Show Notes

• What causes restaurants to stand the test of time
• Growing up on Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese
• An unlikely path to the restaurant business
• How studying anarchism prepared Ari for business and leadership
• Discovering the secrets to success
• Origin of ZingTrain
• The 12 Natural Laws of Business
• The importance of visioning
• 3 bottom lines
• Stewardship and generosity in business
• The Power of Beliefs
• Shining hope
• “Making music…”

Connect With Ari Weinzweig

✩ Ari’s Newsletter Archive: Ari’s Top 5

Summary

Ari Weinzweig co-founded Zingerman’s Delicatessen with two employees and a small selection of specialty foods and exceptional sandwiches. Today, the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses has grown to 11 businesses and over $75 million in annual revenue. Ari discusses his company’s unique approach to business, and how concepts like vision, beliefs, and hope fit into that model.

Full Transcript

Brian

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. In 1982, Ari Weinzweig, along with his partner Paul Saginaw, founded Zingerman’s Delicatessen in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They opened the doors with just two employees and a small selection of specialty foods and exceptional sandwiches. Today’s Zingerman’s Delicatessen is a nationally renowned food icon. The Zingerman’s community of businesses has grown to 11 businesses, with over 750 employees and over $75 million in annual revenue. The company’s unique business model caused Inc. Magazine to call Zingerman’s the coolest small company in America. In addition to his active engagement in day to day operations of nearly every business in the Zingerman’s community, Ari is also a prolific writer. His topics range from the history of bacon to giving great service, and his most recent book, “The Power of Beliefs in Business” is part four of his six book series “Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading.” Zingerman’s founding partners have been the recipients of consistent public recognition through the years. In 2006, Ari was recognized as one of the Who’s Who of Food and Beverage in America by the James Beard Foundation. In 2007 Ari and Paul were presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award from Bon Appetit Magazine for their work in the food industry. And Ari’s book, “Building a Great Business” was on Inc. Magazine’s list of Best Books for Business Leaders. Ari’s approach to business and his approach to life are refreshing and unique. I’m excited to have him on the show today. Welcome, Ari, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence.

Ari

Thank you, Brian. And thanks for all those kind words. You’re very generous.

Brian  

Absolutely. Ari, you’ve been in business a long time, over 40 years – I think 41 years – with Zingerman’s. What causes restaurants like yours and businesses like yours to stand the test of time in a world where most don’t?

Ari  

Well, I don’t know that there’s one magic answer. In fact, I know there isn’t one magic answer. But you mentioned the first book and the four parts of the series “Building a Great Business” and there’s an essay in there called “12 Natural Laws of Business.” It’s my belief that all healthy organizations – whether it’s a food business, like you referenced, or a coaching business like yours, or a basketball team, or even a country or a community – all the healthy ones are living in harmony with those natural laws. So I think the direct answer would be, we just keep attempting – imperfectly every day but attempting – to live those natural laws.

Brian  

Well, obviously, you’ve done that very well. I look forward to jumping into the laws and some of the other secrets that you’ve taught and written about and have really ingrained throughout the fabric of your business. But before we get into those things, I’m always fascinated by the stories of how people ended up in their chosen profession. Have you always been a foodie? How did you get into the restaurant business in the first place?

Ari  

No. The most recent pamphlet you mentioned – not the most recent full book but the most recent pamphlet – is about our food philosophy. It just came out last week. It tells the story of my culinary upbringing, which was anything but remarkable. I had zero interest in food other than – like any other kid out there – I liked to eat. So no, I grew up on Kraft macaroni and cheese, Mrs. Paul’s fish sticks, Poptarts, Tang, Nestle’s Quick, green jello with pears; not a really exhilarating or uplifting or inspirational culinary background. My mother was a good person and a teacher but not a good cook. I really had no idea you could even go into business because everybody in my family was teachers and lawyers and doctors and dentists and psychologists. So business wasn’t even something that I had in my mind as something I could consider. So I really just lucked out. I grew up in Chicago, I came up to Ann Arbor to go to school at University of Michigan. I studied Russian history – which in the moment that we’re recording this is a particularly painfully poignant subject to have studied and still be emotionally and intellectually engaged with at a pretty, I won’t say the deepest level, because there are people who study it for a living, but probably more than the average American is paying attention. I studied anarchism, which we might come back to in our conversation, I don’t know. But after graduating with my history degree there isn’t, of course, anything you can do with a history degree except go get more degrees. That’s what I was supposed to do but I wasn’t really ready and I didn’t know which advanced degree I was going to get. I mostly just knew I didn’t want to move home. So in order to facilitate that financially, obviously, I needed a job. I had driven a cab part time while I was in school in order to help pay my rent. It was fine, but not particularly interesting. One of my college roommates was waiting tables at a restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor so I went in there and applied for the same job he had, which was being a server. They interviewed me and they told me they’d call when something opened up. After two weeks, I hadn’t heard from them so I went back and offered to bus tables. Once again, they said they would call me and once again, I waited two weeks and once again, I didn’t hear from them. By that point, I was running out of whatever money I had had and rent was going to come due. It’s actually 45 years ago, this week, that we’re talking that I went back and offered to do whatever they had. They offered me a job washing dishes and I took it and that’s how I got started. So no, zero childhood dream of doing anything with food, zero childhood dream of being in business. I just got lucky because I stumbled into work that I really love. I still love food and cooking – I cook every night at home still; we eat very late in our house, but I do cook something – and also great people. So my business partner, Paul Saginaw, who you alluded to earlier in the very nice introduction that you gave, he was the general manager at that restaurant. He had been a bar manager in one of their other places and they had just promoted him and moved him over so his first day was my first day and that’s how we met. I started to prep and line cook and manage kitchens. I worked for that restaurant group for about four years before Paul and I opened the deli.

Brian

Wow, what a great story. I’ve been in business a long time and I’m pretty sure this is the first time I’ve heard the terms business and anarchist in the same conversation.

Ari

Yeah, might be the last too.

Brian

Might be the last. Ari, how did studying anarchists either help prepare you for future business success or contribute to your evolution and development as a leader?

Ari  

It’s a good question. I mean, I think at the time that we opened I don’t think that I thought about it at all. It was far from my mind by that point, I was mostly studying food and trying to learn enough to be able to sell. I mean, the cheese that we have now far surpasses the artisan cheese we were able to get in 1982, but it was still pretty out there for the mainstream in 1982. So I was studying cheese and cured meat and trying to learn about salami and cured ham and all the other things that we were going to sell. But in hindsight, and obviously I write about it a lot now, I realized as I was working on that part one of the business book, I got asked to speak at the Jewish Studies department and Deborah Dash Moore, who headed the department, titled my talk, “Rye Bread and Anarchism” or something. And I thought, man, I haven’t looked at my books in like, whatever it was – 30 years – I better get them out and start studying again, because [the] Jewish Studies department, they actually know who all these people were and I’m going to embarrass myself. I started to re-read things and I was struck pretty quickly by two things. Number one is how much of what Paul and I had created in the organization was unconsciously aligned with the stuff in the anarchist books that I had been so drawn to; which is dealing with people as your equals, working as much as you can in a collaborative and consensus based environment, not thinking hierarchically, being generous of spirit and sharing in as much as possible, etc. Then the second big realization was how much of what’s now called “progressive businesses” aligned with what people from the anarchist community, like Emma Goldman, were going to jail for 100-120 years ago, and that they’re really overlapping. So stuff that is now commonly talked about, like self-organizing work teams, engaging staff, purpose, belief and high quality, these are all things that they were pushing back against the Industrial Revolution in 1900. Many of them were going to jail for it. They didn’t have a great place or a great venue to implement what they were trying to do and most of them didn’t succeed in that regard. But I came to realize or believe that business actually allows us a great venue to do it, because there’s nothing about anarchism – contrary to popular belief – that’s about chaos at all. It’s actually all about organization. It’s just about organization where you involve the people who are part of it – the organization – in the organizing, as opposed to the old model where the bosses retreat to the backroom and then stamp on the rest of the organization the way it’s going to be. This is where we’re participating with everybody – obviously, “everybody” is in quotes – but we’re participating with everybody to design how the organization works, etc. So those two things really informed it a lot. It’s helped me to not think hierarchically, we can talk more about what that means if you want. It’s helped me a lot because there’s a very strong anarchist belief that the means that you use to achieve something need to be congress or aligned with the ends that you want to achieve. This sounds simple, but it’s quite common that bosses yell at employees to give better customer service. That doesn’t make sense and in the anarchist belief system, you would know it doesn’t make sense, because the way we want the customer to be treated is the way we as leaders need to treat the people that we employ. If I want to have a high quality product, everything around me needs to be high quality, so that we’re always behaving in ways that are congress. Those are just a couple of the applications but it’s actually proven really remarkably helpful. I wouldn’t have thought it would be but it turned out to be. 

Brian  

Well, it’s interesting how it worked out that way. One of the things that you said was “anarchism is not chaos.” But it is disruptive, isn’t it?

Ari  

Well, everything can be disruptive, I mean, going to church can be disruptive too. It’s not necessarily disruptive, it’s only disruptive to the status quo when it’s not working in ways that are inclusive, that are equitable, et cetera. But really, anarchism is a belief system; one of the things that really informed me is the work of Gustav Landauer, who was a German pacifist anarchist in the early 20th century. He said, we have no political beliefs, we have beliefs against politics. So it’s not about taking charge, it’s the inverse. It’s about how you treat every human being that you interact with, including yourself. So how I treat the next human that I see when I leave here is what anarchism is about. If I treat them with dignity, as if they’re my equal, which I believe they are, regardless of whether they’re the person who’s taking out the trash or the CEO of General Motors, they both matter equally in my mind. So it’s really about that and it’s about getting out of hierarchical thinking, which doesn’t mean there’s no operational hierarchies – in the football team, the quarterback’s calling the plays, it just means that the quarterback isn’t a better person than the player who didn’t even get on the field, and that they both have things to offer to the conversation that are important to bring into the mix.

Brian  

I’m sure there are multiple ways that those concepts are taught and trained and play out in your organizations. Of course, I’m tempted to go down the road of talking about how everything that you’ve been describing applies to politics in the world today but we’re not going to do that.

Ari  

We’ll let people extrapolate.

Brian  

Exactly. Ari, one of the things that we try to do on the show on LifeExcellence is uncover the tools, techniques and strategies that our guests have used to create excellence, with the hope that our listeners and viewers can learn from them and apply them in our own lives both personally and professionally. The good news is that you’ve identified what you call secrets to success; those are nuggets that we try and uncover through conversation. The challenge is there are 49 of them so far, many of which have multiple parts, like the 12 laws that you mentioned, or five steps or six points. I find it remarkable that you’ve documented so many factors that contribute to the success of Zingerman’s. I don’t think even many of the most successful businesses have that level of insight into what’s caused them to be successful. But you’ve not only identified those secrets, you also reinforce them continually in your organization. Share with us how you first recognized the importance of doing that, how you discovered them and started documenting them and how this process has evolved over time.

Ari  

Are you asking about the writing or the understanding of them? 

Brian  

Really the discovery, and then the application of them, whether that’s through writing or training, or all the ways that you do that within the Zingerman’s organization.

Ari  

Got it. Thank you for clarifying. So, I guess at its most basic level, both Paul and I have always been – long before the book “Fifth Discipline” came out – we’ve always been about creating a learning organization. Long before the Toyota Way, we’ve just always thought about making things better all the time. In fact, it’s on the list of natural laws of business that we use a lot of lean work here but the reality is that everybody who’s done anything great for time immemorial is always getting better all the time. That’s just what they do and that was certainly true for us. So I think that our mindset has always been how do we learn and understand and how do we share that with the people that we’re working with. That, at its most basic, intuitive level, just came from getting really frustrated that what was really obvious to us, [what] all these other people didn’t seem to get, but then realizing the problem wasn’t them, it was us. It wasn’t that there was something wrong with them, it was just we weren’t doing a very good job of explaining it. So that’s kind of been in our heads from the beginning. The more people we had, the more important it became to be able to clarify, to clearly explain things, so that they could learn what was in quotes “obvious” to me and Paul; how would we get them to understand it. Then that all took a big leap forward in 1994 – so 12 years into the business – when we started ZingTrain with Maggie Bayless, [who] was the managing partner. Her passion is training; the way I feel about food, that’s how she feels about training. Then her work, her understanding, her insight, and her expertise in training really gave us a much better understanding of what this really meant. She encouraged us and helped guide us towards creating more and more clear what we call organizational recipes, like our three steps to great service, five steps to handling customer complaints. So they’re really just teachable models that, I will suggest, honor the natural complexity of the world but give people a relatively simple frame through which to enter that complexity and process it. So if we oversimplify things, that’s not good, because there is natural complexity, it’s just the nature of the world, the nature of human organisms, you and I are complex, just inside our brains and our bodies, it’s already so complex, I can’t understand it. But at the same time, we want to give people…somebody has been working here for three days, I want to give them some simple construct that they can start to give customer service at a relatively high level. That’s really where those came from and then we just kept working on it and we continue to work at it to this day. I’m always trying to understand what’s going on, why it’s working or not working and when we screw up, how do we learn from it and when something goes right, what can we learn from it. Even in the last few years, I’ve been working more and more on an organizational ecosystem model as a metaphor for organizations; that’s been great. Also, as of, I guess, 14 months ago, when Russia invaded Ukraine, I have been working a lot on dignity and what that really means in the workplace.

Brian  

The guy who’s been there for three days…you and Paul have been around a long time, you are co-founders, you developed a lot of the concepts and certainly have benefited from thinking about them, talking about them, writing about them, teaching, which is how we learn best, as you know. I wonder, though, about the guy who is starting tomorrow or started three days ago, because I know just from prepping for the show that the sheer volume of material is overwhelming. I’m guessing…[you] hand the guy who’s been there three days four volumes of material and say, take this home and read it and there will be a [test].

Ari  

That’s all available, but no, even the best people it’s years, like when a new manager starts in the organization, my belief and what I try to get across is that it takes probably a year for them to get themselves grounded and they’re still not…like, even I don’t remember everything that’s in the books, Brian. Sometimes I re-read an essay, and I’m like, oh, that’s awesome, I forgot all about that. But the point is to be able to give them teachable tools that are going to be helpful on day one, day two, day five, month one, month two, as we get up to speed, I mean, what’s in there is 40 years of learning; they’re not going to get it in four days, it would be ridiculous to even attempt to do that. So we’re trying to create pathways from entry over a long period of time, so that people can have the opportunity to keep learning and growing because most people that are listening to this podcast – certainly you and I – always want to be learning. That’s a big part of what keeps us interested and engaged in the world but at the same time, it is overwhelming to come into any new organization, definitely to come into one with high standards like ours and definitely one where there’s a lot of complexity. So if you go get a job –  and I’m going to stereotype a little bit – in your typical fast food place, it’s mostly, here’s what you do, just do this. Really, ideally, we want people to learn more about the whole organization and to get more involved in running it in any number of different ways. Does everybody do that? Of course not. But if we can get half of them, two thirds of them, 40% of them actively getting outside of their day to day and starting to think about the business as an entity and how they can help lead and contribute to it, that’s pretty awesome.

Brian  

It sure is, I really applaud you for, first of all, setting the bar that high; that commitment to excellence in food and in service and secondly, creating that kind of the internal training that helps people to grow, not just as it relates to the function that they do in one of your businesses, but truly helping them to grow personally. I know that’s a goal of yours and a value of yours. There aren’t a lot of companies that offer such a robust internal training program like you do and, as you know, even fewer of them allow outside individuals and organizations to learn and benefit from those systems and programs. You alluded to ZingTrain; in terms of being part of the evolution of your training program, that’s an external training program but was that the catalyst that helped you to to really refine and formalize your internal training program?

Ari  

We were already doing some already but it certainly helped us go to a higher level, without question. I’m pretty confident that we wouldn’t be where we are remotely without it. At the same time, I mean, were we opposed to training before that? No. Were we doing more than the average restaurant? Probably. But yes, absolutely. I mean, Maggie’s expertise on training has informed everything that we do. I guess in the ecosystem context I’ve come to realize and believe that everything is impacting everything else. So it’s never just ZingTrain or just me and Paul, it’s all of these pieces coming together in this unique and imperfect ecosystem that we’re trying to create. But absolutely, I mean, the training is a big piece of our work.

Brian  

What caused you to start offering the training externally?

Ari  

Well, that’s how ZingTrain started. I mean, Maggie’s interest back in 1994, when she wrote the first vision for it, was really more about doing work inside the organization. Paul really pushed for her to consider the outside also, which I think was a smart move, because it really creates a market. I mean, market driven is a little easy to stereotype but when you’re appealing to outside customers, it pushes you in a way that is – I’m not saying she would have done this – easy to sort of ignore when you’re only dealing on the inside. Also, in a good way, it makes us be even better at the work because if we’re going to teach customer service to people like you who come to a ZingTrain seminar, it’s kind of good to be good at it. So as you know from your own teaching, when you get up in front of other people and talk about stuff, if you have high integrity you’re going to be trying to do it in your own daily life too. So I think it’s helped us enormously. Bo Burlingham, who wrote that Inc. Magazine article that you referenced and who I just actually saw the other day visiting from California, he told me years ago that people who work in our organization, most of them will never fully appreciate the value and how much difference ZingTrain has made to the organization. So I usually go with what he says.

Brian  

I think that’s true of a lot of good things; we reflect on it after the fact; we realize that the value…I mean, I’m thinking about parenting and certainly growing up, we don’t appreciate the value that our parents have provided, all the things that they’ve provided for us, even if it was fish sticks and macaroni and cheese. We come to appreciate that later on in life and so it’s probably similar. Ari, let’s jump into a few specific secrets if we can do that, we don’t have time to talk about all of them but I do have a few that I’d like to hit on. I know you often speak to groups about the 12 natural laws of business and I mentioned that already. One of the things that I noticed as I was learning about them is that many, if not all of them, relate not only to business, but also to our personal lives. Let’s talk about the origin of the 12 laws and why they’re so important.

Ari  

I don’t claim to have discovered them any more than Columbus actually discovered America; it was there all along, he just happened to stumble on it. But Paul used to…for many years he would talk about the idea of natural laws of business. So in essence, natural laws of business are like gravity, they’re just true. So you don’t have to talk about them, you don’t have to even consciously know them, you don’t have to understand them even per se, like, as a history major I don’t actually quite understand why gravity works the way it does but I’m very clear what will happen if I drop my pen or let go of my pen; I know it’s not going to fall up and I make my decisions accordingly. So in a lot of ways, in that context, I guess I would say that every healthy organization, every high level success of a human being, they’re all living those natural laws. So Paul used to talk about it and then I took his basic format and I turned it into a more detailed list. There are 12 in that book. They apply to our personal lives as much as they apply to business. And then I actually have 12 more that I’ve written about in the e-news that I do that need to go into a future book. But they’re just true like gravity and Fritjof Capra, the physicist and philosopher, gave a really great little anecdotal explanation that I think applies to them. He said, the way the water runs over the rocks in the river will always be slightly different depending on which river it is but the basic principles of it are the same no matter where you find the river. So that’s kind of what these are; the first one on the list is about vision. Everybody who’s doing anything great, whether it’s as a public speaker, as a poet, as a public school teacher, as a basketball player, they all have imagined a better future that they’re pursuing. Now, they may not write it down the way we do it but they definitely have thought about it. These are just behaviors that I have seen through all walks of life – small business, big business, military, athletes, nonprofits, social change leaders – they all do the same things. This was just my attempt to be able to say – to answer your first question – this is why we’re doing what we’re doing at the level we’re doing it because essentially we’re living in harmony with nature. It’s also why any organization that’s doing well is awesome. They’re also doing well because they’re living in harmony, with ease even if they don’t have the words of the language or the list.

Brian  

Just a quick commercial I guess, or a quick note to our listeners and viewers, we’ll include the website ZingTrain.com and Zingermans.com in the show notes, but we’re just going to scratch the surface of a lot of these concepts. There are four books, and I wasn’t kidding when I said there are 600 pages. I know “The Power of Beliefs” is 588 pages and I don’t know if the other ones are quite as lengthy.

Ari  

They’re a little shorter. That one came in the biggest but there are also now – as of last week – seven pamphlets that aren’t in the books too. Then a blue book on customer service.

Brian  

That’s what I was going to say; there are lots of free resources available. There are books that are available very inexpensively; pamphlets and the training at ZingTrain, some of which is live in person, some of which is online. Make sure you check that out if you’re listening or watching the show on YouTube. You mentioned vision, and I know the concept of vision is important to you and it’s important to Zingerman’s, it’s a word that comes up in multiple secrets so it’s a recurring theme. Why is visioning so powerful and how can we create a vision both personally and for businesses or organizations?

Ari  

Again, it’s my belief that vision is…it’s not something we made up, the idea of having a vision. I mean, it’s clearly embedded in everything from the Bible to the most recent leadership book on business that just came out. They’re all referencing vision. What’s different here is that we have a process; I wrote a lot about how we learned it in the second to newest pamphlet, which is called “The Story of Visioning at Zingerman’s” and how Stas’ Kazmierski, who actually passed away six years ago today, so I was just honoring him in some pieces I wrote last night, but he taught this to us in 1994 and it really changed our lives. It’s because of that process that we learned how to actually write a vision; not just to have one in our heads, which is intuitive, and also inspiring and can really help create some great things, but we’ve learned and believe pretty strongly that writing it down in a way that others can see it is much more powerful. That’s really where it came from. Stas’ learned it from a guy named Ron Lippet, who was at the Institute of Social Research at University of Michigan in the 60s and 70s. Stas’ was a consultant up the block for a firm called Dana, Miller, Tyson and they would walk down to the deli to get coffee and hang out because they were tired of sitting in the office. So that’s how we met. We have a whole process that we teach which we adapted from what Stas’ taught us. It really just involves sitting down and writing as if you’re in the future already, because the way we do vision is not the five line business school version of vision. It’s a detailed story of your future whether that story is for Thanksgiving dinner this fall at your house, or whether it’s for a new business, or whether it’s for your relationship with your significant other or with your kid or whatever, just writing out that story. So our vision for Zingerman’s 2032 is like 10 or 12 pages long; it’s not the five line statement but it’s a story told as if you’re already in the future with a fair amount of details, not every detail but the details that matter to you. If you have a sales level in mind, there’s no right answer, you could not grow at all or you could grow a lot and go public. Where do you want to be? How do the people who work in your organization feel about working there? How does the community feel about you? How do you feel about working in your job, etc. It’s really just this description of the future which helps you hold course; it helps people help you, it helps you be inspired to keep going after something greater than yourself.

Brian  

So that vision statement of 2032, I think you created that in, was it, 2020?

Ari  

We were working on it from 2018 to 2020. We were scheduled…after many iterations, conversations and organizational roll-outs of drafts, we were scheduled to formally – wouldn’t have been a shock, everybody would have seen it – roll-out the end of March in 2020. (Brian:  Good timing.) That can happen, if people have lost track of the chronology already, but we did roll it out the following January; so January of 2021 with really just minimal grammatical changes and stuff happened in between. It’s about 12 pages long, just to be clear. So the vision is, as we do it, includes the motions and includes details. They might not matter too much to the world, but they matter to us. So that would be true for everybody. If you’re writing a personal vision, it could talk about your kids, it could talk about the music that’s playing, it could talk about what you’re eating, it could talk about your dog; it’s not meant just as a bullet point list of goals. 

Brian  

It’s really a story, an exercise that you work through with your team members.

Ari  

Well, we teach it to everybody interested. Not everybody is interested, but most of them here will have seen one, read one, written one. I’ve written a lot of them. If you’re here for a while, you’re going to write some because it’s just become part of the way that we work. I would suggest, ultimately, it’s through neuroplasticity – which is brain change – it has the enormous long term positive effect on the people who learn it. So much of the country is focused on what’s wrong and who’s keeping them from getting into success; this is about where you start with the belief that you’re responsible for yourself and having that vision can help you hold course as you move towards it.

Brian  

That’s great. Ari, I know at Zingerman’s you focus on three bottom lines and you talk about food service and profits. When I look at Zingerman’s, I think your business is unique in many ways – maybe you don’t – but I’m interested in your thoughts on profit as a business driver because you do think a little bit differently, at least than most owners, most co-founders. Is there tension between financial profits and other goals and if so, how do you navigate through that? We obviously need profits to run our business. If there are no profits, no cash, there’s no business, I get that part of it but tell me about the rest?

Ari  

I think there’s tension between any two things. There’s tension between significant others at home. It’s not bad, it’s just you’re not the same person. There’s tension between us and traffic, there’s tension between wanting to eat six pieces of cake, but we don’t want to be out of shape. There are always these challenges; that’s normal but I guess the point is that you can have a zero sum game mindset, which would say like, we can’t focus on quality because we need to focus on profit. Or you could have an abundance mindset – which you have, I know, and which we also have, and probably most people listening have – which is the belief that you can do all of them at the same time. Is it easier to be one dimensional? Probably, in the short term, but I think in the long run it just depends how you define “easier.” But I think in the long run it’s far more holistically sound to be able to do all of them. Of course, there’s creative tension between if we cut the quality of the chocolate down the cost will go down and, in theory, we’ll make more money. But that’s a very short term view because if you cut the cost, you cut the quality and after a while people stopped coming because the product’s not as good. It’s not as simple as are we going to spend over here to improve the ingredients or are we not going to spend. Everything’s impacting everything else; the better the service, the better the sales; the better the food, the better the sales. Then I think, to your point, very few people in the public truly understand what profit is. I certainly didn’t understand it before I got into business. I think just like anarchism has a lot of inaccurate images, I think the same is true for profit; most people assume profits are this hugely gigantic number that’s all going to the owner. It’s the greed fantasy. But the reality in most businesses is we’re not Google, we’re not Amazon, we’re not bringing in these gigantic margins. Most people I know are working their butts off just to be profitable. Most of the public doesn’t understand that if you’re not profitable, ultimately you can’t stay in business. It doesn’t matter whether you got any, but it does matter that you pay your bank loans and the principal back, it does matter that you buy new equipment. If you’re in an industry like ours, we always need to buy new equipment so that’s impacting profit. If you have investors, you want to be able to pay them back so they don’t pull their money out of your business and leave you hanging. And then it lets us pay taxes, which I don’t really think is a bad thing. I mean, somebody needs to pay for the roads and somebody needs to pay for those who have less, and that’s our part, our contribution.

Brian  

How does stewardship and generosity fit into that?

Ari  

The stuff with stewardship is adapted from Peter Block, who is an awesome human being and a great writer also; I would recommend all of his books. Paul and I read his book “Empowered Manager” in the early 90s somewhere around our eighth or ninth year in business, and then – I think actually in 1993 – his book “Stewardship” came out and we loved that too. This is where the anarchist stuff is actually very aligned. I keep telling Peter that his work, which is around equity, not thinking hierarchically, getting out of patriarchy, which is where it all revolves around the male boss, et cetera, is very anarchist. He always dismisses me but I’m like, you’re saying all the same things in a great way. So stewardship is really…for us, it was like Paul and I, as partners, just dealt with each other as equals from the beginning. And it happened for any number of reasons in the original construct that I own more shares of the business, but that never entered the conversation. It was just [that] we needed to work together to figure it out. Then when we started to hire more managers, over time – they weren’t, out of malice – but they weren’t always treating their staff members or their colleagues as if they mattered in the same way Paul and I had been treating each other like we mattered. So the stewardship stuff was an attempt to adapt what we learned from Peter Block and to formalize expectations around treating people equitably, involving them in the decision, having conversations, not just giving commands.

Brian  

I have to just say, as an aside, that my limited experience with you and with Zingerman’s, you are one of the most generous and giving organizations I’ve ever had the privilege of doing business with. It means a lot to me because I strive to add value to people every day. I have to say that you and others in your organization, Maura Ferguson is an example, really inspired me to up my game even more. I want to acknowledge you for that and to let you know that that doesn’t go unnoticed. Really, thank you for creating a culture of generosity. (Ari:  Thank you.) I believe that that is a good way to do business and what goes around comes around and all of that stuff but the reason for doing it is not to get something in return, it’s just to be a good human and to add value to people. I think if more people did that, if more people held that as something that was important and something that they would strive every day to do in small ways and sometimes maybe in big ways, that the world would be a lot better place. You obviously get that and so, again, I just wanted to mention that.

Ari  

Thank you for the kind words; that underlies what we do. It’s a big part of our belief system and our values. Coming back to anarchism, in 1902 Peter Kropotkin – who had been a Russian prince who renounced his noble title and ended up fleeing the country, but was a pacifist and a scientist – he wrote a book called “Mutual Aid.” That name has come up a lot over the course of the pandemic as people were trying to get through. But his work was all around the idea that survival of the fittest – which Darwin wrote about – and was interpreted by Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Huxley to be a “war of all against all” in quotes. And Kropotkin said, Darwin was right, it is survival of the fittest but Hobbes and Huxley are wrong, it’s not a “war of all against all,” the fittest are the most collaborative and the most generous. This has been reaffirmed in modern times by Adam Grant’s book “Give and Take” saying essentially the same thing but in a 21st century language from a very highly regarded wonderful Wharton business School professor. So this is, once again, where progressive business and anarchism sort of unexpectedly aligned. It is really, in the spirit of the “Power of Beliefs in Business” books, it’s really just a belief. So if you believe that everybody’s out for themselves, there’s a self-fulfilling belief cycle that’s in that book and that all of us are living out whether we know it or not. So if you believe that everybody’s out to grab for themselves, then what do you do? You grab for yourself, right? You don’t want to be left out. So if you grab for yourself what do other people around you believe? They better grab for themselves, too because it’s going to all be gone. They grab and then you go, man, it’s a good thing I grabbed mine first; I wouldn’t have any. But if you believe that generosity actually benefits everybody in the big picture – which you believe that and we believe that – then you share, and when you share, the people around you start to go, wow, this is great. I feel better, you know what, I’m going to share some too, and it creates the virtuous cycle. In fact, the thing I did right before this was in a meeting with a bunch of people about our perpetual purpose trust work, which is a whole other subject in itself. But Ron Maurer, who’s run our admin for 23 years now, talked about how he came here to learn and to grow and to be part of a positive organization but he didn’t realize how much he would learn about generosity. He said, you can ask my wife, but I’ve changed a lot in my approach to generosity over the 20 some years that I’ve been here. So it does make a difference when people are around it and they see it in practice and they experience it for themselves. They see the positive impact it can have on others in the business and in the community at large. It does make a difference. In the spirit of thinking about people as equals, it’s not about charity like we’re giving to these poor people who need help – although certainly we’re trying to help those who have less – but it’s done with the belief that those people aren’t any lesser of human beings that you and I are. They, just through whatever circumstances, are less fortunate than we are and we want to be able to do our best to help them.

Brian  

Absolutely. You mentioned a little bit about the belief book, “The Power of Beliefs,” and it’s epic that you…I suspect was in you all along and yet at some point, you sort of identified it as a topic and started, I’m guessing, reading about it, maybe writing about a little bit, thinking about it and it turned into this 588 page book that I can hardly hold it up. I have to set it down, it’s so heavy. How did you discover the power of beliefs and what you learned about your beliefs in your research and writing? And why does it matter for people and organizations and as individuals?

Ari  

Good question. As people are probably already picking up, a lot of my beliefs have been impacted by books and reading. I know most people don’t believe it anymore but I’m a very shy, awkward introvert and I like to read, so I mentioned Peter Block’s work, “Servant Leadership,” from Robert Greenleaf, open book management from the book “Great Game of Business.” I mean, there are so many people who’ve helped us to understand, helped me to understand, about the world. So one belief I have is none of us are self-made human beings. It’s impossible. We’re all working with things that other people were generous – in the spirit of the previous question you asked – other people were generous enough to share that; have helped me and you and everybody we know. The belief stuff, it sounds crazy but all these years of writing and teaching and everything else, I’d really never thought about beliefs. Obviously, I knew the word, it’s not a secret word but I had never really thought about what it may mean until I was reading Bob and Judith Wright’s book “Transform.” They’re in Chicago, and they run the Wright Institute. Bob wrote the foreword for part three of the book series I did, which is about managing ourselves. I’m reading through their book, and then they have this little cycle, self-fulfilling belief cycle in there. It blew my mind, because it just helped me understand why some frustrations I was having in our organization were happening with people who would say they were going to do stuff, but they weren’t doing it. When I started to understand the impact beliefs have, I was like, wow, I get it; they don’t believe in the work. When we don’t believe in something, we’re not going to really do it and even if we think we’re going to do it or intellectually understand that we’re supposed to want to do it, we’re still not going to do it well if we don’t believe in it. That’s true of parenting, it’s true in business, it’s true of anything that we undertake. So as you said, when I learned it from them, then it really got me going. Then I did what awkward introverted history majors know how to do, which is read more books, like you said. I just kept reading and reading, reading. I started to understand how much beliefs we’re playing out in all our lives. There’s a quote in the book from Carl Jung, the psychologist, which essentially says until we make the unconscious conscious it will direct our lives and we will call it fate. Until we become conscious of what our beliefs are, decide whether those are the beliefs that we want and those are the beliefs that are going to help us get to the vision and values that we aspire to, then we’re going to act like it’s just the way it is and we’re helpless victims. But the reality of what I came to understand is that beliefs are not genetic. They’re all learned that way. They might have been learned when we were two years old, but they’re all learned and because they’re all learned, they can all be changed. If we have beliefs that are unhelpful, then we can either continue on a pace with them being unhelpful, or we could take a step back, reconsider things and choose a new belief; that’s easier said than done, but it’s very doable. I have changed dozens of my beliefs over the years about the world, about myself, about how things function, but nobody can make you change a belief. You need to decide that you’re going to change it. We can impact people’s beliefs, but at the end of the day, it’s still up to them to change it. Sometimes there are beliefs that we held early in our life that were helpful at one stage of our life, but become unhelpful as we go forward. But we have beliefs about everything, beliefs about podcasts, beliefs about business, beliefs about how much work is too much work or how little work is not enough work, beliefs about days of the week, we have beliefs about coffee, and food quality, we have beliefs about organizations, about all sorts of things, and it’s happening all day long, and all of our lives and that little cycle is playing out all the time, whether people are conscious of it or not. And when I teach it, I often say countries go to war over it and right now that’s happening, unfortunately and tragically, live in Ukraine right now.

Brian  

I appreciate you unpacking that; beliefs, obviously, are very powerful. I think that in order to learn and grow, which people – like you and I – think that we’re always…we have a saying in our family, “always learning, always growing.” Our kids know the term and subscribe to it and continuously learn and grow. Part of that is being open to or at least challenging beliefs. I think over time, beliefs change as a natural part of that growth process. I appreciate you unpacking that. I’d like to ask you about one more specific topic. Secret 45 is a – I won’t quiz you – Six-Pointed Hope Star systematic, shining the light of hope across your organization. One thing missing for an increasing number of people in the world is hope. Why is it so important to build hope in our workplaces? By the way, I mean their beliefs are something that we see in personal development books, certainly, and in business books…I don’t recall – and maybe I have but I don’t recall – reading about hope in business. Why is it so important to build hope in our workplaces?

Ari  

Good question there. I don’t think there’s a lot of material out there. It was a surprise to me when I started to learn about it, but I’m not a scientist, I’m a history major trying to be a line cook and a business person. But the more I stumbled on it, again, not intentionally, and as I started to study hope, it just was super clear from all of the scientific stuff that I saw that people with low hope don’t do great work; they call in sick more, they leave jobs more quickly, their resilience is lower. They’re less able to adapt to change. I mean, just across the board, people with high hope do better. It’s not even close. So it’s like, well, if that’s the case, then number one, many of us probably have high hope – you do, I do – but we haven’t thought about it that way. Number two, back to some of your earlier questions, then how do we actually create hope? Because it turns out that it’s actually not that hard to create hope. It’s also, unfortunately, equally easy to crush hope and we’ve all done some of both unconsciously. This is an attempt, as per your earlier questions, to make it a conscious practice. I’ve certainly screwed it up many times in my life. And I, like everybody, I’m highly imperfect so I can still slip but this, the Six-Points of Hope, are actually quite doable. They don’t really take any more work, just more attention. They can be done, in my world, you can do them on shift. They can be done in passing while you’re doing other things or in the middle of a conversation but they’re all extremely doable. By doing them, there’s just no question successful organizations have higher hope. I mean, as a rule, and again, not to dwell on it but if you look at Ukraine and Russia, what you’re going to see is Russia is a very low hope society. It’s just clear. The hope is mostly not to have something disastrous happen or to be left alone and not bothered by others. But what you see in Ukraine, even though they’re defending their country, is high hope. Every interview that you listen to, that I listen to, they all say we’re going to win and they’re up against an army far bigger, with much more money, way more material, way more men in the army. And yet, they still believe they’re going to get there and the quality of their work, the determination to get to a positive future, their resilience, their ingenuity, this is all connected to the hope levels. I’m not saying it’s the only hope but all of these things are playing out. So these six elements of the Hope Star – which I can actually tell you what they are – even though you’re nice enough not to quiz me. But the first is that people see a better future, and this is a belief in a better future. If you believe there’s no better future it’s going to self-fulfill; you will create a worse future. The second one is that people see a positive way to get to that future. And it turns out that higher hope people generally have multiple paths in mind for how to get to someplace. So people with low hope might have one way that they see to get there but then, of course, it doesn’t work because lots of things don’t work. High hope people are like, I got Plan B, oh, there’s Plan C, others, Plan D, let me call my friend, she or he probably has Plan E; I will come up with a way to get there. People with low hope might have one path, some obstacle occurs,  – their boss doesn’t like him on the third week or they have a bad day – they give up. So the first is, you believe in a positive future. The second is that you see a way to get there. The third point on the Hope Star is that they see that they, as a human being, matter. This is separating them from the work; just, you matter because you are who you are. Brian, this could be a terrible podcast or a great podcast, you could be a great parent or a bad parent, you could be a great coach or a bad coach, but you’re no less of a human being. The fourth is that their work matters. This is very common in big organizations and even in small ones and in society; if people get treated like they’re irrelevant, that what they do is irrelevant, their hope level goes down, their engagement with the world goes down. The fifth is that they see that the small things matter. So all of the work…and I deeply appreciate it what you did to prepare for this; I’ve done a lot of podcasts, not everybody reads the material before they get on, they just come on and ask questions. It doesn’t make them bad people but the extra work that you put in to prepare for this has made for a far more, I think, interesting conversation. Then the sixth is that they understand that they’re part of something greater than themselves. Again, you go back to Ukraine, people – this is part of what Putin didn’t understand, part of what leaders don’t understand in businesses – people want to be some part of something greater than themselves. Part of my work as a leader then becomes to remind people in our organization that it’s not just about them or just about me, it’s about how we all fit together to create this community of businesses that is making a positive difference in the world. So if we do those six things:  we help people see a better future, we help them see how to get to that future, we help them remember that they matter, we help them remember their work matters, we help show them how much the little things – just the way somebody buses the table, the way somebody made a shot of espresso – how much those little things matter, and then remind them that we’re all part of something much bigger than ourselves. Hope levels go up, health goes up, work quality goes up, resilience goes up, and everybody comes out ahead.

Brian  

Thanks for sharing that. That’s awesome. I’m so happy that you shared each of those six points. That’s a great takeaway for everybody listening or watching the show. Ari, you and Paul have created an incredible company and even impacted countless numbers of employees, customers, clients, vendors, readers and others. Who have been impacted by the Zingerman’s community of businesses? I heard you say in a talk you gave a while back, and I quote, “I just look at it as I’m making music that 50 years after I leave the planet, people are going to be there are still going to be listening to.” What do you hope for the future of Zingerman’s? And more broadly, what do you hope for the world?

Ari  

I’ve come to believe that the best way to change the world is start with changing ourselves. There’s a quote in the third book on self-management from an anarchist named John Hennessy, who said that the only revolution worthwhile is the one man revolution within the heart. Everyone can make this by himself without waiting on anybody else. And so in the spirit of that work, the more I begin here – not with blaming politicians, competitors, vendors, partners or all the myriad other people that it’s easy to blame – I start with my own work. Then the work that we do in our organization, I think, is one of the best ways to change the country or change the community or change the world because we have a lot more influence right here. I don’t mean I don’t vote and I don’t mean I don’t have opinions, like you do, or whatever, about what happens at a national level, but my impact is far bigger here within Zingerman’s, within Ann Arbor and within the greater Zingerman’s ecosystem, through the books and through Zoom now, around the world. So my hope for the future of our organization, I mean, we’ve written the 2032 vision, which you and I talked about earlier, which is a description of what we’ve all committed to helping make happen. That’s in the “Story of Visioning” pamphlet, which is the second newest one, that vision is in there, it’s again, about ten full pages long. The one that we’ve just finished rolling out formally, after many years of work, our “Perpetual Purpose Trust,”  is a long conversation in and of itself, which I’m happy to come back on with you and get into details, or people can email me and I’m happy to send them an essay that I wrote about it in January when we did the formal roll-out. But essentially, it makes – in our case – the intellectual property, or the brand, essentially self-owned so that it can’t be sold so that the benefit of the profit and the power in the decision making stays local in the organization and doesn’t – as so many organizations do – get sold, transferred off to big companies somewhere else. And yes, the [local] owners leave with some wealth, but the organization itself in the community to which it was contributing are generally left poorer for it, not necessarily in the first week or month or whatever but over time, the decision making power shifts from what was once local owners, to new corporate owners headquartered in Los Angeles or Hong Kong or New York or whatever, the profit starts to go somewhere else. And what was once a really an important part of the community starts to become less and less vital and less and less relevant. So this is a way that we essentially gift the organization to itself over time. Paul and I aren’t…we’re not walking away, but 50 years from now, my hope is that this allows Zingerman’s to still be a community institution in the positive way that you’ve so generously described us as. That is a very different path than what most people have gone down and this model is relatively new. There are only 40 or 50 of them in the country right now but I think it’s going to become more and more well known. People might have seen, we didn’t know this was happening, but Patagonia in California rolled out one in the fall. And I just saw in some financial newspaper, Michael Bloomberg, the zillionaire business person in New York, has announced that that’s what he’s going to do with his company also. So if they’re doing it, and small places like us are doing it, there might be some merit in this model. For some people listening, it’s not for everybody, but it might be helpful for others and I’m happy to share.

Brian  

One of the things that really stood out immediately when we met is how thoughtful and intentional you are about everything that you and I have ever talked about. I really appreciate that about you. Thanks for being on the show today. It’s great to be together with you again, and I appreciate all you do. Keep doing great work at Zingerman’s. I appreciate all the wisdom that you’ve shared here today. Thanks again.

Ari  

Well, thank you, Brian, because you’re doing the same and I’m honored to be on your show with you here. I’m sure we’ll do more down the road. I know you’re going to share resources; the link to the e-news that I do every week, which people can sign up for, and then you’re welcome to put my email which is just ari@zingermans.com and where people can reach out directly too. (Brian:  Perfect, thanks.) And then you’ll put the book resources; it’s a good to mention for folks that work off the grid, in the spirit of that anarchist idea of operating in a way that’s congruent with the ends that we want to achieve, we do them all here in town and we print them locally and try to create essentially the farm to table version of books.

Brian  

Who would have imagined that back in the late 70s, mid to late 70s, that Ari, a Russian history major these 45 years later, would be talking on a podcast about anarchism? Certainly not in relationship to business. It’s awesome. Thanks again.

Ari  

Thank you, man. Appreciate it.

Brian  

Thanks for tuning into LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Ari Weinzweig on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.