely overtaking the dish. Other bacons from the lighter smoke end of the spectrum, like Vande Rose, Nodine’s and Nueske’s, will also work well. As for the angels, any good oyster will work. I love Apalachicolas, which we bring to the Zingerman’s Roadhouse regularly from Florida. I’ll just share this note from Sherlock, who wrote that, “Throughout the ages, men have argued over the superior flavor of oysters of their regions, but until they have tasted the Apalachicola oyster, they’re in no position to judge.”

Ingredients

• 8 oysters, shucked
• 4 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise

Procedure:

1. 1. Heat the broiler.
2. 2. Wrap a half-slice of bacon around each oyster and then run a toothpick through the whole thing to hold it together. Place on a baking sheet, run it under the broiler and cook until the bacon is done, giving it a turn halfway through. If you want the bacon well done you can cook it part way in a pan before wrapping it around the oysters.
3. 3. Cook carefully: as V. M. Sherlock says, “Local appetites may differ but most will agree that you should never wash an oyster and never overcook one.”

Devils on Horseback
These are made in the same manner as Angels, except that the oysters are replaced by dark Devils—in this case, prunes. Pork and prunes are a classic combination found in all sorts of big-flavored dishes from southwestern France, and this easy-to-make appetizer delivers that same wonderful flavor pairing to your guests in mere minutes! Of course you know already that I’m going to say you have to find really good ingredients to work with—my favorites are the prunes from Agen in France, but I don’t think you can get them in the U.S. anymore. If you find a variety that’s better than the standard supermarket grade, grab it. I like to make this dish with one of the smoky, dry-cured bacons to balance the sweetness of the dried fruit.

Ingredients:

• 8 really good prunes, pitted
• 4 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise

Procedure:

1. 1. Heat the broiler.
2. 2. Wrap a half-slice of bacon around each prune and then run a toothpick through the whole thing to hold it together. Place on a baking sheet, run it under the broiler and cook until the bacon is done, turning the “devils” halfway through the cooking. Again, if you want the bacon well done, you’ll do better to cook it partially through on its own before you do the wrapping.

Clam Pigs
This is the same dish as Angels on Horseback, but made with fresh clams instead of oysters. Gotta love the name, which I came across in Sherlock’s Apalachicola cookbook!

Ingredients:

• 8 fresh clams, shucked
• 4 slices bacon, cut in half crosswise

Procedure:

1. Follow the instructions for Angels on Horseback, substituting the raw clams for oysters.

Bacon Dates
Taking our passion for bacon a tad bit beyond the now-standard allusions to love and sex, it seems reasonable to go ahead and actually make a real life “date with bacon,” don’t you think? That said, I guess this recipe really is a literal as well as figurative date with bacon (or, actually, if you prepare the whole recipe, 16 dates with bacon). Of course there’s really no limit, since you can multiply the recipe as many times as you like.

Bacon dates are a great little appetizer and extremely easy to make. If you’re up for a “double date” you could serve it for dessert, too—I’ve never thought of using the same dish to both start and end a supper before, but given Americans’ fondness for bacon it sort of makes sense to bacon-end the meal. I love the organic dates from Four Apostles in Bermuda Dunes, California. The sweet smokiness of the bacon with the buttery richness of their ripe dates and the spice of the long pepper gives this finger food a great bit of balance in its flavors.

Ingredients:

• 16 dates, pitted
• 8 slices bacon (we prefer these with the Broadbent bacon), cut in half crosswise
• 4 whole Balinese long peppers, quartered lengthwise

Procedure:

1. 1. Heat the broiler.
2. 2. Stuff each date with a sliver of long pepper, then wrap with a half-slice of bacon and secure with a toothpick. Place the bacon-wrapped dates on a baking sheet and broil 10 to 15 minutes or until the bacon is crisp, turning once. Keep an eye on them so they don’t burn!
3. 3. Remove from the oven once the bacon is done, let cool for a couple of minutes and serve while still warm.

SEE YOU AT CAMP!

Ari recently had a chance to chat with renowned Wisconsin bacon maker Bob Nueske about the history of his family’s business.
Bob will be speaking at Zingerman’s 4th Annual Camp Bacon this summer. Please join us!

Bob Nueske’s great-grandfather came to the small town of Wittenberg, Wisconsin in 1882. Shortly thereafter he started to cure and smoke meats in the style of his German heritage.  Located up near the UP, they’ve been making their bacon using basically the same family recipe for nearly a century and a half now. We’ve cooked off Nueske’s Applewood smoked bacon at the Deli every morning for over 31 years now. I have no idea how many tens of thousands of pounds it adds up to but I know it’s a lot. That record, like the bacon on which it’s based, is something special.  So too is the man behind the bacon—Bob Nueske is a marvelous story teller, a very grounded and forward thinking business man, a “Small Giant” long before Bo Burlingham wrote the book, a master bacon maker and a bacon lover.  We’re excited to have successfully enticed Bob to leave northern Wisconsin for the wilds of Ann Arbor and a few days at Camp Bacon. 

Ari:  Can you tell me a bit of the Nueske story?

Bob:  I hardly know how to begin. When you’re born and raised into something that becomes your life it’s hard to know where to start. The only way I can explain it is that if you’re born in a cooler and raised in a smokehouse it permeates into your being and you don’t even realize it. I’ve been part of Nueske bacon literally my whole life.

And when you are born and raised in a family business, working as a father and son it makes a special situation. I had a good father. He smiled a lot. He was a good man and a good businessman. He was really firm and fair. And yet as a kid, you know, when you’re 16, 17, 18, and you have all the answers . . . when I was 16 years old . . . . Well, I’ll you a story.  Back when I was 16 I had a car. Back then Wittenberg was a town of 895 people (Today, it’s totally taken off—the 2010 census said it had 1081 people). It’s all a farm community. I figured the best way for me to see the world was to head down to Chicago on my own. So I drove south. I got downtown by myself. I’d never been there. I was looking at all these great big buildings and I noticed there were a whole lot of good restaurants. But I couldn’t afford to eat in em. And I thought to myself, I’d love to understand ’em. Now, who’d have ever thought that bacon would take you to places like that? But today our bacon is in some of the best restaurants and stores in the country.

As I remember growing up, my dad had put four hours in at work by the time we kids got up in the morning. We were always eating the odd shaped pieces he didn’t want to sell to other people. My mother would say, “I’m married to the man who has the best bacon, but you always bring home the other stuff!” He’d say, “We don’t sell those odd cuts, we eat em. It tastes the same. It just don’t look the same!”

We have some pictures of me sitting on a truck with three birthday candles. When you’re little it seems like your parents are doing things you could never do. Then you get to the age when you think, “They don’t know anything.” But then eventually you realize that things that seemed big aren’t that big, they aren’t that important. And I realized that my dad knew what he was doing. In learning how to do a product like my dad taught us it was time consuming and it wasn’t like I took notes. Day in and day out you learn it and you don’t even know you’re learning it. But my dad had these little books that he used.  And they weren’t just sitting on the shelf. They were well read, well worn. And he would take a lot of notes.

My dad was a good student of bacon. Making bacon like ours is like making fine wine. You don’t hurry the process. I remember him saying, “You know Bobby, we do it this way because of . . . . ., but, not this way because . . . ” There were good reasons why each piece of the process happened. I remember thinking “There has to be a faster quicker way to make bacon!” But eventually I realized that he really knew what he was doing.

Where did your grandfather come from?

He was from Germany. I’m still trying to figure out exactly where. I got drafted into the military got my medical training at Ft. Sam Houston and thought for sure I was headed for Vietnam. It was not a pretty time. But somehow I was the only one in our class that ended up stationed in Germany. So through a fluke of luck I learned the heritage of the meat. My great grandfather came to Wisconsin in 1882. Wilhelm Nueske. I’m still trying to find out what town he came from. No one really knows. We know it’s German heritage. I’m starting to discover that it was up in the northeast area of Germany and what’s now Poland.  There are still some Nueskes up there. It’s not that common a name. I literally know most everyone of them in this country.

After I went through the military I went into the printing press business for a while. But then I came back to smoking meats and I began to experiment a little on my own, I realized that speeding things up, going fast just creates another me-too product. Volume and big is not what we’re after at Nueske’s. We don’t want to be the biggest. One of the best words I’ve learned over all these years is, “No.” When we’re approached by certain companies to sell to them we look at how they actually run their business. A lot of times I can see that we’re not large enough to produce enough for them so we say, “No.”

Speaking of which, you and I both read a lot of business books.  Were there any that were particularly helpful to you?

I was remembering a book called Beyond World Class. It’s by Ross Alan. It was written about the way I think a business should be run. It said that if your suppliers don’t treat you like you wanted to be treated, and if someone in your company or a customer doesn’t fit the way you want to work, then you just say, “We’re not interested.” You just don’t stay with them. You need to work with people who care like you do and who want to work the way you do.

That’s a recipe for how to have fun while you’re running your company. You enjoy your relationship with everyone and you work with a great group of people. It takes work to keep it that way. But growing up in a company like ours . .  . well, you know .  . .

When I left the family business at 18 I had two really good experiences. One was in a small printing company. And then I was wooed away to American Can Company. It was a huge corporation. I actually got that feeling of putting your brains up on the time clock when you punched in. They didn’t want your thoughts. And then you picked them up when you left. They didn’t want you to think. I learned I could get done 8 hours work in 3 hours and kept pushin’. But then I was told “Don’t do that again.”

People that work here like what they do and they’re having fun. That’s the key. Many an outsider looking in at our company goes by and says, “How do you do this?  How do you get your culture?” At first they think it was a trick, like when you used to go to Russia and they put on a stage Grand Tour to fool you. But after a while, the visitors realize there’s no “Grand Tour.” That’s the key. What your people do. How they smile. How they work. That’s what makes a great company. It just seems to work.

We love your bacon here at Zingerman’s.  It’s gotten great press in the New York Times and just about everywhere else.  What makes the bacon so great?

Well, what really makes the difference how the hogs are fed. How they’re grown. How they’re treated as far as stress. You don’t want stress in the hogs. You have to find companies who know how to slaughter and cut and sort correctly. And then how you cure and smoke the meat properly. We taste test constantly. Even though there are strict formulas, there’s still always the human side. If something doesn’t seem right when we taste the product we pull it off.

We all know that our bacon is a natural product and the whole production system can run a little off one way or another. Pretty much it means the standards of where you want it to be even though the flavor profile never changes. Something comes in wrong and you have to make a point and send it back.  Consistency is key. Don’t accept anything that’s less than what you really want.

Our hogs are raised in Canada. They’re the Belgian Pietrain breed and some others. We cure the bellies and then give them 24 hours in the smoker. We use real Wisconsin Applewood. We actually have one man who’s responsible to select the Applewood. We buy full trees, not wood already cut in pieces.  He actually cuts it as we need it. When you select the wood it has to be the right balance of dryness and greenness. Not too dry, not too green. We use wild Cherrywood and it’s the same thing there. We start with a full tree. We’re fortunate . . . when I think back when my grandparents moved here, we’re fortunate that they picked an area with so many apple and cherry orchards.

It’s pretty impressive that Nueske’s has stayed small and focused for four generations.  Why do you think it’s worked so well?

Let me tell you another story. There’s a man around here who started a very large nationally known meat curing company around the time my father was getting going. He and my dad knew each other pretty well. The companies were just about 45 miles a part. Our location was on a dead end street. We didn’t really have a retail store. We just were wholesaler but my dad would let people in when they knocked on the door. Finally he put in a tiny little counter. Anyways, Fritz would come in to that little counter and buy our bacon and smoked liver sausage. “I said why are you buying our bacon when you have your own?” He said, “I want to buy the good stuff for our big shots coming up to my cottage up north.”

“Well, Fritz is probably in his 70s now. He came in one day quite a few years ago now and he asks one of the retail clerks in our shop, if I was there.  I asked him the same question I would ask every time he came back when I was 14. “What are you doing buying bacon here?” And he said the same thing he said back then: “I’m going up to my cabin and need the good stuff.”

But then he said, “I want to tell you a story about your dad and me. You know, I would tell your dad, ‘Robert, I’m gonna build the biggest meat company I can. And your dad would look at me and say, ‘Well Fritz, I’m gonna become the best meat company I can become.'” Then Fritz said to me, “I succeeded.  I sold out to a big company. I made a lot of money. But I don’t like what the big company did with our products. And you know what? Your dad was right and I was wrong. I would never do that again.” When I think of the decisions I’ve made over the years. You gotta know when to say ‘No!’

What’s your favorite way to eat bacon?

I love it best when you lay it on parchment paper and bake it in the oven. It comes out sort of crispy and soft in the middle. I love it that way.

See you at camp!

This essay is an excerpt from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Volume 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Yourself by Ari Weinzweig (coming in the Fall of 2013). Today’s installment is the conclusion of the essay. 

The Role of Belief in Building a Sustainable Business

5. Belief in Our Coworkers

My recent dialogue with Anese around belief reinforced something that my partner Paul Saginaw said to me many years ago. That, if we don’t believe in the people we’ve hired, quite simply, they aren’t ever going to be great at what they do. Having staff members that we don’t believe are going to succeed is a recipe for serious frustration for all involved. If, that’s the case then our commitment to serve the organization dictates that we need to, respect- fully, help them head elsewhere.

On the upside we have a huge opportunity to help them excel. My belief that the staff member can and will get to greatness starts to change the way they relate to themselves, their coworkers, and the company. People regularly tell stories about the teacher or professor who believed that they would make it when others had said they’d fail. The more we become mindful of our beliefs about our coworkers, and the more constructively we then challenge ourselves to stay focused on positive outcomes for all involved, the more likely people are to do well.

Here at Zingerman’s that plays out on a broad scale—all of our work with open book finance, authorizing everyone to do whatever they believe they need to do to make something right for a customer, our extensive investment in training, all of it is based on the belief that everyone here is more than capable of doing great creative, highly effective work. Amy Emberling, managing partner at the Bakehouse, reminded me, appropriately, that one way the leader can help in this area is simply to take time to listen to others’ beliefs. That simple act can do wonders for people’s feeling of belonging, and we show in the process that we believe their insights and ideas have value.

6. Belief in the Boss

I almost forgot this one! But, if the team doesn’t believe in the coach, if the musicians don’t believe in the conductor, if the staff doesn’t believe in the boss, then most every- thing else I’ve gone over above will start to slide as well. It doesn’t mean that the business won’t run at all—just that a layer of richness, a positive piece of a big puzzle, a key ingredient is missing. And over time, the whole thing becomes less and less compelling, and eventually the business will likely collapse.

mindful Belief

The bottom line on all this comes down to a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to push ourselves to take time for some introspection. What I know for sure is that if what I believe is out of whack with what I want, the odds of me getting to where I want to go are slim, maybe none. And while believing that better things are to come doesn’t get alone get rid of poverty, pestilence, or really poor performance, it sure does increase the odds of them happening. And so, I challenge myself, and invite you, to reflect for a few minutes. What do we believe about:

Ourselves?

Our lives?

What we do for a living?

Our friends?

Our staff?

Our boss?

Customers?

Family?

Our future?

The opportunity is that the more we can build that belief balance sheet, the better we’re going to do. When we have strong, grounded, humble, meaningful, positive belief about all of those, the more likely we are to be living that dream everyone is after. I’ll close with a rather compelling quote from early 20th century writer, William Ralph Inge. “Faith,” he said, “is the choice of the nobler hypothesis.”

This essay is an excerpt from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Volume 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Yourself by Ari Weinzweig (coming in the Fall of 2013). Stay tuned for the next few days to read the whole essay.

The Role of Belief in Building a Sustainable Business

3. Belief in What We’re Working On

Even when people believe in what the organization at large is going after, there’s still a whole separate issue to address about whether they actually believe in the work in which they themselves, in the moment at least, are engaged in. When the people who are doing the work don’t really believe that it’s worth doing, or has a reasonable shot at success . . . guess what? The project is pretty much doomed to failure. At best it stalls, at worst it makes things worse. In any case, it’s really wasted effort, and none of us can really afford much of that.

I don’t know why I never quite fully grasped this before. But in hindsight, with Anese’s intellectual assistance, it’s pretty glaringly obvious. Now that I’m aware of it, I see it over and over again, even in our own organization. Well meaning, caring people will, when they think they “should,” or when they succumb to organizational pressures, agree to do something that they don’t believe in. I don’t mean the project runs radically counter to their entire value system—it’s just work they don’t really believe is going to work. So they sign on, but steadily, still tune out over time.

This (lack of) belief problem could be around a new product line they don’t love, but that someone else (like me) wants to put in place; it might be a work group they’re skeptical about, but agree to lead anyways; or a new hire that they don’t think is likely to be very good but others around them are advocating for. I know all these because I’ve contributed, inadvertently, to the problem by pushing people to do work that I believe (rightly or wrongly, is actually almost irrelevant) that they don’t believe is going to be of benefit.

I hardly think these “non believers” are malicious, lazy or evil. They’re good people in a pretty good organization. Nor do I believe that my vision for the work and its impor- tance is necessarily incorrect. But that’s the problem—I believe in it, they don’t.

My job as a leader then is to be sure to work on building belief, not just on getting agreement, to proceed. I know that product quality won’t magically get better just because people believe. But low levels of belief will almost always bring down the effectiveness of what we’re doing, no matter how logically sound a supposition it might seem to be. A technically terrific strategy, in the hands of non- believers, is pretty much guaranteed to fail; by contrast, a B- strategy, put in place by people who are passionate about what they’re doing, I think, a far better way to go.

4. Belief in the product

Without question, this issue is also at play when it comes to sales. If people don’t believe in what they’re selling . . . you don’t need to be a PhD social scientist to suss out that sales are going to suffer. Ann Lofgren, currently at ZingTrain (but who’s worked in most every part of our organization over the last 11 years) told me that, “I can’t go out and sell a product I don’t believe in. And when I do believe in it then the experience for me isn’t ‘selling,’ it’s sharing. I get paid for it, but it’s really about sharing something I totally believe is great. I have never, ever thought of myself as a salesperson and of course, now the reason why is clear.” Emily Hiber added, “I believe that at Zingerman’s I’m selling something good. When people are upset because they think our prices are too high, I’m OK because I believe in what we’re doing.”

In many places, however, staff aren’t believers in what they’re supposed to get our customers to buy. Many times, it’s because we as leaders have failed to share with them why our products are so special, or to make clear how much impact their work has on the quality of life for their customers and coworkers, and on the organization overall. A bit of support, reinforcement, teaching the big picture and . . . . voila, people can get on board in a hurry!

That said, there are other times where we’re trying to get people to sell something that, for good reasons they don’t believe in. In my experience there are two broad categories at play here. First there are times where we have a product or service that simply . . .isn’t all that great It’s not, as it needs to be per Natural Law of Business #2, compelling. When we don’t care about it, when it’s not great, when we don’t believe it’s worth what we’re charging or that the buyer will benefit from it, the problem is pretty clearly with the us and the business. We need to improve our offering, or we’ll never get the level of belief we’re after.

The other area of trouble is when our product or service is seriously excellent, but falls outside the comfort zone of the staff member. It could be that it’s a luxury item they can’t afford and wouldn’t buy; a design they think is doofy, or a service that they’d never pay for because they’d just do it themselves. Now, of course, I understand that we all have products and services about which we’re more, or a bit less, excited. But, if the core of what we’re doing, our signature lines or our future breadwinners, aren’t things the staff believes in, the odds us arriving at a successful, mutually rewarding future are small. Clearly, everything I’ve advocated above about free choice means that they’re well within their personal purview to suspend belief. But we need to be clear that we’re not just asking them to recite our sales pitch from rote, or grudgingly follow “orders” with so-so vibrational energy; we expect them to believe in what we (i.e., they) are making, selling and serving. And if they don’t, we respect their different beliefs, but that we, in turn, don’t believe that we’ll be able to work well together.

Check back tomorrow for Part Four (conclusion) of this essay!

This essay is an excerpt from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Volume 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Yourself by Ari Weinzweig (coming in the Fall of 2013). Stay tuned for the next few days to read the whole essay.

The Role of Belief in Building a Sustainable Business

The Boss’ Belief Sets the Bar

If we, as leaders, don’t truly believe in the business, ourselves, our products, the staff. . . well, we’re the one’s setting the organizational bar. If our passions aren’t particularly high, if our doubts are significant, and our commitments uncertain . . . there’s just no way around the reality that disbelief (or lukewarm belief at best) is going to take down most everyone and everything else in the business.

Building Belief When you’re not the Big Boss

If you’re thinking that you’re “only a manager” and “can’t control” (it’s actually all out of control, but that’s another article) what your whole organization is doing—or not doing—I’ll counter by arguing that you can create a vision of success that applies only to your own area. Even if the rest of the organization is basically oblivious, you can just start going after it on your own, working constructively within limits that come down from corporate. I haven’t had to do this myself, so I know you can roll your eyes with cynicism on this subject if you want—Paul and I started the company and thankfully I haven’t had to go into a so-so set- ting and start something special. But I’ve watched people who’ve come to ZingTrain seminars pick up positive pieces of what we do and successfully take them back to their own businesses; many work in places where the organization overall isn’t really going for greatness, but these folks seem to find a way to make big things happen in their own department anyways. Before long, the people who work for and with them become believers. Energy, commitment, caring and quality all go up. Having worked at, and around, this approach for nearly a year now I’ve begun to break the belief stuff down into a series of different layers. All are important. Any are helpful.

1. Belief in Self

I don’t think it takes a PhD psychologist to predict that we’re going to do better in every aspect of our lives when we have a calm, grounded, humble respect for, and belief in, ourselves. Our internal dialogue, our self image, our belief in our abilities, has a huge impact on our ability to inspire others around us and on our own odds of attain- ing our dreams.

While I grew up inspired by Isaac Asimov’s science fiction stories set on other planets, he had some very insightful things to say about life here on Earth. In the context of this bit on belief in self, he said: “And above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning.” It’s pretty much true. Go into any difficult interaction, personal or professional, from a place of self-doubt and internal dissonance and almost inevitably the other person will pick up on it.

By contrast, go in with a calm, centered sense of self and interact with the same person and you’ll almost always end up with a far more positive outcome.

Ian Mays, a poet by profession, who now sells pastrami and potato salad at the Deli, said, “I enjoy my time here. The space is comfortable, and I’m allowed to be who I am. There’s a lot of opportunity to be nice and have fun and eat good food. We always came here to the Deli as kids. We looked forward to the food, but that was almost secondary—it was more looking forward to having a good time. We believed we were going to have a good time. I still believe that I’m going to come here and have a good time during most of my day. I feel like I can give a part of myself to others when I‘m at work, but I believe I can do it in a way that’s consistent with who I really am.”

Part of our work as leaders, then, is to actively help each staff member to see that they have a solid shot at being successful, to know that they’re good enough and smart enough, strong enough and talented enough to do well in our world. While this issue rarely comes up in business literature, the more I think about it, the more obvious it is—we can’t build the kind of positive organization people will believe in, if the people who are part of it don’t also believe in themselves, and conversely, if we don’t believe in them. Author, and Emma Goldman’s great niece, Dawna Markova, said in her excellent and insightful work, I Will Not Die an Unlived Life, “If your purpose is only about you, it has no branches. If it is only about the rest of the world, it has no roots.” Together—a healthy grounded individual working in a healthy organization, with shared vision and values, where each believes in the ability of the other— we can get to great things!

2. Belief in the Business

Let me state my supposition up front: pretty much every- thing in an organization is going to be better when the people working in it believe in what the business is doing. When we believe, we work harder, we give more, and we put a level of energy and passion into play that’s clearly essential to creating anything really great. With very few exceptions, people want—I’m tempted to say “need”—to believe that they’re part of a great organization, that their work makes a difference, that what they’re selling is a good product, that the organization they’re part of is generally doing good in the world. Our job as leaders is to make that scenario into a reality. I believe we can, and that when we do everything—from feelings to finance to food quality—is going to work more effectively.

Emily Hiber, a supervisor in our Next Door café, used to be a teacher, but has opted to work here instead. “I was just talking to a friend of mine whose husband is just super unhappy with his work,” she told me. “He’s not earning very much and they were feeling totally unfulfilled. I was saying that, while I’m not in the ‘lap of luxury,’ my work pays me a livable wage and because I believe in it so much, and in the people that are involved with it, that I’m really fulfilled in what I do. My commitment is really high because I believe in the people that I work for and with. I think the people who work here are willing to buy in because they really believe in the service we provide and the products that we’re introducing people to. And also to our way of thinking about food and work and relationships.”

Bill Rosemurgy, trained as a naval architect, now crafting cappuccinos here, added, “Belief is very important. You get a sense of purpose. It’s very easy to believe in what I’m doing here. That was one of the first things that I picked up on a few weeks after I started. It’s probably one of the biggest reasons I can still work here after all these years. I couldn’t go to work every day doing something I didn’t believe in, something that didn’t have any purpose in it.”

Check back tomorrow for Part Three of this essay!

This essay is an excerpt from Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Volume 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Yourself by Ari Weinzweig (coming in the Fall of 2013). Stay tuned for the next few days to read the whole essay.

The Role of Belief in Building a Sustainable Business

Don’t misconstrue my choice of titles—for better or for worse, this is NOT on essay on religion in the workplace. Neither is it about beliefs, as in “values” or “guiding principles,” though those certainly underlie all of what I’m addressing here. Nor is it about politics. It’s about what we—each of us as individuals—believe about the work, people, products and problems we’re engaged with every day. It’s about what we believe to be true—as in “I believe that training is critical to the success of our organization” or, alternatively, “I believe that training is a total waste of time that we tolerate only because corporate says so.” It’s also about approach and framing: “I believe that having employees is the hardest thing about being in business;” Or the inverse, “I believe our people really are a huge asset—the more we involve every- one here in running the better we’re going to do!”

This piece is about how belief plays a really big role in our success—or failure—as individuals. On a bigger scale, how it impacts the health of any organization, how it plays into the quality of the lives of the people who work there, and, (believe it or not) into the quality of the product and service we deliver every day.

My belief in the importance of belief is a fairly recent event in my intellectual development. The concept came into—and stayed in—my mind during a series of long talks, emails and essays with my friend, Anese Cavanaugh. Belief, she insists, is big, and its import is mostly ignored.

As a caveat, let me be clear that none of this stuff about belief is a substitute for sound business practices, great food, good finance, or skilled service work. This is NOT about some supernatural act where you just “believe “and all of a sudden your baguettes get a lot better and everyone who works for you is immediately inspired to perform at championship levels. Instead, I see belief as a modifier, a multiplier. It’s not a substitute for the actual work, but it will amplify whatever else is going on; what you already do well will get better if you believe in it, yourself and your organization.

What you Believe is (Very Often) What you Get

This one’s a bit tricky. I’m not saying it to be all Pollyannaish or anything. Good business planning is obviously based, to a great degree on a real sense of what’s going on. But . . . without losing touch with reality, I have found—through frequent errors on my part—that when I, or others, believe that something is going to be bad . . . it usually will end up being so. I’m not saying that just switching beliefs is enough to turn a terrible economy into a boom, or a bad dishwasher into your next dining room manager. But I really do believe—based on a fair bit of reading, and a lot of years of experience—that it really does make a big difference.

“When people are believing or not believing in something,” Anese went on “they’ll find evidence to support ‘the fact.’ The impact can be huge. Each time what we believed would be bad, turns out to be bad, the culture of negativity grows ever stronger. To quote Rosabeth Moss Kanter, in her excellent book, Confidence: “Instead of believing in positive futures, everyone expects the worst of everyone else—and then acts to make those expectations come true. Self-confidence confidence in one another, and confidence in the system disappear.”

“The way to get past this,” Anese explained, “is to help people be aware of, and responsible for, their beliefs. The belief doesn’t have to be ‘wrong,’ It’s just the art of teaching people to take responsibility for it, challenge it, and get a sense of where their belief is coming from.” That level of awareness—realizing how much one’s often unconscious beliefs are driving decision making and direction—can often be enough to turn things 180 degrees

Energy and Belief

Without question the strength of people’s belief is very closely correlated with the energy we experience when we engage (as customer, coworker, owner or manager) with the organization. First off, the level of energy always follows the level of belief, both up and down. As Anese said, “Belief leads directly to energy—when people believe in what they’re doing, energy amps up, people feel good, value is added to the lives and work of the organization. In negative scenarios, when people just go through the motions and belief is low, the individual and organizational energy both sink quickly.” Secondly, just saying the “right things”

about believing in people or “high quality,” etc. never work well if the energy beneath them, the internal feelings of the person doing the talking and acting, are not authentic. Saying what you’re “supposed to say” without really believing what you’re saying comes across, inevitably, as hollow—energy falls fairly quickly, and belief falters soon thereafter.

Experience Builds Belief

The (unfair perhaps) reality of the world is that the organizations with the long-term track records of success are more likely to attract successful people, folks who believe in themselves, in the organization, and in the value of the work. Which, of course, increases the odds of those organization being even more successful in the future, which in turn attracts better people who believe ever more strongly in the work.

By contrast, getting people to believe in themselves and in the organization when things aren’t going all that well is a hard task. When the people who work in an organization believe that their individual efforts aren’t important and that their input doesn’t make a difference . . . they stop giving it. Productivity slides, good ideas go by the wayside, creativity and quality suffer.

There’s no question that belief builds success which builds belief which builds a culture of success and a positive sense of security, trust and stability. “Continuity,” Rosabeth Moss Kanter write, “breeds faith.” We can increase the odds of this happening by helping people focus on, remember, and learn from their past successes.

Check back tomorrow for Part Two of this essay!