Anne Claire Broughton contributed to this article.
There are not many people more passionate about traditional, full-flavored foods than Ari Weinzweig. Along with his longtime friend and collaborator Paul Saginaw, Weinzweig is the founder of the Zingerman's Community of Businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a world-renowned culinary institution. Zingerman's began as a 1,300-square-foot deli offering a mix of traditional Jewish foods like corned beef, chicken soup and chopped liver, along with specialty foods like extra virgin olive oil, varietal honey, mustard, and more.
In 1994 Weinzweig and Saginaw embarked on a bigger vision for their company – to create a community of businesses, all located in the Ann Arbor region, with each being part of the Zingerman’s family but having its own unique specialty and managing partner(s) who would share in the ownership of the company. The Zingerman’s Community of Business would operate as one organization but with these semi-autonomous businesses within it.
Two decades later, the “ZCob,” as it is affectionately called, includes a bakery, a creamery, a sit-down restaurant featuring regional American food, a training business, a coffee importer and roaster, a traditional candy manufacturer, a farm, and a mail-order company. Later this fall Zingerman’s will open its latest venture, a traditional Korean restaurant. Together the Zingerman’s companies employ more than 700 people with revenues over $60 million per year.
A prolific writer, Weinzweig has published a series of books on management lessons he learned from his experience at Zingerman's, called The Zingerman's Guide to Good Leading. He recently came out with the fourth book in the series: A Lapsed Anarchist's Guide to the Power of Beliefs in Business. The Hitachi Foundation's Tom Strong talked with Weinzweig about his book, as well as his experiences as a business leader and employer.
The Hitachi Foundation: Why write a book about beliefs in business?
What got me started was a simple frustration with a workgroup we had started to deal with an organization wide quality issue. It had all things that should have made it work well—some partners, some front line staff, a lot of folks with long experience. We wrote a vision with the group. And yet, no matter what we did, the group just didn’t “work.” At the time I was reading a book called Transformed!, by Bob and Judith Wright, and was really intrigued by their concept of a "self-fulfilling belief cycle." That cycle gave me insight into what was wrong with the work group—the folks on it were very capable, but they just didn’t believe in the work we had asked them to do, and they didn’t really believe in each other. When you don’t believe in what you’re doing…it just doesn’t work.
That got me interested in the world of beliefs, both on a personal level and also with regards to how beliefs impact and shape entire organizations. Beliefs underlie every single thing we do, both individually and organizationally. Because I'm in the food business, I think a lot in agricultural metaphors. Beliefs are like the root system of our lives. You can’t see them but everything that comes up above the ground is obviously completely an outgrowth of what’s below the surface. In my metaphor I started to look at organizational culture as the soil. Clearly the quality of the soil will have a huge impact on what’s planted—new ideas or new people—in the organization.
The thing is that most of us have beliefs that we’re not even aware of having. We all have some beliefs that we're conscious of, particularly when it comes to religion, politics, and even sports. But for every conscious belief, we also have hundreds of unconscious beliefs, which can nonetheless have huge effects on our everyday life. Beliefs about the world, about people, about employees, customers, our products, society, how much money is enough, etc. And all our everyday actions are based on those beliefs.
The Hitachi Foundation: Can you give us an example of how beliefs play out in everyday life?
Weinzweig: There's a wonderful organization I've been part of for many years called the Southern Foodways Alliance. About ten years ago I was speaking at one of their conferences when I let slip that I didn't much care for pimento cheese.
Suddenly all these people started yelling at me! The other attendees, including several good friends of mine, let me have it. I held my ground at the time, but a while later a voice in the back of my head started asking "Really? People feel this passionately about pimento cheese?"
Now, this is a foodie organization, filled with people who deeply care about these things. And I'm a Chicago native who has lived in Ann Arbor most of my adult life. I did not get pimento cheese. I thought it was a very processed food, something like the pimento loaves you can buy at the supermarket. I did not realize how passionate people are about it in the South, and about the long heritage associated with it. And honestly I didn't realize either how simple it is to make - and how incredibly delicious it can be when made with quality ingredients.
So I did what I always do when I'm rethinking something - I went home, got a few books about it and started doing research. My beliefs about pimento cheese changed, a hundred eighty degrees. A few months later, Zingerman's began selling our own containers of pimento cheese. Nowadays, we sell hundreds of pounds of pimento cheese a week. Now you might say that's a minor belief, and in the big scheme of things it probably is. But it led to a new product line and made a difference for our business. And it also affected the beliefs of our customers, many of whom had never heard of pimento cheese before we started selling it.
There are really hundreds of things that I learned while working on it that are all in the book. One is the realization that “Great organizations change their customers' beliefs. Average organizations fulfill existing beliefs.” You look at a great organization, something like Apple - they absolutely change the beliefs of their customers and employees, every day about the product or product category that they sell. It’s clear to me in hindsight that here at Zingerman’s we’ve changed beliefs about what good food is here in Ann Arbor. We’ve also changed the beliefs of a lot of people about what work means, about how work can be a hugely positive piece of your life, one that can help you grow as a person, not just something that you tolerate to get a paycheck.
The Hitachi Foundation: Why do you focus on the concept of “hope” so much in your book?
Weinzweig: A lot of us, who are very fortunate, tend to take hope for granted. We live in a very hopeful world. But not everyone lives in that same situation. Many have low or no hope. On the most basic level - people with low hope don't do very good work. Now that I’ve been paying attention to it’s kind of obvious! But not that many people talk about it, at least in the business world. It turns out that people's level of hope, whether they have high hope or low hope, is closely correlated with all these performance indicators - how people do at work, in school, in relationships, everything. As a business leader, you can say "well, that's interesting, but there's nothing much I can do about it," or you can try to change the way your business operates in order to cultivate hope. We've chosen the latter route.
The reason I started to look at this was because of a screw up several years ago. One night I was working at our restaurant, Zingerman’s Roadhouse, when I happened to overhear a long-time employee go to his manager with an idea he was very excited about. The manager reacted quite negatively, saying "It's never going to happen, first you'd have do to this and this and this…" and I watched as the employee's face fell.
Now in hindsight, I would bet the manager was correct that the employee was getting ahead of himself. But the way he said it dashed the guy's hopes. And as a leader of the organization, I hold myself responsible for it. After all, it's not as if we taught a class about this. We never told the manager "don't crush hope."
We had never done any training or set any clear expectations around how we wanted to deal with hope. And the thing is – the whole world does that all day long. They unwittingly crush the hope of those around them, at work, those they employ. Which doesn’t make much sense—when people have low hope, they don't do the extra work, they don't go the extra mile for customers. So you actually have to be proactive and cultivate hope in the organization, which begins with doing it yourself and teaching your managers to do the same thing.
The Hitachi Foundation: What can you do to cultivate hope?
Weinzweig: In the book I talk about a "Six-Pointed Hope Star," which gives leaders six concrete things they can do every day to help bring more hope into the workplace:
- Help people see a better future.
- Help people see how they might get to that future.
- Show people how much they matter.
- Help people see how much their work matters.
- Help people see how small steps are the key to success.
- Show people how they fit into a larger whole.
Through things like visioning exercises and training, you can get deep into any of those points, every day. Simply by appreciating people - something we make time for in every meeting - you lay the groundwork to build hope. Obviously, there’s a lot more in the book.
The Hitachi Foundation: Is there a danger in relying too much on hope?
Weinzweig: In a way, yes. You don't want to get people believing in things that are not actually going to happen. But I would argue that there's a fair gap between that and shutting down any dreams they have of improving their lives. It is better to clearly define what must happen for someone's dreams to become reality, and either provide them with or help them develop a clear road map. That’s the second “point” on the hope star.
For instance, we create a “Training Passport" for every position we hire for at Zingermans. This lays out all the training an employee needs to complete for their position. So if they want to advance their career through the company, they have access to a very transparent map. It doesn't mean they will succeed - they still have to work hard, complete all the requirements, and be ready when the right opportunity arrives. But we have made the process easy to understand, which fosters realistic hope. We also, literally, put the passport in their hands. They carry it, which puts them in charge of their own training.
The Hitachi Foundation: How would one go about creating an actual system for cultivating hope within their organization?
Weinzweig: We want cultivating hope and positive beliefs to be part of our organization's culture, and we're big believers in having systems for doing that. In fact, in my first book I describe our cultural change "recipe" - to create a positive culture, you've got to a) teach it, b) define it, c) live it, d) measure it, and e) reward it. All this takes time - you'll note that we put "teach it" before "define it" because teaching is necessary to create an organizational definition that works. Otherwise you just get a memo from corporate, and that never results in real change.
We're just in the early phases of rolling this out and I think it will take a few years. To go back to my ecosystem analogy - if beliefs are the roots and culture is the soil, well, you can't change the culture in a day. Ultimately, though, you can create a better ecosystem for the organization that leads to better business outcomes and a more hopeful place to work.
Stay tuned for part two of The Hitachi Foundation’s feature on Zingerman’s business model. Our next interview will feature Maggie Bayless, Founder and Managing Partner at Zingtrain.
