Ari Weinzweig is the co-founding partner of Zingerman’s, a world-renowned community of businesses based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman’s is known as much for its incredible food as its radical approach to leadership and culture. Ari is a sought-after speaker, author of numerous influential books and pamphlets on visioning, leadership, and business beliefs, and a trailblazer in building organizations where dignity, creativity, and compassion lead the way.
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Ari Weinzweig On Building Zingerman’s And Leading Like An Anarchist
Ari Weinzweig’s Unexpected Culinary Start
Our quote for this episode is from Neil Blumenthal. “The key to an ideal workplace, in one hyphenated word, is self-awareness.” Our guest, Ari Weinzweig, is the Cofounding partner of Zingerman’s, a world-renowned community of businesses based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Zingerman’s is known as much for its incredible food as its radical approach to leadership and culture. Ari is a sought-after speaker, author of numerous influential books and pamphlets on visioning, leadership, and business briefs, and a trailblazer in building organizations where dignity, credibility, and compassion lead the way.
Ari, welcome. I’m excited to have you join the show.
Thank you. I’m honored to be here.
It’s taken a while. I’m excited we made it happen. I like to start with the beginning or childhood. Did you have some formative experience with food as a child that ignited this career path at all?
To the contrary, I wrote a pamphlet on food and philosophy. It came out a couple of years ago. The first line is once every week or so, my mother cooked us fish sticks. I grew up in a family setting that had neither a culinary focus nor any business background. I’m completely at the other end.
That is not unrelated.
Everything’s related to everything.
The absence of things is often as powerful as the prevalence of things. I’m not going to let you get away with that.
I’m happy to tell the story. I grew up on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Pop Tarts, Tang, Fruit Loops, Cocoa Krispies, American Singles, and Wonder Bread.
That’s like my son’s ideal diet.
I did it because that’s what we had. I used to say it was the mid 20th century industrial diet, but I’ve realized that they still sell all of it with newly designed branding. I stopped eating it a long time ago. I have no culinary background. My grandmother used to come on Friday nights and make chopped liver, chicken soup, and all that.
Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Chicago.
It’s not that far. What were you interested in as a kid and as a teenager?
As a kid, I used to think I wanted to be an archaeologist at some point. It’s a long time ago. I don’t know. Baseball, football, or basketball. I’ve been reading a lot since I was very little. I’ve been reading all sorts, so everything from science fiction to history to whatever. In high school, I was probably mostly interested in not being interested. I managed to survive that, came out the other side, and still have a brain. I came up here to Ann Arbor to go to school at the University of Michigan, where I studied Russian history with a particular focus on anarchism.
We were talking about that before the call. You started washing dishes, but where did this interject itself in your life?
For any history major tuning in, they’ll be able to relate. After graduating with my history degree, there isn’t anything you can do with a history degree except go get more degrees, which is what I was supposed to do. Everybody in my family had advanced degrees, so I was the failure of the family for never going back to college.
As you mentioned in your very kind intro, we do a lot of work around visioning, which we can come back to, but when I graduated, I had no vision at all. David Whyte, who you’ve had on your show at some point, his books and writing are awesome. He calls it the via negativa. This is where you’re clueless about where you want to go, but you’re super clear where you don’t want to go. Where you don’t want to go informs, to some degree, what you do.
When I graduated, I was very clueless about what I wanted to do, but very clear that I didn’t want to go home. In order not to go home, I needed a job. I had driven a taxi part-time while I was in school, and it wasn’t that interesting. One of my college roommates was waiting tables in a restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor, so I went in there and applied for the same job.
He was waiting tables. They had a nice interview with me. They said they’d call. I waited two weeks, and they hadn’t called. I went back and thought, “I’ll reapply as a busboy. Maybe they’ll hire me for that.” Once again, nice interview. Once again, no calls. As you can imagine, the end of the month was coming. Rent was coming due. My anxiety was increasing.
I went back and offered to do anything, and they said, “Do you want to wash dishes?” Never having worked in restaurants, I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to want to wash dishes, so I said, “Sure. Sounds great.” They said, “Awesome. Can you start tomorrow?” I said, “Yes,” and that’s how I got going. I had no interest in food or business. I had a high interest in being able to financially find a way to not have to move back home. I lucked out.
With Russian history, your options were the CIA or a Think Tank.
My mother would’ve loved it if I went to law school. You could have any degree and get into law school. You could go get an advanced degree in history. You could do anything.
You’re washing dishes. What happens next?
Building Zingerman’s: From Dishwasher Dreams To Pioneering A Deli
I lucked out. I stumbled into a work that I love. I came to love food, cooking, and the food world, and then also great people. My business partner, Paul Saginaw, started that same day as general manager. He’d been the bar manager in one of their other restaurants, and they promoted him.
He was the GM, and you were the dishwasher.
Correct. His first day was my first day. That’s how we met. It went from there. I was a pretty good dishwasher. I started prepping and then became a line cook. The newest publication I have out is this little chapbook called Life Lessons I Learned From Being a Line Cook. I started managing kitchens. I worked for that restaurant group for about four years. Paul left about halfway through that and opened a little fish market here in Ann Arbor. It’s still one of the best in the country. He and I stayed friends. We would chat off and on about doing something, which is a fairly common conversation amongst people who work in restaurants. Most of them never do it, but we would talk about it. In the fall of 1981, I decided I didn’t hate my job. It was perfectly fine, but it was less inspiring.
What kind of restaurant was it?
I don’t know what you call it. Upscale or casual. It’s not fast food, but not super fancy either. It was quite popular. It did a good job for that era. I gave two months’ notice in November 1981. I had no idea what I was going to do next. I felt like it was time to move on. It wasn’t one of those nice life stories that worked out. Paul called me two days later to say that there was a little building coming open near the fish market.
He was like, “Let’s go check it out.” He had grown up in Detroit, where you could get good deli food. In Chicago, where I grew up, you could get it, but you couldn’t get it here. Within a week, we decided we would open, and somehow, four and a half months later, we had renovated the whole space, redone the floors and the walls, and made the menu.
Did you guys self-fund it? How did you do it?
We borrowed $20,000. He borrowed $20,000 as a second mortgage on his house, and my grandmother lent us $2,000 with no interest. In 1982, that was not insignificant because interest rates to the bank were about 18%. That’s how we funded it. In four and a half months, we had renovated the whole space. The original building was built in 1902, so it was having its 80th anniversary that year. We opened up March 15th of ‘82 with two employees, me and Paul. It was 1,300 square feet. We had 25 sandwiches on a menu, 29 seats, all the old Jewish stuff we had both grown up with, and then a little bit of what is commonly known as specialty food, but in 1982 in the American Midwest, it was mostly called weird.
How did you market? Did it go well from the beginning? The restaurant business, from the outside, looks like you have a 90% chance of failure, and if you succeed, it’s miserable. It seems hard.
Miserable is subjective. I like it. It’s always hard. It’s never done.
You have to live there, right?
You don’t have to do anything. I like it, so it’s fun. I run every day, but not in formal races. If you run a marathon, for people who don’t run, it sounds miserable.
Did they come, or did you have some clever marketing ideas?
People came. We’ve always marketed mostly through word of mouth up until more modern times, with mail order, where buying lists and list management became much more important. We did a small bit of advertising, but mostly, it’s the quality of the work, the mindset from day one, and the belief from day one that we needed to give the customer a lot of reasons to want to come to us.
It is the understanding that I still go to work every day, which is that nobody needs anything we’re doing, and that if we don’t go re-earn their trust, their confidence, and their desire to hang out with us and buy from us, then we’re going to be out of business. Maybe that would take a year, two, or three, but it’s not that hard to go out of business. It’s quite easy. It’s hard to stay in business.
In fact, I visited my daughter abroad, where I had gone many years ago. She kept asking me about the restaurants. I was like, “The restaurants aren’t going to be there 5 years later or 30 years later.”
There are a few that are there.
Was it successful right away? Was it a struggle? Did you have some near-death experiences? What was the early experience? Could you point to the tipping point?
It’s a long time ago. I don’t look at things as being successes or not successes. The next pamphlet I’m working on, which maybe we’ll get out later this 2025, is this metaphorical model of the organizational ecosystem I’ve been working on for quite a while. In a forest, it’s not like the forest is a success or a failure. On the same tree, you could have a healthy tree with dead branches.
You’re constantly failing and succeeding, whatever metaphor you want to use. In a basketball game, even the best player on their best night of the year makes 2 shots out of 3, and mostly, they’re making 1 out of 2 or less. We’re always failing and succeeding. It went fairly well. It’s never easy. We’re in the food business, so it’s not like you ever hit some point you can coast. That remains true in my mind 43 years later. I don’t think there was a tipping point. There are constant ups and downs.
Even the best player, on their best night, might make two out of three shots, but mostly they make one out of two or less. So, we’re always failing and succeeding.
It’s a slow build.
43 years later, we’re an overnight success.
Zingerman’s became a household name. In other parts of the country, it became a thing you went to and visited. When did that first start happening?
Staying Rooted: Zingerman’s Unique Growth & Local Focus
It’s gradual, too. Part of our unwritten vision and part of our written vision is that we only do things here in town, and we only do everything once. It’s always been my drive, motivation, or whatever to create an organization or a place that was special. No disrespect to those who open multiple units, but it’s never been my thing. I always liked those places that, twenty years later, you still remember. You have this amazing experience there. That’s what we wanted to create, and that’s a big part of it.
We’re in an ecosystem that, for better and for worse, people are leaving all the time. First, it’s not a big deal, but 20 years later, you’ve had 16 classes that have graduated from the University of Michigan, which means that there are people all around the country and all around the globe even that have been here and eaten here when their parents came to visit. It builds up this word of mouth in a good way.
You didn’t expand your own footprint, but you started having people on your team who were entrepreneurial or did things. Unlike a lot of businesses, which I don’t think would take this approach, there’s that adage of the CFO and CEO discussion. It’s like, “What if we train them and they leave? What if we don’t train them and they stay?” You embrace this and. If someone wanted to go do something or start a business, you would help support them and launch that, and then they would become your key suppliers, right?
That’s not untrue, but let me try to reframe it more accurately. We did expand our footprint in 1986. We added 700 square feet. We’re in a historic district, so it was very difficult to make changes.
Sorry, I meant units, not the actual footprint.
We added on again in 1991. In 1991, we expanded again by renovating the house next door. The key story is that in the summer of 1993, at about 10:00 in the morning when I should have been inside getting the sandwich line ready for the lunch rush, Paul, my business partner, grabbed me and pulled me outside to the bench in front of the deli. He looks at me and goes, “In ten years, what are we doing?” I was like, “I don’t know what we’re doing in ten years.”
He said, “We said we’re only opening one place. We’ve already turned down offers from other cities because we don’t want to open elsewhere. We won’t open other units on campus, so other people are doing it. It’s not as good, but it’s still eating into our business. What are we doing?” I’m like, “I got work to do.” He’s like, “No, this is our work.”
In hindsight, in our language, he was asking me, “What’s your vision?” He didn’t have one, I don’t think. I know I didn’t have one. It’s not like we were satisfied with the status quo because we’ve always been about continuous improvement long before there was a Toyota Way. There’s a big difference, having done this for many years, between improving what you have and going after a long-term inspirational vision of the future. His question prompted a year of long walks, long talks, lots of swear words, frustrations, and eye rolls, but still, we are continually coming back to the table until we can come to an agreement.
During the course of that year, we got to know a guy named Stas Kazmierski. He was a consultant at that time for a firm called Dannemiller Tyson. Kathie Dannemiller was known all over the country for her progressive organizational change work. I don’t have an office, but anybody who works in an office, what’s their main thing? To get out of the office. They would all walk down the block to come to the deli, get coffee, and have meetings.
One of us started talking to him. He shared with us this process that we call Visioning. At the time, he knew it as Preferred Futuring. It came out of the work of a guy named Ron Lippitt at the University of Michigan in the late ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. He had worked at the Institute of Social Research. It was a methodology that he developed for communities and not-for-profits to get clarity on the future they wanted to create without worrying about how they got there.
Instead of what everybody else does, which is flip back and forth between, “We could do this, but what about this?” and then they never go anywhere, this is where you break away from the present, plant your mind in the future, and describe what the future will be like. It’s a story of the future. It’s not the five-line business school version of a vision statement.
Out of that year, we ended up, for the first time, writing a vision. It was called Zingerman’s 2009. If you’re quick at math, you realize we went fifteen years into the future. It was about a six-page-long vision. It is not 100% how we would write it now, but it was our first effort. That vision described that by 2009, we would’ve created this community of businesses all located here in the Ann Arbor area. I have a strong belief in doing business where you live. I like to travel, but not to have businesses all over.
One of the plagues of society is the breakdown of community and having a place where you belong.
I am in full agreement. It was where each business would have its own unique specialty, so we could keep the deli unique but still grow the organization and provide opportunity, and where each business would have managing partners in it that had a passion for what that business was going to do and would be literal owners and partners with us. That’s how that developed. It wasn’t, “Jimmy’s good at blah. Let’s make him a partner.” It’s Jimmy coming and going, “I want to do X,” and then we start a series of conversations.
Let’s take that through. Did Jimmy see this vision and have the idea that he could be an entrepreneur?
Yes. I’m sitting in front of ZingTrain, which is our training business, which started in 1994. That started because Maggie Bayless, who had worked with us in the restaurant, was a German lit major from Oberlin but had gone back to Michigan.
You collect all the unemployables.
It’s the food business. There are not a lot of neurosurgeons who leave and go buss tables. We have neurosurgeons we wait on, but not come to work here. She had gone back to Michigan to get her MBA. Long story short, she became very passionate about organizational training, but she could never find a place where she loved working. When she saw that vision, her husband said, “Why don’t you go do business with them?” That’s how ZingTrain started. We’re clear that this is what we’re trying to create. A lot more people have ideas than want to do the work to make the idea a reality. That’s where it comes from.
Everyone came from working at the deli, or did some people come outside?
A few have come from the outside, not from the deli. Some could have come from inside. There are a dozen businesses. It’s not centered around the deli. It’s a very anarchistic, non-centered entity.
Anarchist Philosophy in Action: Unconventional Leadership At Zingerman’s
Talk to me about this. I could go in three directions with this. I’ve never talked about this topic on the show. Let’s talk about this anarchist philosophy. What’s your introduction to the topic, and how does it apply to business leadership and how you operate the organization?
I studied it in school. Since you asked about my childhood wounds, my friend, Shawn Eskinosie, who would be great on your show, makes some amazing chocolate in Missouri. He says that our vocation is very frequently built out of our childhood wounds. My extrapolation from his story is that many of us have multiple childhood wounds, so we can have more than one vocation.
Certainly, to your point earlier, an implicit point, growing up on bad food makes me want to have good food, but also growing up and having my family not listen to what I was saying probably turned me into an anarchist at some level. Michigan has the largest anarchist collection in the country. I went up there and studied a lot. I liked it for many reasons.
Can you define it for people who don’t even know what we’re talking about?
I’m going to define it. After graduating, I started working in restaurants. When I started managing kitchens, I tried leaving everyone alone. The naive belief that they would do the right thing didn’t work at all. I then started reading Peter Drucker, Max De Pree, Stephen Covey, Tom Peters, and a lot of the staples of the late 20th-century leadership gurus, so to speak. For years, whatever was present, I was a lap standard kid because I still believed in it, but I no longer practiced. That’s how it went along for a long time.
In 2008, I was working on what became part one of the leadership book series that I got going. Deborah Dash Moore, who, at the time, was the head of the Jewish Studies Department, asked me. I was already speaking on business all over in food, but she asked me to come speak to the Jewish Studies Department. I booked it like how it happens often in academia, which is ten months in advance.
She goes, “I want to call it Anarchism on Rye or Rye Bread Anything.” I was like, “That’s cute. That sounds good.” I didn’t think about it. When I got to about three months out, I was like, “These people know who all these people I studied are. I haven’t looked at my books in 25 years. I’m going to look like a complete idiot.” I got all my books out and I started to study it.
I’ll say this, and then I’ll give you the definition, but it blew my mind for two reasons. A) A lot of what Paul and I had unconsciously created was very aligned with that thinking. He wouldn’t even talk about anarchism, but it wasn’t even like I was trying to do it that way. It’s what came out. What blew my mind is that so much of what’s called progressive business is very parallel to a lot of early 20th-century anarchist thinking. What’s anarchism? There are a million definitions of all the words in the world.
Different than anarchy, right?
If things are defined all over the place and anarchy or anarchism is the last word, you’re going to get everybody to agree on a singular definition because, by definition, nobody gets to decide. The common misconception of anarchism, which is 180 degrees wrong, is that it’s about chaos, rock-throwing, and destruction. That’s called nihilism, which comes out of the mid 19th century Russian work of Nechayev.
We’re seeing a pretty healthy resurgence of it.
People confuse that with anarchism. Anarchism, and this is my approach, is a positive belief in people, a commitment to human dignity, freely chosen collaboration, and contributing to the community because you want to. It’s about getting out of hierarchical thinking and into much more peer-to-peer thinking.
Anarchism is a positive belief in people, a commitment to human dignity, freely choosing, collaboration, and contributing to the community.
In nihilism, you don’t believe in anything.
You destroy everything because why not? We are seeing it.
I assume that’s the foundation of a kibbutz, right?
The kibbutz scene, not all, but many came out of a very anarchist thinking. Gustav Landauer was an anarchist whose work I didn’t read when I was in college because it hadn’t been translated from German, but I have since read it because it has been translated. He was good friends with Martin Buber. He was a pacifist Jewish anarchist who was killed in 1919 in the overthrow of the democratic government.
He had agreed to go into the government, forget what ministry he had accepted, and then was kicked to death by rioting German soldiers in what I would say was an early rendition of January 6th. He and others from that school of thought were very instrumental in the early kibbutz scene. They were experiments in egalitarian living.
Someone’s trying to explain the difference between socialism and you want to be in it, and it’s non-hierarchical, right?
Yeah. There are a million versions of all of it, but if you want the philosophical thing, in the mid-19th century, there was a big split between the anarchists and the Marxists, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, etc. One of the big principles of anarchist thinking, which has helped me enormously in my life, is that the means that we use, so how we go about doing something, must be aligned with or congruent with the ends that we’re trying to achieve.
Yelling at an employee to give better service doesn’t work. Treating somebody with indignity because they treated somebody else with indignity doesn’t work. If I want dignity, it’s got to start with the way I treat every human being that I deal with, and for that matter, every animal or the planet, too. That came out of the disagreement over Marx’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as to how you were going to create freedom. Bakunin and the other anarchists said, “That’s ridiculous. How can you have a dictatorship to create freedom?” Lo and behold, they were right.
Freedom through dictatorship.
A lot of the work of the anarchists of that era was to get rid of the state. That’s not my thing. I don’t know how to run a country in that way.
You look at it in the context of flat organizations without hierarchy.
I look at it in the context of organizations, not thinking hierarchically. We’ve been so raised to think hierarchically. It’s like that story of the two fish swimming along, and they’re talking about a third fish. They’re like, “He’s like a fish out of water,” and the other fish goes, “What’s water?” even though they’re in it. Thinking hierarchically is the endemic belief that because you’re the surgeon, you’re better than the person who cleans the room.
It is the endemic belief that because you’re the minister of agriculture, you’re better than some lowly farmer, or that older people are better than younger. This is honoring that. There is an operational hierarchy. Somebody has to play quarterback. Somebody conducts the orchestra. In a restaurant, somebody’s running the cook’s line, but they’re not a better person than the newest person.
You have managers, though, right?
Yeah. There’s plenty of operational hierarchy.
Is this how you treat people? It’s like, “It’s not because I am the GM or the shift manager that it means that you are less than me or I can treat you in a certain way.”
Absolutely. There are manifestations of it that have worked out well over the years. All our meetings are open. Once a month, we have our organization-wide meeting. We’ve been running the organization by consensus of our partner group, which started in ‘94. It was 7 or 8 people. Now, it’s 22. That’s a little told business story because it doesn’t fit with the business school version of heroic business leaders, which is me and Paul, but we haven’t been in charge for 30 years. Those meetings are open. We pay anybody who wants to come. They are small things in a way, but it’s a huge shift from what people are used to in most organizations.
Zingerman’s Unique Structure: Building A Community Of Businesses
That’s interesting. We’ll jump around a little bit. I want to go back to the structure of how you do this. I’m Jamie, or whatever the character, and I say, “I’d love to go build a bread company and supply to Zingerman’s.” Do you have a specific structure of how you do this and how you stay involved?
Yeah. It’s one organization. This isn’t just me and Paul investing in different people. That was implicit and specific in our 2009 vision. It was always meant to be one organization with semi-autonomous pieces. It’s not, “You and I are the founders, and then we go invest in nice people and they do whatever they want.” When you become a managing partner in what we call the Zingerman’s Community of Businesses, a big part of your work is running the business in which you’re the managing partner. At the same time, you become part of that partner’s group, which is responsible for the entire organization.
You buy into it, or you get profits from the whole group.
You own part of it. Some years, the owner doesn’t get any money. Some years, the owner gets money. Some years, the owner puts money back in. Anybody with a small business will have been through those. The point is, Maggie from ZingTrain, because I started talking about her, she becomes part of running the entire community of businesses. It’s not that they’re dealing their little business within the community. They’re also a leader within the whole organization. Paul and I are partners in that business, too. We use a consensus model for decision-making at the partner level, which is how Paul and I worked from the beginning, by intuitive sense. It’s formalized, so even if the managing partner owns 5% or 95%, it’s still a consensus. It’s part of our succession work.
Are they disproportionately incentivized for their business unit, or how that works, or no?
Incentive is a loaded word because I’ve never been motivated by money.
If I’m running the bread business.
You’re bonusing coming out of the bake house, but they’re still responsible for the whole thing. Several years ago, we set up a way for employees to own a share. It’s like a co-op. 304 or 305 people own a share in the organization. We’re not selling it. The share price is $1,000. It doesn’t change, to go down an alley or a rabbit hole.
What if they want to get out?
If the partner wants to leave?
Yeah.
They can leave. We have to figure out how to get them out. The textbook way that we do it is that they buy in at book value, and they get bought out at book value. As we’ve been around for a while, it becomes more complicated. Not in a bad way, but there’s more to it than that. It’s not like ten people.
How many people in businesses make up the whole Zingerman’s?
Depending on how you count, we’ll say there are a dozen and there are 22 people in the partners group. Eighteen are managing partners. A couple of years ago, we added three of what we call staff partners. That went so well a few years ago that we added a fourth. They serve two-year terms on that group as full members of the consensus, but they’re not managing partners.
How many people come through the training? You have tons of people who come to you to be trained. Are they big businesses or small? How many people come through the training?
Tons is relative. Compared to Michigan Stadium, we’re tiny. I don’t know what the number is, but we get all walks of life. As is true of many things, like therapy, the people who need it most are least likely to go. People will regularly say, “I had the worst experience at that business. I’m going to send them your stuff.” I’m like, “Don’t bother because they’re never going to come.” The people who are already grounded in trying to do well are the ones who come. We get everything from small businesses to large. We thought it would be mostly food. I’m maybe making up a number, but it’s maybe 35% food. We get all walks of life. I’ve presented in Ethiopia, Ireland, England, and Germany.
Do you have business owners who are coming and trying to figure out a different way because they’re frustrated with the current way they’re running their business?
Yeah. The other way doesn’t work that great. It’s what everybody’s used to.
I assume the visioning is a big part of this.
Yeah. We teach servant leadership. There’s a group here doing our open-book management or open-book finance session, which is a whole other conversation. It is all those things and then some. In the visioning process, I mentioned how we learned it in ‘93 and ‘94 from Stas. We’ve adapted what he taught us, so, in a good way, we made it our own. That’s a huge piece of what we teach and what we practice.
Our vision is written for 2032. The vision is that we do it as a story. It’s the story of what you want to create. People who learn it end up using it not for their organization, but people write personal visions. People write visions for their relationship. Every project here starts with a vision. Some places write shift visions every day. It’s Stephen Covey’s starting with the end in mind.
Vision, as we understand it, is a story – specifically, the story of what you aim to create.
I like to tell the story from Alice in Wonderland, which people might remember. Alice is walking along the road and comes to a fork in the road. She’s not sure which way to go, so she looks up in a tree. She sees the Cheshire cat. She asks the cat, “Which road should I take?” The cat appropriately asks her in return, “Where are you going?”
She tells the cat the truth, which is, “I’m not sure.” The cat gives the best answer of all time, which is, “Any road will get you there.” If you don’t know where you’re going, there’s no right or wrong answer. If you are trying to go public in five years, you make super different strategic short-term decisions. If you’re like us and you have a perpetual purpose and you’re never selling it, you make different decisions.
Your open book, is that from Jack Stack and The Great Game of Business?
Yeah. We’ve adapted it again. We always do and make it our own, but it’s learned from them. In fact, I’m keynoting on dignity at their gathering in September 2025 in Dallas.
Jack has been on the show.
They’re great.
Restoring Humanity: Compassion And Connection In the Modern Workplace
He’s amazing. You talk a lot about love and humility in business and compassion in the workplace. We seem to be in this bad place. Ghosting is the perfect example of this. You have companies that have people come in and go through five rounds of interviews, and they won’t call them back. At the same time, you have people accept jobs and not show up for them.
I don’t know whether our businesses are a reflection of our people and our culture, or our people and our culture are a reflection of our businesses. Everyone complains about the businesses ghosting, but the number is more that the employees ghost the businesses. How have we lost the human aspect of the workplace? How do we get it back?
We’re trying to get it back. You can guess who I voted for, but people in this extreme situation that we’re in would’ve made a big difference. The real difference is going to come on the ground. I treat how the dishwasher treats me because that’s where people learn how to interact. We’ve been trained to wait for the new boss like it’s a consumer product that I’m going to stop buying Cocoa Krispies and switch to Cocoa Puffs, but it’s not about that.
We have a training compact that Maggie from ZingTrain developed in 1994. What we have long been saying is that the trainer is 100% responsible for the quality of the trainee’s experience, and the trainee is 100% responsible for the effectiveness of their own training. Both parties are 100% responsible. I’m going to extrapolate and say each of us is 100% responsible for the whole country. We’re 100% responsible for the community we’re part of. If you shift that framing, instead of saying, “If this person were in charge, it would all be fine,” to, “I’m responsible for everything, including the behavior of the people whom I don’t agree with,” then it changes the way we work.
It’s the extreme ownership.
Jason Stanley, who writes about fascism, is a professor at Yale. I texted him in the fall. He said, “No workplace democracy like what you’re doing there is integral to creating a democratic society.” The problem is people, if they are raised to be either angry or apathetic, or wait for some giant cash out, it’s not conducive to learning how to have meaningful conversations with people you don’t agree with. It’s not conducive. People are trained that business success is flipping your business and getting out. That’s a belief. I wrote a whole book on beliefs. You don’t need to have that belief.
They also believe that it will make them happy. I’ve seen enough people that it doesn’t.
It won’t. Correct. You flip the belief and you have the belief that we have, which is business health means you create something that’s lasting in the community and that people’s grandchildren are coming into and value in the community that’s unique to the place, and not like, “I love the Grand Canyon. Let’s open one in every state and cash in.”
It’s more like, “We’re of this place. Let’s make something special. Let’s make something that 50 years from now, we’re gone, but people are still coming to. We’re leaving the community better than it was when we got here, not how we can get the most out of it.” We want to make a living. I’m not down on that, but they’re not mutually exclusive. People learn beliefs. We’ve been running the organization by consensus for 30 years. How come that’s not on the front page of the business section of Pick Your Article?
Does consensus mean everyone agrees or the majority agrees?
No. Consensus means that all 22 of us agree to the decision. We’ve made it work. We have techniques that we use to make it work. It’s not voting. I’m all for voting in the country. Believe me, I vote. We encourage people here to vote and participate. The problem with voting, which Emma Goldman, the famous or infamous, depending on your view, anarchist from the early 20th century, said, “The problem with voting is that immediately after the election, half the people minus one go to war with half the people plus one. It’s doomed.” That’s what we’re living in.
Consensus forces you to have a conversation to listen to the other person, hear their fears, concerns, hopes, dreams, and vice versa, and the belief that you end up coming out of it with something better that none of you would’ve thought of on your own. If people are working here and they’re learning those practices and those beliefs are developing, no offense, but they don’t go to January 6th.
Defining “Enough”: Finding Meaning Beyond Monetary Success
There’s making a living, and then there’s making a life. I’ve seen studies, and I’ve seen different ones. I saw one not long ago, and I’m going to paraphrase. It is something like the last people have a $1 million to $100 million net worth. How much is enough? What level is enough, and what do you think the answer is?
I don’t know, but it’s a lot lower than people would think.
It was 40% more than whatever they had at whatever the level was.
That’s evident by turning on the news. I want to live well, and we do live pretty well by most people’s standards. I live with the knowledge that most business owners have, which is that if things go in the tank, which they can. The pandemic happened a couple of years ago, when our sales dropped by half in a week.
I fear we’re about to enter another pandemic, an economic pandemic, based on what’s going on where we have a big personal stake in that debt. I’ve got to come up with that money. I try to have savings that allow me to cover a lot of that if I had to go a couple of years without getting paid. I’m not in the least complaining, but having more money at some point, for what? There’s so much more you could be doing.
You mentioned the word a couple of times. I don’t hear anyone else use it anymore. I’m super interested in pamphlets. People write books and articles. What are pamphlets?
I do both. Pamphlets in 1900 were the equivalent of social media. It’s smaller than a book. In 1900, for a very tiny amount of money, you could print something and get your message out. It could be passed from person to person in a very affordable way. Books in the beginning were quite costly. Printing wasn’t what it is now.
For pamphlets, that’s the historical background of them. Anarchists in the 1900s were using pamphlets. It was a very common way to spread your message. It was much more affordable printing. It was much more affordable for people to purchase. I like it because it’s much lighter than a book. Some people don’t want to read a whole book, but they’ll take a pamphlet. We do a lot of them.
How often do you publish a pamphlet?
I publish an e-news. People can email me at Ari@Zingermans.com to get it, and I’ll send it back to them. I do that every week. That’s a lot of work. If I get a pamphlet out every year, that’s good. I’d like to get moving on to the next big book, but that takes a lot longer. It’s not like I’m sitting at home writing all week because I got a whole other job. It isn’t about that. I also put out a little chapbook, which is even smaller than a pamphlet. It’s a format that was used many years ago. It’s very common in poetry.
It is very confusing with ChatGPT.
I don’t know much about that, but if you do ChatGPT, it’ll tell you what a chapbook is.
I’ll do that.
I got a little chapbook that came out in December 2024 called Life Lessons I Learned from Being a Line Cook. It’s a little thing like that. It has 50 pages.
How many books have you written?
Pamphlets And Beliefs: Unpacking Zingerman’s Philosophy Through Writing
I’ve lost track, but pamphlets and books together, fifteen.
The Power of Beliefs in Business.
That’s the opposite of a chapbook. It’s 600 pages long.
Give me an example of a belief that you have that significantly influenced Zingerman’s success.
There’s no action that we take that’s not based on our beliefs other than instinct. If somebody throws something, you’ll duck. The fact that I’m on this show with you is based on beliefs in a good way. I’m not paying you. You’re not paying me. We both believe that spending an hour or whatever we’re going to spend together is productive for us, productive for the world around us, and is helpful to other people, or else I could easily say, “I’m way too busy.”
The textbook story or the classic story I like to tell is that I grew up in a family where no one was in business. I didn’t know anything about business. It never even dawned on me. Your kids are growing up with business all around them. I didn’t. I had, in hindsight, low-grade, negative beliefs about business. I didn’t know anything, but it mostly seemed like it did bad things to people.
Paul pretty quickly changed my beliefs back in 1978. His grandfather had a business in Detroit, and he taught Paul what Paul taught me, which is that business isn’t bad and business isn’t good. It’s a tool. In the same way, I always say, you could take a hammer and hit somebody and cause them severe harm, or you could take the same hammer and build a home for Habitat for Humanity. It’s not the hammer. That’s a good example.
Business isn’t bad nor good. It’s just a tool.
Closed-book management is based on the belief that your employees are going to cheat you or give away all your secrets. Open book management is based on the belief that everybody’s making decisions all day long. When they have faulty or incomplete information, they’re going to make super flawed decisions. People want to do a good job. When you give them more information, they’re better able to contribute. Those are two simple things.
The non-hierarchical stuff is embedded in our organization, even though we don’t use that phrase. Nobody’s better than anybody else. My job is to treat everybody with dignity. It doesn’t matter if you’re about to get fired or you’re a partner. Everybody can be treated with dignity. Servant leadership, which is a big piece of what we do, is based on a belief that our job as leaders is to serve the organization, not the other way around, which is the opposite of the business. It’s like, “You started this company so you could flip it, make a lot, and then do it again.” This is where you start the organization to serve the people and the community of which it’s a part. Those beliefs are playing out all day long.
I never even realized I had beliefs, to be honest with you. It sounds dumb, but I never thought about it. Most people haven’t thought about it. What they don’t think about, which I also had never thought of, is that they’re all learned. If they’re learned, they could be changed. I’m giving you beliefs that are well-aligned with our work, but I’ve changed many beliefs over the years that were unhelpful. People don’t realize that it’s all based on your beliefs. We’re trained to say stuff like, “That’s how I am,” but the reality is, it’s not how you are other than height, eye color, and skin color. How you are is mostly learned.
It’s learned. It’s experience. It’s the community. It’s all of these things. Derek Sivers is one of my favorite guests I’ve had on the show. He said, “My favorite thing in life is to change my mind.” How many people do you hear say that?
This is what I learned, and it’s a lot of what’s in the book, including a recipe for how to change a belief, which requires you to decide to change the belief before the evidence is in. There’s a self-fulfilling belief cycle that the whole book is based around. Part of the belief cycle is that we all have what scientists would call confirmation bias, but I’m a history major, so I call it a filter. We all filter out all the information that doesn’t support what we believe and take in what does.
I like to metaphorically think about our beliefs as the root system of our lives because we don’t see them. Everybody is arguing about the plants that come up above the surface, but if you don’t change the root, the plant is going to keep coming up. If you’re 40 and you learned it when you were 2, the root has been growing for 38 years. It’s not coming out that quickly. If you don’t commit to changing the belief, knowing you’ll continue to see evidence that your new belief is wrong and the old one was right, it’s not going to work. It’s hard, but you can do it.
It occurs to me that a big part of your success to be doing this for so many decades is this contradiction of things, which is innovation and tradition. Things are moving so fast. You guys have innovated, but you’ve also kept some things the same. Which things should be kept and which things need to change?
Innovation & Tradition: Balancing Change And Consistency At Zingerman’s
You don’t know. Do your best. We work, and it’s implicit in a lot of what I already shared. When we’re going to make a change now, not many years ago, we have a recipe for organizational change. I wrote a pamphlet on it. It’s called Bottom-Line Change. It’s a methodology that is designed around getting as many people involved in the conversation before the decision, so you can improve the quality of the decision before you make it.
It’s the opposite of what’s been in the news, which is that no one’s involved in the conversation. They send you the notice out of the blue, which doesn’t work. It creates what you’re watching in the news, which is chaos, upheaval, and a high degree of extreme inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Instead of people trying to get to the same place together, they’re all reactive, freaking out, and unable to focus.
This is where we all are unsettled. At the same time, your input, my input, and 30 other people’s input come together to form a better decision. When you go through that, there’s still a gut feeling involved. I’m all about intuition, but my intuition might be completely off base. Paul and I are very different in many ways. We share values, but what bothers me doesn’t bother him sometimes, and vice versa. If we can get a bunch of free-thinking people on board, it’s probably good.
Learning From Intuition: Key Lesson And Democratic Ideals
Last question. I always say this is multi-variant because it can be singular, repeated, personal, or professional. You get to choose your adventure here. What’s a mistake you’ve made that you’ve learned the most from?
I made so many. It’s hard to decide. There have been times when I went against my intuitive sense of what was right because other people said that was right, and that was a mistake. That feeling is coming up because of the state of the country. I wrote a piece about why democracy matters. It’s not about politics. I long ago grew super disenchanted with politics.
It’s not hard.
Gustav Landau, the anarchist I mentioned earlier, one of the things I loved from him is when he said, “We have no political beliefs. We have beliefs against politics.” I’m not saying don’t vote. We need to participate. The key to democracy is not who’s in power. It’s how we work together. It started to become clear that we can’t work the way we work in a non-democratic setting.
I studied Russian history. I went to hear Vladimir Kara-Murza speak, the former Russian political prisoner who got out in a prisoner exchange a few months ago. Over in Russia, you don’t talk the way we’re talking right now because you’ll risk going to jail. A priest was arrested in the middle of his service because he prayed for Ukrainian children.
This is not some theoretical abstract soccer game that’s happening half a country away. This is how we live. I started to realize that without democracy, we’re not going to be able to work the way we work. There’s no more diversity program. You can’t have open-book management very effectively if people are afraid to talk. It’s this thing where a lot of people are going along. I don’t judge them as bad people, but I’m a history major.
That’s been embraced by both extremes equally.
I’m not trying to be on the extreme. I’m trying to do the right thing. I don’t judge the people on any side of it. I want to treat them all with dignity. Whether I agree with them or not isn’t the point. I’ve been studying history. It’s hard to tune out 1930s Germany, where people went along because they thought it would go away or it would all work out. It didn’t work out that great. I don’t want to make a ruckus, but I also don’t want to keep my mouth shut and find myself living in Russia.
Thank you for joining us. You’ve built an incredible business for almost half a century. It’s something with global recognition. That’s no small feat. I enjoyed getting to hear a little bit about how that all came together.
I’m honored. To state the obvious, it’s a collective effort. I’m only one small piece of it. My email is Ari@Zingermans.com. People are welcome to reach out. I welcome conversation. I can learn from them as much as they’re going to learn from me. Please come visit Zingermans.com if people want to buy food. If they want to train, visit ZingTrain.com. We’re off the grid with the books, so we’re not on Amazon. We do all the design and the printing here in town. They’re at ZingTrain or ZingermansPress.com. I’m honored to help people.
Readers, thanks for tuning into the show. Thanks again for your support. Until next time, keep elevating.
Important Links
- Zingerman’s
- Ari@Zingermans.com
- Life Lessons I Learned From Being a Line Cook
- The Power of Beliefs in Business
- Bottom-Line Change
- ZingTrain
- Zingerman’s Press
- The Great Game of Business
- Jack Stack on Winning The Great Game of Business
